Angels upbeat about their future despite dropping back-to-back games
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Angels manager Ron Washington knew his team needed cultural adjustments.
It wasn’t just handling the 40-man roster general manager Perry Minasian assembled. The 73-year-old skipper, in his second season leading the Halos, identified a characteristic missing from last year’s Angels. Washington said his goal was for the Angels to become a family.
Looking back on two weeks ago, when the Angels stumbled to a 17-25 record after a hot start to begin the season, Washington said he felt the buy-in to the family ideology already seeped into the walls of the clubhouse — featuring a roster makeup mixing veterans with postseason success along his young starters across his infield. The results, however, were yet to come.
“My clubhouse was already jelled,” Washington said. “We just had to start playing good baseball.”
Ron Washington, a baseball lifer, is still perpetually upbeat despite having spent 55 of his 72 years in the game. And in that time he’s seen a lot.
The Angels didn’t just play good baseball. They were the best in baseball across the last two weeks. With seven of eight victories coming on the road — a three-game sweep of the Dodgers and a four-game sweep of the Athletics — the Angels riddled off an eight-game winning streak. The run was the franchise’s best since 2014 when the Angels won 10 straight and clinched a postseason berth (their most recent playoff appearance).
“We’re not going to win them all,” said shortstop Zach Neto, referring to Saturday’s loss to the Marlins that broke the Angels’ streak. “It was a matter of time. But we’ve been playing really good baseball. It’s another day today. We get to come out, play, play the game we all love.”
After dropping Saturday’s game to the Marlins (21-30) in 6-2 fashion, the Angels (25-27) couldn’t respond Sunday, falling 3-0 to Miami to lose the weekend series. Marlins right-hander Edward Cabrera sailed through 5 2/3 shutout innings, striking out 10 as the Angels’ offense struggled to produce for back-to-back days and tallied just three hits.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to reach that roll,” Washington said postgame about the Angels’ offense, compared to their winning streak bat-to-ball skills. “We’re going to get to the point where we swing the bat well, and I’m at the point right now where I knew we wasn’t going to be doing what we did, but I thought we would be consistent throughout the lineup and making something happen, but the pitching [Miami] threw at us the past couple days thought otherwise.”
Saturday and Sunday’s offensive production featured the opposite of the Angels’ winning streak.
Ron Washington is confident ‘the day will come’ when the Angels will be able to end their struggles and compete for World Series titles like the Dodgers.
Players such as veteran outfielder Taylor Ward were hitting the cover off the ball. The 31-year-old former first-round pick tallied a hit in each game of the eight-win run, hitting a home run in five of the contests amid a 10-game hitting streak and franchise-tying nine-game extra-base hit streak. On Sunday, both streaks came to a close. Ward struck a ball down the line just foul in the sixth inning, striking out to end the inning instead of bringing two runners in scoring position home.
The Angels, as a whole, socked 19 home runs across the eight-game stretch — the power appeared to help them surge to third place in a division more than up for grabs.
“Everyone’s whacking homers all the time,” said Jack Kochanowicz, the Angels’ second-year starting pitcher who shut down the Dodgers for 6 ⅔ innings of one-run ball on May 16. “It’s just good vibes in here right now.”
As Angels first base coach Eric Young Sr. put it, last year’s team featured young upstart talent — Neto, catcher Logan O’Hoppe and first baseman Nolan Schanuel — trying to make a name for themselves on a roster circling the drain of the American League West.
In 2025, all three have taken the next step.
For an Angels fan, these are the worst of times. In six years in Anaheim, Shohei Ohtani never reached the postseason. In his first year with the Dodgers, Ohtani won the World Series.
“They’re playing better baseball than they did last year,” Washington said. “They are more consistent right now than they were last year. Are they a finished product? Not by a long shot, but we like the progress. And that’s what the game of baseball is — progression.”
O’Hoppe (.272 batting average, 14 home runs and 30 RBI) is slugging almost .100 points higher than a year ago to a .543 clip. Neto (.284 batting average, eight home runs and 19 RBI) is hitting close to .300 for the first time in his career, coming back from a right-shoulder surgery that kept him out of action to begin the season. Schanuel (.281 batting average, .382 on-base percentage and has walked just as much as he’s struck out with 26 apiece) has developed into the Angels’ surefire everyday first baseman in his second full season at Angel Stadium.
The trio has year in, year out All-Star potential should the Angels play their cards right. O’Hoppe is under team control until 2029, while Neto and Schanuel are under team control until 2030.
“We realize, the veterans realize, that those guys are going to be the leaders of the Angels in the future, if not now,” Young said. “They probably have more leadership than they know, because we can’t let them know too much right now because they are still young, but they are learning and processing.”
The Angels are last in the American League West and might stay there until they embark on a complete rebuild like the one the Athletics implemented years ago.
And despite the eight-game turnaround turning into a two-game skid to end the weekend against the Marlins, Young knows the Angels could turn it back around on a dime.
“I don’t remember in my major league career going on an eight-game winning streak,” he said. “And you know, you always say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna start a new one today.’ Well, you never know, it’s got to start somewhere.
“So why not go out there and win today?”
The Angels will have their next chance to jump back in the win column Monday when the New York Yankees come to Angel Stadium for a three-game series.
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