2026 Team Previews: Los Angeles Angels
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 LA Angels
Full Series Links and Explanation Page Here
Podcast
Intro
The Angels are in a bad spot right now. They are still haunted by some of these massive contracts they’ve handed out. It hasn’t been pretty. They’re in a pseudo-rebuilding process right now, and we’ve seen them already shedding veteran payroll. There’s no great young core here, either. There aren’t too many organizations with bleaker outlooks for the next few years than the Angels. Playing in this huge market means they can turn things around in a hurry. When it’s time to spend, they’ll do it with the best of them. But they’re limited in what they can do with Trout and Rendon still on the books.
Hitters
Zach Neto
Age: 25
Pos: SS
There hasn’t been much good news for the Angels over the years. But Neto is giving them some hope. They were aggressive in getting him to the big leagues, and he’ll head into his age-25 season with high expectations.
Neto missed the beginning of the 2025 season and ended up with just 128 games played. He did not finish super well. But cruised to his second-straight 20-20 season. Neto now has 49 homers and 56 steals since the 2024 season began. That makes him one of just nine members of the 49-50 club since 2024. A very elusive and well-known club, of course. Everybody always talks about “the 49-50 over two years club”!
Neto has done that in fewer PAs than anybody but Jazz Chisholm. And with some of the injuries and the badness of the Angels, he’s been at least somewhat unnoticed.
The season went like this:
I really expected him to struggle to hit for power out of the gate as he was recovering from shoulder surgery. But no, some of his best slugging work came early in that season. He ripped nine homers and eight steals in his first 160 PAs of play. It was sick.
Between the last team preview and this one, I developed the 30-Day Rolling SRV plots. You can find those on the player rater page of the web app.
Basically, anything in double-digits is elite fantasy production. Anything over five is good stuff. So he did trail off at the end of the season, and his season ended early due to a hand injury after getting hit by a pitch. That’s no concern for next season.
Let’s get into the skills to see how reliable this power + speed combination is. The fScores:
Strong across the board, besides the discipline. He has a higher than average swing rate (49% - which isn’t crazy high) and posted a 4.9% BB% last year. So the OBP/points league appeal is slightly diminished, but it’s not like he’s a bad option in those formats. For standard roto, he’s pretty much everything you need.
The team context sucks, and probably will get worse this offseason. As I write this, the Angels are shopping Taylor Ward and Jo Adell. Losing one or both of those guys would be devastating. Imagine they send both of those guys packing and have another Mike Trout injury. That lineup will be horrifying. So the R + RBI stuff is limited for Neto. He drove in only 62 runs as the lead-off man last year. That’s not bad for a lead-off man, and hitting 26 homers will do that. There’s probably just not 180 R+RBI upside in Neto while the Angels are going through this like multi-decade rebuilding process.
The other thing to note is that it seems like Neto is really great at maximing the skills he has. Because the raw talent is nothing to write home about.
That’s a more than fine EV90 at 105.7, but it’s well short of elite. His sprint speed is also short of fantastic in the 69th percentile. There is also a 27% K% sitting here when you look at 2025.
That was up from 23% the previous year, so I think you could come back down under 25%. My model is at 25% and Steamer is at 24% in the early projections. That sounds right to me. It’s a fine K%, but it’s far from elite and doesn’t support much more than the .260ish batting average projection.
All Neto has done since arriving in the Majors is hit homers and steal bases. He’s played at a 25-homer, 26-steal pace since arriving in the Majors, and it’s gotten better each year. That alone makes him a very strong fantasy player.
The issue is that he’s going to go in the top 40 this season. And there’s an argument that this is mostly a two-category guy. He could have a .250 batting average season with some bad luck and only end up with 80 or so runs while driving in less than 65. I’d be wary of being too aggressive in the draft to get him. All of this stuff, plus his lack of skill-driven upside, makes me pretty lukewarm on the guy.
Ranking
Right now, the best comp in the rankings is James Wood. Wood has the far higher ceiling, but I think Neto is probably the safer pick in the third(ish) round. Leaning on the ceiling makes my new top three look like this:
Projection
600 PA, 89 R, 31 HR, 69 RBI, 22 SB, .2650/.328/.493
Mike Trout
Trout’s 34 now. With the age and the lack of production we’ve gotten from him for several years now, it seems like we should be nearing retirement age. But he’s got five seasons left on that contract! We’re going to be doing this for a while longer.
2025 was the season of the always-injured vets staying healthy. Trout played 130 games last year! His most since 2019. 26 homers were added to his Hall of Fame resume.
But that’s about the end of the good news for the guy.
The K% jumped up well into the danger zone. We’ve seen high strikeout rates from him for a while now, but 32% was a new career high. His contact rate fell to 71%, and it was weak in the zone as well, at 79%.
The FB% was very high once again (30%), he did a decent job with Air Pull% (19%), and his exit velos are not suffering much from the age (107.9 EV90, 115.4 max).
Predictably, he stepped off the gas with the steals, coming down to a 1% attempt rate after that 25% attempt rate spike in 2024.
We’re left with a guy who is mostly an empty-power fantasy player. And the RBI opportunities aren’t going to be plentiful on this team. It’s an ugly situation. I hope we don’t get five years of bad Trout to finish out his career; that would be pretty rough on his overall legacy.
The fScore:
Mike Trout is only 6% above the league average fantasy player. That’s in the same territory as Hunter Goodman, Wilyer Abreu, and others. I’m not saying Trout isn’t still a very good player (120 wRC+ last year), but the days of saying “Trout’s a first-round producer while he’s healthy” are in the rear-view mirror.
He won’t cost much, and the mostly healthy 2025 season was good to see. You can say that much for Trout. I think we’re still looking at an easy .450 slugging hitter with a near 30-homer pace, but the ceiling is zapped, and he’s not much different than the super late-round “homer or bust” guys you can always find.
Ranking
It’s pretty clear where to put Trout in the current rankings. I have Dylan Crews and Brenton Doyle right next to each other currently, with the next outfielder behind them being Luis Robert. Trout goes right around that duo.
Projection
400 PA, 56 R, 23 HR, 59 RBI, 4 SB, .245/.348/.487
Jo Adell
Age: 26
Pos: OF
We will see if Adell remains an Angel through the winter. Adell gave us the warm and fuzzies last year (unless you didn’t have him on your fantasy teams, I guess), finally putting together a good Major League season after all of those failed attempts after he was held so high by the prospect bro’s.
Adell was the Angels’ #1 prospect from 2019-2021. He got plenty of chances, but continually fell flat.
Let’s do a comparison of 2021-2024 vs. 2025:
→ 21-24: .218/.276/.397, 31% K%, 6.2% BB%, 26.6 PA/HR, 20% SBA%
→ 2025: .236/.293/.485, 26.5% K%, 6% BB%, 15.4 PA/HR, 5% SBA%
The biggest key for him was dropping that K%. 26.5% is still higher than you want, but it’s very manageable when you have the kind of raw power and speed that Adell has. He still wasn’t hitting for average, but the higher rate of contact let his power play big-time. The guy jammed 37 homers in 152 games. What a surprise.
And you saw the age at the beginning of this. It wasn’t a 29-year-old breakout; he’s still just 26 (he’ll turn 27 in April).
fScores:
The power is really carrying the score here, but he got above 90 in everything, and that’s good to see.
Looking at more numbers:
I really like these FEAR SCORES. What goes into those is how often the hitter is getting pitched around and how few fastballs and pitches in the zone they’re seeing. Pitchers caught on pretty quick to the Adell breakout and stopped wanting to mess too much with him. Although his 33% Chase% contributed to it, he didn’t give the pitchers a ton of reason to throw stuff down the middle. He wasn’t taking many walks (5.8%) and was still very susceptible to the whiffs (71.5% Contact%, although a decent 83% Zone-Contact%).
There are still holes for Adell. And he shows us some very poor stretches:
July was pretty rough with a .659 OPS and just three homers. And that was after he finally got universally owned against the 1.038 OPS he posted in June. But his final two months were very strong with 16 more homers and an OPS of nearly .800.
I don’t have any issues with the batted ball profile. A 109 EV90 and a 36% Sweet Spot%. That’s an elite combination.
As long as Adell doesn’t bounce back up to a 30%+ K%, I think he’ll be a standard league outfielder. The homers will keep coming. This guy’s raw power is near the tippy-top of the league (99th percentile bat speed).
I’d feel a lot better about it if his stolen base attempt rate didn’t fall to what it did. He swiped just five bases in 152 games. Not a great sign. We do know that he’s stolen a bunch of bags in the past (16 in 2024 on a 29% Attempt% in 130 games), so that could bounce back up to double-digits.
He’s still in the prime years. So I’m viewing Adell as a high ceiling bat with a very low floor. There’s still a chance the K% becomes a problem again, and he slumps his way to the bottom of the lineup or worse. There’s nothing alarming in the splits data, which should help his playing time.
There’s also not much competition if he does remain in LA.
Ranking
It feels right to rank him pretty close to Trout. They’re both 30-homer bats with risk (Trout = injury, K%, Adell = K%). I feel better about Adell (that’s weird to say) because of the age and the fact that I think he’s more likely to steal bases.
Adell vs. Doyle is an interesting comp. So I’ll just put those together right ahead of Trout.
I might be too high on Crews, but I really like the buy-low on the talented young guys who have struggled early in their careers.
Projection
500 PA, 64 R, 29 HR, 72 RBI, 10 SB, .249/.309/.503
Become a paid subscriber today to unlock the rest of this post as well as everything else we’re doing here at MLB DW. Projections, dashboards, apps, unmatched tools, tons of dynasty league content, and so much more.