Angels place Robert Stephenson on 15-day IL

The Angels announced that right-hander Robert Stephenson was placed on the 15-day injured list on Saturday due to inflammation in his right elbow. With just over a week left in the regular season, that IL placement ends Stephenson’s 2025 season. Right-hander Sam Bachman was recalled from Triple-A to take Stephenson’s spot on the roster.

Stephenson, 32, signed a three-year pact with the Angels in free agency prior to the 2024 season. It has not gone especially well to this point. While Stephenson has a lifetime 2.70 ERA in an Angels uniform, that comes in a sample size of just ten innings after he missed the entire 2024 campaign and the first two months of 2025 while rehabbing elbow surgery. He made his debut with the Halos on May 28, but made it into just two games before a biceps injury shut him down once again.

That injury cost him nearly three months, but he returned to the mound in late August and finally managed to make regular high-leverage appearances for the Angels over the past few weeks. He’ll finish the year with solid enough numbers across that small sample of just 12 outings: that aforementioned 2.70 ERA is paired with a 3.65 FIP, a 23.8% strikeout rate, and a walk rate of 7.1%. Those numbers certainly aren’t bad, but they aren’t the sort of dominant production that the Angels were surely hoping for when they guaranteed Stephenson $33M two years ago. At that time, Stephenson was coming off an otherworldly run in Tampa where he had pitched to a 2.35 ERA in 38 1/3 innings while striking out an eye-popping 42.8% of his opponents.

While Stephenson’s elbow surgery last year unlocked a $2.5M club option for the 2027 season that leaves this contract still potentially salvageable overall, Stephenson will need to stay healthy and pitch at least as well as he did this year for the next couple of seasons for the Angels to get a meaningful return on their investment. That might make today’s diagnosis of elbow inflammation sound scary, but Stephenson told Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register on Saturday that he’s “not as concerned” about this injury as he was about last year’s ailment that caused him to go under the knife. He added that he has yet to undergo imaging, and that he’ll know more then, but for the time being he doesn’t think the issue is “too serious.”

Of course, there’s reason for concern any time an elbow injury comes up, particularly for a player with Stephenson’s injury history. The good news is that the right-hander will have a full offseason to recover, so even a moderate injury could still see him on the Angels’ Opening Day roster next year. How feasible that will end up being won’t be clear until the Halos get more testing done on the righty’s elbow, but in the meantime, they’ll give Bachman a turn on the pitching staff over the season’s final few games. The righty has a 4.96 ERA in 19 appearances this year, but a 3.52 FIP suggests he might have some better results than that in his future.