As the Angels enter mid-June, with July slowly creeping towards them, they find themselves 13 games back in the A.L. West behind the dominating Houston Astros.

Clearly this deficit will be a steep hill to climb and combined with the loss of superstar Mike Trout to the disabled list for at least the next 5-8 weeks it is becoming increasingly clear that, barring a massive winning streak between now and the middle of July that keeps the team in the Wild Card conversation, Billy Eppler needs to position the team as a seller leading up to the trade deadline on July 31st, 2017.

This trade deadline, as FoxSports.com Ken Rosenthal detailed in late January, could prove to be a busy one. The Angels are actually reasonably well positioned to make either some lateral moves, if they are still in the Wild Card hunt, or conduct a full fire sale of their short-term assets if they are out of the race by mid-to-late July.

With this potential sell-off positioning in mind, Angelswin.com would like to present the 2017 Trade Deadline Series where we will focus on and pinpoint a set of teams that are the most likely to be in the playoff discussion, identify their general areas of need, and determine which, if any, Angels players might be of interest to them in possible trade deadline deals.

As Angelswin.com described in the Primer Series over the winter, Billy Eppler accumulated several players to compete in 2017 and, if the teams season did not break right, act as potential trade chips at the deadline.

The following players seem like surefire trade candidates that Eppler will shop to the other 29 teams:

• Bud Norris
• Yusmeiro Petit
• David Hernandez
• Danny Espinosa
• Doug Fister
• Yunel Escobar
• Cameron Maybin
• Ben Revere
• Jesse Chavez
• Eric Young Jr.
• Andrew Bailey
• Cliff Pennington

Most of these guys have low range trade value but could bring back needed depth, role players, and prospects that could be contributors in the future.

In addition to these twelve players, the following members of the team could potentially be bandied about in trade discussions as well:

• Huston Street
• Ricky Nolasco
• Matt Shoemaker
• C.J. Cron
• Blake Parker
• Martin Maldonado
• Carlos Perez
• J.C. Ramirez

Now to be clear this second group of players is less likely to be traded than the first group above. This is primarily due to the fact that all eight of these guys have more than one year of control and/or they could be important contributors to the Angels future success.

Billy Eppler has and will be busy as he attempts to move rental and, perhaps, controllable assets to re-position the Angels for the second half of 2017 and the remainder of Mike Trout’s years of control. The team, despite being 13 games back in the A.L. West, is only 2 games back of the 2nd Wild Card berth as of June 10th, 2017.

If they can stay afloat until Trout returns Eppler will almost assuredly deal one or more players in an attempt to improve the squad at the deadline without expending prospect capital or unnecessarily hamstringing the team. In the likelihood we are out of the race expect a sale of any and all expendable short term assets.

In the next section we will discuss the basic methodology used for this series to help with our trade analysis.

View the full article