5 Things the Angels Learned From Their 2026 Season

Ureña, on the other hand, is in the midst of his first big league campaign and has been incredibly good, pitching to a 2.97 ERA and 1.22 WHIP over 148.1 innings and 27 starts (and two relief outings). His 3.01 ERA as a starter ranks fourth amongst qualified rookies, trailing only Logan Henderson (MIL, 2.51), Parker Messick (CLE, 2.55), and Andrew Alvarez (WSH, 2.99).

Each have demonstrated their abilities this year and it’s proved a point on why they should be rotation anchors for years to come. Detmers is under club control through the 2028 season, while Ureña will be under control through the 2032 season.

It would be an encouraging movement in the right direction if this organization can start to fill their rotation and bullpen with quality arms that can help win some ballgames — this is already coming to fruition.

The Angels also have a good crop of quality starting pitcher prospects in the minors who’ll eventually and hopefully reach the major leagues, headlined by Tyler Bremner, Johnny Slawinski, Dylan Jordan and Trey Gregory-Alford.

While Ureña isn’t going anywhere any time soon, Detmers on the other hand was brought up a ton in trade talks this summer and those will certainly be revisited in the offseason. 

Detmers, along with Zach Neto, are rapidly approaching the point where the Angels would decide to offer them a long-term contract. The case for trading Detmers or keeping him is a tough situation to look at, but I’ll break it down quickly and simply.

Trade talks for Detmers will likely heat up over the offseason and that would likely be the time he’d get dealt. If he does get traded, that means the front office thinks the Angels are still a ways from contending and would make cashing in on his value an easy choice. They could also keep and extend him, making him a building block down the road.

The overall point here is that the Angels have stumbled upon two very good starting pitchers, and they have the chance to build a potential playoff-quality rotation around the duo in the near future. Arms like Detmers and Ureña aren’t easy to come by.

The Pitching Staff Took a Huge Step Forward

One of the main contributors to the Angels lack of success in recent years is largely in part of how bad their pitching has been as a staff. They’ve been decent some years, but overall pitching hasn’t been a strong suite for the Angels.

However, this season, pitching has surprisingly been the club’s strong suite where the offense has struggled big time (we’ll get into this later). Angels starting pitchers thus far have posted a 4.19 ERA and 10.5 fWAR, which both rank 14th in the majors.

The starting staff has gotten good production from guys like Jose Soriano, Ryan Johnson and George Klassen, along with the incredible efforts from Detmers and Ureña. Yusei Kikuchi, Rodriguez, and Jack Kochanowicz have shown flashes of success, but have struggled in general.

The Angels pitching staff as a whole so far in 2026 is worth 13.5 fWAR, which is their highest mark since the 2022 season, where the club’s pitchers racked up 16.4 fWAR. In terms of fWAR, Angels pitchers have more tripled their production from 2025 where they were worth just 4.5 fWAR.

Something that’s been overlooked this season is how great Angels pitchers have performed since the organization moved on from pitching coach Mike Maddux. He was replaced by Tim Leveque, and he has taken the pitching staff to another level.

Since Leveque took over pitching coach duties on August 11, the Angels pitching staff has excelled at almost every angle you look at it. It’s been refreshing to see a prolonged problem finally starting to see drastic improvements.

It’s still uncertain if Leveque will return next season, but the methods he’s been teaching have certainly been working out for the best. While pitching has been on the rise for a ballclub looking to return to the postseason, they now need to turn their attention to the offense which hasn’t impressed.

The Offense Has Been a Huge Liability

Angels pitching has actually been pretty good in 2026, but their offensive production has been abysmal, and ranks in the complete opposite end of the spectrum — definitely not a recipe for success. Their offense is currently worth 10 fWAR, which ranks 29th and sits just ahead of the Colorado Rockies’ 8.9 mark.

The club’s lineup has really struggled to make contact which has led to an unhealthy amount of strikeouts. Angels batters have struck out 25.5% of the time this season, which is currently tied for last with the Cincinnati Reds.

Those strikeouts are clearly backed by the fact that the Angels currently rank 30th in squared-up swing rate (22%) and 29th in squared-up contact rate (29.9%). This also explains why their .234 batting average as a team is tied for 26th in the majors.

Angels batters aren’t even doing themselves any favors, tied for 22nd in the majors with a 8.4% walk rate. This basically sums up the fact that the offense doesn’t seem to have a good approach or strategy to their at-bats. It looks to be a lot of free-hacking with little to no discipline.

Also to note, the power has suddenly evaporated from the Angels lineup this season. In 2025, they ranked fourth in the majors with 226 home runs, but they’ve only hit 151 thus far in 2026 which is just one longball above the last-place Toronto Blue Jays. The Angels also rank dead-last with a .369 slugging percentage.

Simply put, the Angels offense has struggled at basically everything this season and it’s something that needs diar attention.

Light Is Finally Shining at the End of the Tunnel

The Angels have put up yet another poor season, but the organization is finally heading in the right direction. It’s been a rough year, but at least everyone, including the players, coaches and fans know that the front office is starting to notice and fix some serious flaws.

There were multiple events over the course of the 2026 season where the Angels organization kept making the necessary and correct steps towards returning to postseason contention. 

A lot of what has happened within the organization this year has not been what fans have been accustomed to over the years. What fans have grown accustomed to is not how an MLB franchise should be run, and now things are looking a lot better.

It started back on June 26, a random Friday evening, when news broke that the Angels had fired general manager Perry Minasian from a position he’d held since his arrival on November of 2020, ending a five-and-a-half year run. 

The organization replaced Minasian with John Mozeliak, who served as the St. Louis Cardinals general manager from 2007 to 2025.

Bringing Mozeliak into the organization was the first step of the puzzle in steering the Angels back into a relevant franchise again, and his first draft at the helm showed that he might be the right man for the job.

In an article put out by Rhett Bollinger of MLB, Mozeliak stated, “My philosophy on the Draft is let the scouting director and his team do their jobs”.

The 2026 Angels’ draft class could end up being one of the strongest in recent years. The class is headlined by Jared Grindlinger, Jarren Advincula, Gavin Grahovac, Rylan Lujo and Jaxon Willits, but is full of top-to-bottom names that could make an impact at the major league level.

Grindlinger was the Angels’ first-round pick, slotting in at the 12th overall selection, making him the first high school player that the Angels drafted in the first round since they took Jordyn Adams in 2018.

The Angels’ farm system has been pretty weak for a while now, but we’ve seen improvements over the last few seasons, including time with Minasian at the helm. The only problem is that the club’s top prospects consisted of a lot of pitchers.

It seems as if Mozeliak and the scouting department were very aware of the imbalance down on the farm and that’s why the team’s first five picks of the draft were position players — a quick fix to a much needed issue.

Mozeliak continued to add to the Angels’ minor league system when he decided to conduct a major selloff at this summer’ s trade deadline — something that should’ve been happening a lot in recent years, but never took place.

The Angels managed to trade away seven players from their active roster, in return for seven true prospects and two players that already had gotten their feet wet at the major league level. 

The biggest pieces they got back were shortstop prospect Arjun Nimmala, and catcher/first baseman Moisés Ballesteros from the Cubs. These are two position players who could become lineup anchors for the Angels down the road.

And finally, the moment that most every Angels fan (and baseball fan in general) had been waiting for, Arte Moreno sold a majority of the team to Stan Kroenke and his company, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, earlier this month on September 1.

On a day where most fans were just expecting a few September call-ups, they got a surprise in which many had been awaiting for a very long time.

Let’s just say that what we’ve seen from the Angels this year has been very encouraging, and the organization itself can walk away with quite a few positive and learning bullet points from the 2026 season. Winning might not be present now, but it’s finally starting to come into view.