Biggest Surprise of 2024?

[Chuck]

Who was the most pleasant surprise of 2024? 

[UndertheHalo]

Has to be Neto.  
 

I would be shocked if Joyce’s arm holds up more than a couple of seasons.  

[Chuck]

13 minutes ago, UndertheHalo said:

Has to be Neto.  
 

I would be shocked if Joyce’s arm holds up more than a couple of seasons.  

I hear you, I voted for Neto. But some would argue that Neto was going to come close to those numbers this season. 

Someone like Koch really surprised me. 

[totdprods]

50 minutes ago, UndertheHalo said:

Has to be Neto.  
 

I would be shocked if Joyce’s arm holds up more than a couple of seasons.  

Low-key would explore trading him next summer if he’s healthy. Closers don’t have much use on a rebuilding club and the pieces he’d bring back could really speed along the rebuild and atone for not dealing Ohtani to a degree.

Kinda like the Tanner Scott return.

[Dgar24]

I’m on Koch, the rest we had seen soon glimpses , this guy kinda came  out of nowhere to me.

[Redondo]

Neto

[Angels 1961]

Pleasant surprise to me without a doubt is Jack Kochanowicz. With so many QS in last 2 months. I do not think anyone saw that coming this year. Zach in his second year looks like a solid player. Hopefully they can players to build around him.

[BTH]

Soriano.

Dude went from being a setup reliever to a legitimate mid-rotation SP, with upside.

[Stradling]

Yep. It’s Soriano. 
My list would go:

Soriano

Koch

Joyce

Neto 

[totdprods]

Yeah, I had hoped Neto would be Trea Turner-lite, so wasn’t a huge surprise.

Soriano came out of freaking nowhere though. 

[Swordsman78]

On a positive note.   Ben Joyce.

On a negative note:  The 2024 Angels had more errors than the 2023 Angels.  Thus negating a metric people here thought would improve drastically with the change in mgr.

[tomsred]

1 hour ago, Swordsman78 said:

On a positive note.   Ben Joyce.

On a negative note:  The 2024 Angels had more errors than the 2023 Angels.  Thus negating a metric people here thought would improve drastically with the change in mgr.

When you have as many devastating injuries as the Angels did this year, and were playing guys that should have never been brought up near the end of the season, it's no surprise they had as many errors.

[Swordsman78]

5 minutes ago, tomsred said:

When you have as many devastating injuries as the Angels did this year, and were playing guys that should have never been brought up near the end of the season, it's no surprise they had as many errors.

Normally I wouldn't even bring it up, except to correct the neighborhood bully.

[EDinTUSTIN]

4 hours ago, totdprods said:

Low-key would explore trading him next summer if he’s healthy. Closers don’t have much use on a rebuilding club and the pieces he’d bring back could really speed along the rebuild and atone for not dealing Ohtani to a degree.

Kinda like the Tanner Scott return.

No, he won't. He has already been hurt and is merely minted. Only someone like Arte would give up a haul of good players for either a rookie closer or a washed-up, once-great player.

[EDinTUSTIN]

Just now, EDinTUSTIN said:

No, he won't. He has already been hurt and is newly minted. Only someone like Arte would give up a haul of good players for either a rookie closer or a washed-up, once-great player.

 

[Erstad Grit]

Soriano and Koch for sure. They are legitimate SP. 

On the flip side I reallly thought Detmers was going to have a break-out season. 

[Inside Pitch]

Biggest surprise? 

The front office for embracing the suck, selling off, and not making any high end stupid purchases last winter. Not sure I'd consider the others really big surprises, save for maybe Soriano transitioning back to SPing as easily as he did.  A slight surprise for me was seeing Dana make it all the way up.

Neto was projected by a lot of models to be a 4 WAR player -- the SBs were a nice surprise but he mostly lived up to his projections if slightly underperformed his contact and walk rates.

Ben Joyce discovered a new pitch and reaped the benefits -- pretty common, particularly so in RPs.

Rengifo repeated his 2023, not sure why so many people hated him here early on other than his bone-head stuff, but he's playing to his skils

Nolan Schanuel walked a lot like most people believed he would and possibly showed more power than many expected

Jack Kochanowicz -- Allow me to do a victory lap.  Been saying he could be an innings eating 4.25-4.50 guy.  He's a unique pitcher that doesn't make a lot of sense the way teams play now with the emphasis on K's and launch angles.  He's a pitch away from being a dominant pitcher but I'd be happy if he simply continues to throw 90 pitches a game while racking up innings.  His BaBip ended up at .290 on the season so this isn't a case of him being lucky -- his success is the byproduct of his near 60% GB rate and Percy-esque heavy FB.

Adell's defensive improvement was shocking.   So maybe that's the biggest surprise.  Never doubted the tools but man was he an adventure out there.

[Inside Pitch]

2 hours ago, Erstad Grit said:

Soriano and Koch for sure. They are legitimate SP. 

On the flip side I reallly thought Detmers was going to have a break-out season. 

Don't give up on him.  The underlying data on him is a lot more positive than the results, there's a lot of fluke results in his pitch data.  You'll see him turn it around when he stops leaving the curveball up -- that's been his issue and also the area where he's potentially unlucky. 

[Inside Pitch]

4 hours ago, Swordsman78 said:

On a negative note:  The 2024 Angels had more errors than the 2023 Angels.  Thus negating a metric people here thought would improve drastically with the change in mgr.

Hate to burst your bubble but, the defense did improve drastically -- I've been the resident complainer about the importance of defense for years.

You're focusing on the wrong stat -- error totals tell you nothing other than how an official scorer judged a defensive play. People used to think Jay Buhner was a great defensive OFer because he had a big arm and rarely made errors.  He didn't get to a crazy number of catchable balls but nobody seemed to notice that part.

The 2023 Angels posted a defensive efficiency of .682, which ranked 6th worst in MLB and well below the league average of .691  The 2024 Angels posted a defensive efficiency of .704 above the MLB league average of .697, tied for 10th highest in MLB.  That was a massive improvement in an area of extreme weakness and it's worth pointing out they were all of .002 away from posting the 6th best.  There were 10 teams all clumped together between .704 and .709 -- the Mariners were tops in MLB at .724, the Dodgers second at .710. 

The Angels may have clanked a bunch of balls but they did a better than average job of getting to them and converting them into outs in the first place.

[jsnpritchett]

2 hours ago, Inside Pitch said:

Hate to burst your bubble but, the defense did improve drastically -- I've been the resident complainer about the importance of defense for years.

You're focusing on the wrong stat -- error totals tell you nothing other than how an official scorer judged a defensive play. People used to think Jay Buhner was a great defensive OFer because he had a big arm and rarely made errors.  He didn't get to a crazy number of catchable balls but nobody seemed to notice that part.

The 2023 Angels posted a defensive efficiency of .682, which ranked 6th worst in MLB and well below the league average of .691  The 2024 Angels posted a defensive efficiency of .704 above the MLB league average of .697, tied for 10th highest in MLB.  That was a massive improvement in an area of extreme weakness and it's worth pointing out they were all of .002 away from posting the 6th best.  There were 10 teams all clumped together between .704 and .709 -- the Mariners were tops in MLB at .724, the Dodgers second at .710. 

The Angels may have clanked a bunch of balls but they did a better than average job of getting to them and converting them into outs in the first place.

And the whole "they had more errors!" thing is just b.s., anyway. They had 97 this season versus...95 last year. Lol.  That's just random noise over the course of 162 games.

[eligrba]

5 minutes ago, jsnpritchett said:

And the whole "they had more errors!" thing is just b.s., anyway. They had 97 this season versus...95 last year. Lol.  That's just random noise over the course of 162 games.

When a person doesn't know anything about baseball, they will hang their hat on stats that are limited in what they describe.

Angels absolutely had too many unforced errors, but those will always happen because humans play the game. The ones that drive me nuts are the side arm erratically thrown balls by Rendon. Third baseman should throw over the top when they are able...Rendon throws like he just fielded  bunt every time. 

[Stradling]

4 hours ago, Inside Pitch said:

Hate to burst your bubble but, the defense did improve drastically -- I've been the resident complainer about the importance of defense for years.

You're focusing on the wrong stat -- error totals tell you nothing other than how an official scorer judged a defensive play. People used to think Jay Buhner was a great defensive OFer because he had a big arm and rarely made errors.  He didn't get to a crazy number of catchable balls but nobody seemed to notice that part.

The 2023 Angels posted a defensive efficiency of .682, which ranked 6th worst in MLB and well below the league average of .691  The 2024 Angels posted a defensive efficiency of .704 above the MLB league average of .697, tied for 10th highest in MLB.  That was a massive improvement in an area of extreme weakness and it's worth pointing out they were all of .002 away from posting the 6th best.  There were 10 teams all clumped together between .704 and .709 -- the Mariners were tops in MLB at .724, the Dodgers second at .710. 

The Angels may have clanked a bunch of balls but they did a better than average job of getting to them and converting them into outs in the first place.

 

1 hour ago, jsnpritchett said:

And the whole "they had more errors!" thing is just b.s., anyway. They had 97 this season versus...95 last year. Lol.  That's just random noise over the course of 162 games.

It was a dig at me because a few days ago I mentioned that this years team had less errors than last years then we went on to have 7 errors the last 5 games. 

[Dtwncbad]

2 hours ago, jsnpritchett said:

And the whole "they had more errors!" thing is just b.s., anyway. They had 97 this season versus...95 last year. Lol.  That's just random noise over the course of 162 games.

It’s even closer when you consider Sword officially counts dumping Nevin as an error last year.

[T.G.]

Soriano.

More of that please.

[tdawg87]

Definitely Soriano. I was literally pissed they moved him to the rotation. Dumbass. 

Koch is surprising just because he shouldn't be doing what he's doing but he's doing it. Sometimes baseball is weird and the analytics guys just toss their hands in the air and move on. 

Offensively, uhhhhh. Neto's power? That's probably not too shocking to those who aren't retarded like I am but damn son.