Angels mailbag: Production ideas out of left field

Hello, Angels fans. Your favorite team is 16-17 so far, which translates to a 79-win pace for a full season. That’s about where experts projected them to finish. But it would have been difficult to predict the pitching injuries that again have struck the club in 2017: Garrett Richards, Tyler Skaggs, Cam Bedrosian and others are all out.

So, let’s talk about the team. As always, please submit mailbag questions through my Twitter account (@pedromoura) or via email at pedro.moura@latimes.com.

Less, which is not at all what the Angels planned, considering they invested $13 million plus potential incentives into the spot. They spent less than $2 million on the spot last year.

Angels left fielders — mostly Cameron Maybin and Ben Revere — have combined to hit .197/.263/.270 this season. That .533 on-base plus slugging percentage is far worse than the lines posted in 2016 and 2015, which added up to a .584 and .592 OPS, respectively. And almost anything would be better. Those were two of the 10 worst seasons by any team’s left fielders in the last century.

There’s ample reason to believe the Angels will extract more production from the position. Both Maybin and Revere have experienced sustained success in the majors. Neither is striking out much. Anecdotally, Revere seems to be stroking a lot of line drives. Also, they are better on defense than the hodgepodge of folks who played the position in previous seasons.

A few factors have produced this run of legitimately successful starts for J.C. Ramirez, who is a massive man. Chiefly, he throws hard. He throws really hard. He’s the hardest-throwing healthy starter in Major League Baseball.

Additionally, late last season, he nixed his four-seam fastball in favor of a sinking two-seamer. Plenty of pitchers throw two-seamers. Few throw no four-seamers whatsoever, but Angels’ staffers say they discovered that Ramirez could not predict what his four-seamer would do when he threw it. Sometimes it cut; sometimes it did not. From what I understand, that led to more strikeouts but also more walks, and generally more volatility.

So pitching coach Charles Nagy suggested moving away from it. And in the last month of last season, Ramirez logged a 1.93 ERA.

When the club told him to come to camp as a starter, he developed a curveball to accompany his long-standing slider. Manager Mike Scioscia believes that to have helped his slider too.

I don’t know what to expect from Ramirez long term; neither do the scouts I speak to regularly. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Considering where his career stood a year ago, that still represents a tremendous improvement.

Kole Calhoun has never not been a good hitter. Andrelton Simmons is hitting well this season. If you were holding a singles-hitting competition, there are not many major leaguers I’d take over Yunel Escobar. Martin Maldonado has a .345 on-base percentage. Albert Pujols still strikes fear in pitchers’ minds when he comes up to the plate in big spots.

Hitting is not the club’s problem.

Good pitchers are not generally free agents in May. The Angels signed the best free-agent pitcher around this time a year ago, Tim Lincecum, and he pitched terribly. In nine major league starts, he had a 9.16 ERA.

As far as making a trade, they are difficult to execute at this stage in the season. Also, the Angels have a limited stock of prospects to trade, and is this really the right time to pull from that stock?

Yes, they should consider that, and I imagine they will. Whether they sell or not depends on all kinds of factors, most of which I detailed near the end of last week’s mailbag.

Sure. He was a trade piece a year ago, but he was not traded because the market for his services is lessened by concerns about the way he carries himself. He has strengths, but he remains prone to lapses in concentration on the base paths and in the field.

Trout is a human, not a machine. Sometimes his body hurts. He’s missed 19 starts since he was called up for the last time five years ago, which means he has started more than 97% of the club’s games.

But to answer the question specifically, I suppose the best way would be if nobody showed up to the stadium the next time he takes a day off. That would be something.

I can’t say that I ever spent much time thinking about this, but I just did, and I’m pretty indifferent. I guess my overall thought is that most people who can grow full, good-looking beards generally do, and most people who can’t don’t. I’m in the latter category.

Send questions to the below addresses to be considered for the mailbag every Monday, all season long.

pedro.moura@latimes.com

Twitter: @pedromoura