Angels mailbag: Mike Trout’s great, but what about the rest?

Hello, Angels fans. Your favorite baseball team is 19-21, which translates to a 77-win pace for a full season. Last week was neither good nor bad. It just was. Here are some questions and answers about the Angels.

As always, please submit mailbag questions through my Twitter account (@pedromoura) or via email at pedro.moura@latimes.com.

Yes, Mike Trout is in the midst of another superb season, so far the best of his career. So, to date, Trout has been worth 2.5 Wins Above Replacement, per Fangraphs.com. The 35 other fellows who have played for the Angels have combined to be worth 3.4 WAR. Most of that’s come from the bullpen. That’s pretty close, but not quite there, and it’s unlikely to happen this season. There would have to be abundance of bad players to offset Kole Calhoun, Andrelton Simmons and some of their other positive performers. But, if you want to have fun with small sample sizes, you can say Trout has been worth more than eight times as much as the rest of the Angels’ position players so far.

A complete rebuild would obviously involve them trading Trout, which is not going to happen. So, not in the next four years, at least. Houston’s organization is in wonderful shape now, but the circumstances don’t always line up as well for such a rebuild. They were the oldest club in the league before they tore down, and they did not have a star player. They also drew terribly at Minute Maid Park for several years and are still recovering. That path carries risk.

I’ve gotten this question from a few people, but the premise is inaccurate. The Angels are actually using Parker in a valuable role. He’s often the first man to emerge from the bullpen, but that’s regularly with men on base, which can be the highest-leverage situations within games.

Take Sunday, for example, when he entered with a man on second, one out and a one-run lead in the seventh inning. He struck out Justin Upton and escaped on a deep flyout from J.D. Martinez. Those were the two most important plate appearances of the game, according to fangraphs.com’s leverage metrics.

Parker is a 31-year-old journeyman who went around the waiver wire during the off-season, but he leads the patchwork bullpen in strikeout rate, so it makes sense to deploy him with men on base. When I asked Parker about it, he said he imagines Mike Scioscia uses him there because of that, but it has not been mentioned to him. He said he hadn’t pitched in a role like this since he was in Class-A almost a decade ago.

I imagine fans are asking about it because Parker rarely pitches after the seventh. But the Angels have played tighter than typical games, which amps up the leverage in earlier innings.

“We’re put into a lot of higher-leverage situations because our games have been so close,” Angels General Manager Billy Eppler said the other day. “So, we are encountering higher-leverage situations nightly right now. We know that the big spots come up in the sixth inning, the seventh inning, the eighth, the ninth. They arrive at all times of the game based on out situations, game states, and so on and so forth.”

Out of the Angels’ bullpen, only closer Bud Norris and left-handed specialist Jose Alvarez are entering in higher-leverage situations than Parker this season.

Cowart has played 182 innings at second base in his career, all recently. He has a .477 major league OPS. Yes, he has had a nice start to his triple-A season, but do you really want to entrust a regular major league role to him? It would be foolish to do so at this point.

If Danny Espinosa continues to struggle and Cowart becomes better at his new position, perhaps it’ll be an option in a few months. But Espinosa has proven over many years he has strengths at the major league level. He can field well, and he can hit home runs. Yes, he strikes out far more than you want, but the power potential remains.

Espinosa has long been a switch-hitter. Before the 2015 season, the Washington Nationals asked Espinosa to only hit right-handed during spring training, so he did, with a few exceptions. Then, in the season’s sixth game, Phillies right-hander Jeanmar Gomez relieved left-hander Cole Hamels, and Espinosa switched over to bat left-handed, later telling the Washington Post he felt more comfortable that way. He switch-hit for the rest of the year.

You can imagine that it’d be difficult to face major league right-handed pitching as a right-handed hitter for the first time in a decade. So, it’s not really the sort of thing that can happen mid-season. While the Angels have acknowledged Espinosa’s right-handed swing is in much better shape than his left-handed swing, they’re not about to have him nix it right now.

As I’ve written in this space already this season, the Angels can spend internationally this season. Come July 2 they will be free to spend up to $4.75 million on a prospect from outside of America. As far as normal free agents, the Angels can pretty much spend whenever they want. There’s no salary cap in baseball. Nothing besides business sense has been preventing them from spending in recent seasons.

I would describe little as a breakout season in mid-May, but right-hander Eduardo Paredes is having a good year. The Angels added him to the 40-man roster over the winter, and he has already earned a promotion from double-A to triple-A. He’s a reliever, but he’s only 22, and he has 24 strikeouts in 20 2/3 innings.

Outfielder Michael Hermosillo, also 22, earned a promotion to double-A Mobile two weeks into his season, but he has a .463 OPS since. Right-hander Jaime Barria, 20, has 42 strikeouts and eight walks over 46 2/3 innings with high Class-A Inland Empire. That’s good.

Baldoquin, once the Angels’ big international investment, turned 23 Sunday. He’s in low Class-A, hitting .247 with a substandard .712 OPS. It’s not great. But it’s better than the last two years in high Class-A, so there is that.

The recency bias regarding players at the same position always astounds me. When Revere had a great spring training, fans clamored for his insertion into the opening-day lineup. When he struggled in April, they stopped. After a good week in May, the chorus has returned. The reality is that Revere is hitting .228/.238/.342 and Maybin is hitting .185/.307/.250. They’ve both been bad, about equally bad. Maybin is a better defender, and capable of playing center field. Over the long haul, they’re probably going to hew toward what they’ve been over their careers. Whichever man was the better player three months ago is probably still the better player.

That’s it for this week. Send questions to the below addresses to be considered for the mailbag every Monday, all season long.

pedro.moura@latimes.com

Twitter: @pedromoura