Angels Quietly Show How To Build a Club

What does a team have to do to get some respect? The Angels haven't had a lightning-rod bestseller like Michael Lewis's "Moneyball" written about them. That's understandable — a lot of what general manager Bill Stoneman and manager Mike Scioscia do is just great talent management. As the Yankees and Red Sox know, you don't build to win this year, you build to win every year, and as the Angels begin to get in gear with more of their regulars coming back off the disabled list, the team is lining itself up to dominate the AL West now, and, potentially the entire league for years to come.

Although the Angels are not the defending division champs, Los Angeles is perhaps the favorite to win this year. This isn't entirely a matter of the strength of their talent — the Oakland A's lost their best hitter (Frank Thomas) and most famous starter (Cy Young winner Barry Zito) to free agency in the off-season, without finding equally valuable replacements. But a few funny things happened on the way to the season's start, and in the early going, the Angels' rotation was without one of the best starters in the league last year and a Cy Young winner. They were already down a starting outfielder, Juan Rivera, after a winter accident shelved him for much of the 2007 season with a broken leg; didn't know whether their young starting first baseman, Casey Kotchman, would finally blossom after missing all of last season to an exceptionally bad case of mono, and would also be breaking in a young second baseman, Howie Kendrick. And then supersub Chone Figgins broke a couple of fingers, forcing him to the DL.

What the Angels understand is that losing talent isn't the same thing as being without talent. Because of their extraordinary depth and confidence in the young players they've been integrating into the ballclub to replace the core of their 2002 World Series winners, the Angels have been able to roll with those losses. While the Yankees and Mets have had rotation controversies created by injuries and ineffectiveness, the Angels lost Jered Weaver and Bartolo Colon, and later, Kelvim Escobar, and could still field a good starting five. In the absence of the headliners, youngsters Joe Saunders and Dustin Moseley combined to deliver four quality stars (pitching six innings or more, and surrendering three runs or less) out of five. That didn't save Saunders from a demotion to Triple-A or Moseley from being pushed to the pen once Weaver, Escobar, and Colon came off the DL. The staff's ace, John Lackey, already has four wins and ranks second in the AL in Support-Neutral Value Above Replacement, a Baseball Prospectus metric for starting pitcher quality. (Roy Halladay is the leader.) What that depth portends is that where the Yankees are at panic stations, the Angels know they could lose a starter or two for a longer stretch, and they'd have a replacement available such as Saunders who is good enough to start in 29 other rotations.

The lineup is shaking down, too. The Angels have already earned a reputation as a team willing to run and gun on the bases, although they've seen a couple of games end with a "caught stealing." Scioscia understands that's the cost of doing business, and after one such incident, he commented on the extent to which he'd done the math: "With that combination — the time we had for the pitcher [coming to the plate] and throwing time [for the catcher] — I thought we had a better than 75% chance of making it." Scioscia is no dummy; 75% is pretty much where any stathead would tell you stealing makes sense. The Angels aren't a walks-driven offense, but they're just as hip to statistically informed decision-making as anybody in the game.

While Kendrick's promise as one of the best line-drive power sources to come out of the minor leagues in the last 20 years is shelved on the DL, Figgins has already been reactivated. Kotchman is starting to reward the club's faith, slugging .446 in the early going. Although Scioscia might devote as much time to base-out runscoring percentages as any sabermetrician, getting right fielder Vlad Guerrero off to the hottest start by any AL hitter not named A-Rod makes his margin for error much larger, especially with Guerrero's exceptional plate coverage and ability to drive any pitch he takes a cut at. Factor in the eventual return of Kendrick and the likelihood that top third-base prospect Brandon Wood will be up to stay later on this summer, and the lineup's going to be able to damage opponents almost as brutally as the rotation will be shutting them down.

What's interesting is that the Angels don't even get their due props, neither from press box reactionaries — like ESPN's Joe Morgan — nor from the authors of the inevitable books lauding some "anti-Moneyball" approach to winning. Teams like the Twins or Braves or Cardinals get propped up as the latest example of oldschool baseball, without a lot of supporting evidence, because it makes for good copy. That kind of work treats baseball fans to the tedious exercise of building up a false dichotomy between scouting and statistical analysis, in which an archetype of old-school scouting that reflects the value of traditional approaches to player development gets thrown up against equally overdrawn visions of brilliant technocrats grinding down the troglodytes through an inspired brand of spreadsheet magic.

The wonderful thing about the Angels is that they drive home the point that the truly great organizations do it both ways. For all the advertised genius in Oakland's front office, or for all of the equally well-advertised player development know-how of their crosstown rivals, the Dodgers, the Angels are the ones who have a recent World Series championship (2002) and who have the better foundation for future success. While nobody's writing books about the Angels' brand of baseball — not yet — they use every weapon, and are willing to look at every bit of information at their disposal.

Ms. Kahrl is a writer for Baseball Prospectus. For more state-of-the-art commentary, visit baseballprospectus.com.