The best and worst part of the MLB Offseason is its pace. Most other sports begin their offseason with a flurry of activity and then a long quiet stretch where there’s not a lot to get excited by. In baseball, the offseason is a glacially slow drip feed of transactions. It’s a more memorable experience, as I enjoy the rush of a Passan-bomb dropping at any random moment, but there are a lot of times where your patience gets tested and you wish that things would move a lot quicker.
The Winter Meetings are MLB’s closest equivalent to the excitement of other sport’s opening days of free agency, but most years you’re typically left disappointed with a lot of major names left unsigned, and your favorite team left with holes all over their roster. While this year’s meetings are so far no exception, the Angels have made a few moves over the past week so I thought I’d use this chance to catch up on a few transactions.
Alek Manoah
The Angels signed Alek Manoah last Tuesday for $1.95m. This is a tough deal to judge presently, because for me, I need to see what other moves the Angels make before I can properly evaluate this deal.
My initial fear when this deal was announced was that Manoah was signed with the intention of being the fifth starter. All of the reporting since has confirmed that’s not likely to be the case and the Angels are still in the market for starting pitching, but until a transaction is made official I’ll remain a little skeptical. If the Angels go out and sign somebody like Tyler Mahle, and they use Manoah in the bullpen with an occasional spot start, then I love this move.
The biggest question is obviously whether Manoah's best days are behind him. Manoah had an incredible 2022, placing third in Cy Young voting, but in the seasons since, Manoah has dealt with a ton of injuries to his pitching arm. In 2023, Manoah pitched through discomfort in his right shoulder which ended his season early. In 2024, Manoah started the year on the IL for right shoulder inflammation, and then only made a handful of starts before suffering a UCL sprain that eventually led to surgery. This surgery wiped out most of his 2025, but he made some starts in the back half of the year.
You look at Manoah’s struggles when healthy from 2023 to 2025, and it’s fair to say that it was primarily because his stuff dropped off. I won’t go into all the examples, but his changeup from 2022 to 2024 lost three and a half inches of drop, which among other factors increased the xSLG on that pitch from .353 to .761. You look through his data and there’s a lot of little things like this all throughout his profile, which all came together to transform him from a Cy Young candidate to a below replacement-level player.
The Angels are betting that this drop in stuff is either correctable, or was due to structural issues in his pitching arm. Manoah is only 27, which means that he should still have his best days ahead of him. As a bullpen arm, Manoah will work closely with Mike Maddux to get back to his 2022 form, which if he does, the Angels will still have him under team control for 2027.
If Manoah struggles, there’s also the upside here that he has two options left. While I’m sure the Angels would love to keep Manoah around Mike Maddux, if he struggles it's nice to have the option to send him down to Salt Lake.
Alek Manoah was a Cy Young candidate, who for the past three years has struggled with health. That’s a profile that’s absolutely worth a $1.95m bet. If the rumors are true that Mike Maddux pushed for this, then I’m feeling even more confident that the Angels can turn Manoah’s career around. This is a B signing, that I’ll push up to an A should the Angels sign another starting pitcher.
Vaughn Grissom
Trading for Vaughn Grissom might be the most Perry Minasian transaction of all time. Perry can’t resist a former top prospect, and for the second year in a row we’ve brought in a player who was once the centerpiece of a Chris Sale trade. Grissom was also drafted by Perry Minasian in Atlanta, continuing the long list of former Braves who Perry has brought to Anaheim.
Despite the fact that it feels like both the former Braves and the former top prospects have never worked out for us, I still like the strategy here.
Grissom, after being traded to Boston in December 2023, never had a chance to prove himself in his new organization. In spring training, he suffered a hamstring injury which put him on the IL to start the season. During his rehab stint, he suffered from a pretty serious flu which saw him lose 14 pounds. Due to the rules surrounding rehab stints, the Red Sox were forced to activate Grissom sooner than they would have liked, which led to a .367 OPS in May while recovering.
This is important context for Grissom’s career, because if you exclude this stretch, his career OPS is .748.
When you look at Grissom’s profile, that production seems sustainable when you look at his great bat-to-ball skills (His 88.9% Zone Contact rate would have been second on the Angels behind Nolan Schanuel), which leads to him being great at avoiding strikeouts. Grissom is also a prospect who scouts always thought had some untapped power, and we saw glimpses of that this year in AAA, as he increased his average exit velocity from 85.5mph to 88.2mph.
Grissom was forced out of Boston due to their impressive depth of young talent, and I really like his fit in Anaheim. He’ll slot perfectly into the Rengifo role of being a depth infielder, who has experience playing both second and third base. Trading for Grissom also makes it more palatable to bring back Moncada, because, like Rengifo, you should be able to trust Grissom to step into Moncada’s role during his inevitable IL stints.
To acquire Grissom, the Angels traded Isaiah Jackson, who I had as our 21st ranked prospect. Jackson was a high-floor prospect in center field due to his great defensive instincts. He doesn’t have the typical speed of a glove-first outfielder, but the ability to make great reads made him a Pac-12 All-Defensive teamer for two straight years.
Jackson is a left-handed bat with a power-over-hit profile, and like most glove-first prospects it’s now a waiting game to see if his bat develops enough for his defensive skills to get him on the field. The Angels don’t have a lot of position player depth in their farm, so I would have preferred to see them move a pitcher, but Jackson is a reasonable price to pay here.
Overall, this is probably a B- transaction. If Grissom had options left, I’d have bumped this up to an A, but it’s still a low-risk move that should allow them to cheaply replace the hole left by Luis Rengifo. I really like Grissom’s contact profile, and emerging power, and the more I researched him for this article the more I started to like him. I don’t think we should be shocked if he contributes on offense this year.
Rule 5 Draft
The Rule 5 Draft was mostly uneventful for the Angels this year. The MLB phase saw the Angels pass with their pick, and also saw no Angels selected by other teams. As a net result for the Angels this was a win, as there were three key names available to other teams.
Jared Southard has quietly climbed through the Angels system after being a twelfth-round pick in 2022, and after spending half of 2025 in AAA, it’s possible that he makes his major league debut in 2026.
Samy Natera Jr was another name on the radar for the Rule 5 draft, who got a lot of prospect buzz after a strong showing in the 2024 Arizona Fall League. He couldn’t command the ball in 2025, but still showed some great stuff as the lefty struck out 34.3% of batters. If Mike Maddux and the Angels can get him to find the zone more consistently this spring, then he could be one of our more impactful relievers.
Joel Hurtado was the final name on the radar, who as a prospect has some similarities to Jack Kochanowicz. He primarily uses a sinker that at the moment shares a ton of traits with the one thrown by Kochanowicz, but I like Hurtado more as a prospect due to his velocity upside (his maximum recorded pitch velocity was 104.4mph), better secondary pitches, and better command. He doesn’t strike many guys out, but gets a lot of ground-ball outs, and had a good year in Double-A posting a 2.70 ERA.
Overall, I’m glad we kept all three players in the system.
The minor league phase was a lot busier, with the Angels picking up Eybersson Polanco from the Red Sox, and losing five players.
Polanco is a 22-year-old pitching prospect, who posted a 5.23 ERA in Low-A this year pitching in relief. The Angels likely took him because the righty can reach 98 mph with his four-seamer, and has encouraging whiff rates on his secondary pitches. His FIP and xFIP this year were 3.35 and 3.52 respectively.
The Angels lost the following players in this portion of the Rule 5 draft: Sandy Gaston, Sam Ryan, Jake Smith, Jorge Marcheco, and Yendy Gomez.
Gaston signed with the Angels this year as a free agent after being let go by the Rays. The Angels got him to improve his walk numbers pitching in relief in High-A, but he still has some work to do on that front. The Angels moved him to AAA at the end of the year, probably to get a final look at him to determine if he was worth protecting, but the Statcast data from those appearances doesn’t show much to get impressed by. His stuff graded poorly, and he was overmatched by the step up in competition.
Ryan was also signed this year, after being released by the Blue Jays and spending a year playing independent ball. He had a 3.58 FIP in half a season of relief in Double-A. At 27 years old, he is a low-ceiling prospect, but one who I can see reaching the majors as a low leverage reliever.
Smith has been in our system for a while after being drafted in the sixth round of the infamous all-pitchers draft back in 2021. He is a 26-year-old reliever who posted a 3.92 ERA this year across High-A and Double-A. He walked 18.8% of batters this year, and 2022 was the one season where he had a sub-5 FIP.
Marcheco was a 22-year-old starting pitching prospect who signed with the Angels as an international free agent. He spent the year in High-A, and had one of the better K-BB% ratios in our entire system. He gave up a ton of homers, but otherwise was moving through the system pretty nicely. He is the name I’m most upset to lose as a lottery ticket SP prospect.
Finally, Gomez at 21, has been in the Angels system since 2021, but has only 29.1 IP in full-season ball where he has struggled. He had some good numbers pitching in the Arizona Complex League, but has been stuck at that level for four years.
