Series Preview: Seattle Mariners vs. Los Angeles Angels

Thanks to Leo Rivas and an exhausted but effective bullpen, the Mariners managed to pull out the sweep against the Cardinals. More importantly, the M’s fifth win in a row helped them keep pace with the surging Rangers and maintained their one game gap behind the Astros in the AL West. Now they’ll welcome their division rivals to town in a big four-game series ahead of a season-defining road trip next week.

Just like in 2023 when the Angels made a ton of ill-advised moves at the trade deadline to try and win with Shohei Ohtani still on the roster, Los Angeles made a handful of funny win-now trades this year too. The problem, as it was two years ago, is that the Angels roster is nowhere close to being competitive. They can’t pitch, their defense is the worst in the majors and the lineup is top heavy and very shallow. They’re on track to improve on their 99 loss season last year, but not by much. That’s faint praise because it really doesn’t seem like they have a coherent plan to rebuild their roster; they’re just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

The Angels lineup is, like it has been for the past decade or so, more top-heavy than the Rainier Tower; the difference is instead of Ohtani and Prime Trout, the big producers are more star-adjacent and less superstar. The exception to that is Jo Adell, who continues to round into the franchise cornerstone player the Angels thought they were getting when they drafted him tenth overall; he’s maintained the drastically-improved strikeout rate he posted last season and amended that with some extra power, threatening the 40-home run mark. He’s fresh off AL Player of the Week honors for the first week of September after hitting .407 with five homers; the red-hot Adell will be a headache for Mariners pitching all series.

Beyond Adell, there’s a trio of 20+ homer guys anchoring the top of the lineup. Leadoff man Zach Neto has not only repeated his breakout 2024 campaign but improved it, pairing 26-homer pop with strong defense at short. The oft-injured Taylor Ward has boosted his 2025 power output with 30 homers. It’s weird to talk about Mike Trout as the low man on the homer totem pole, but 20 is still a respectable number for the 33-year-old Trout, who always seems to bring something extra against the Mariners.

The rest of the lineup is the typical Angels stars-and-scrubs model, made up of journeymen and role players all performing about as you’d expect. The pair of ex-Mariners Chris Taylor and Luis Rengifo aren’t having great seasons, but always seem to play well against their former organization; part of the reason the Angels are so annoying when they play the Mariners. This is a lineup that, on paper, should be overshadowed by the Mariners’ lineup, but the way these two teams play never seems to go chalk.

From a previous series preview:

José Soriano is a really tricky pitcher to analyze. He throws harder than almost every other starting pitcher in the majors, has the highest groundball rate of any starter in baseball, and features three pitches with whiff rates north of 30%. Yet, he’s focused on generating weak contact with his sinker rather than racking up strikeouts with his breaking balls, so his strikeout rate is only 21.3% and his mediocre command prevents him from really excelling. That means he’s often working in and out of trouble but doesn’t have the approach to avoid allowing some damage when there’s traffic on the bases.

From a previous series preview:

After finding some success in Toronto and a second-half stint with the Astros last year, Yusei Kikuchi signed a three-year deal with the Angels to lead their rotation. He’s largely the same pitcher that he was when Seattle first brought him over from Japan with an overpowering fastball and a trio of solid secondary pitches. His fastball has lost about a tick of velocity from where it was last year and he’s now throwing his slider as his primary pitch. That has seemed to erase all the command gains he showed the past few years; his walk rate has increased by more than four points despite him running a career-high zone rate.

Mitch Farris was traded to the Angels over the offseason in an extremely below-the-radar move — the full transaction was Farris for Davis Daniel, and you’d be excused if you forgot that Daniel made six starts for Los Angeles last year. As for Farris, he was a 14th round college pick in 2023 and graded out as a low-level, 35+FV prospect in Atlanta’s organization. He was assigned to Double-A when he joined the Angels and they called him up to make his big league debut at the beginning of the month. In two starts, he’s allowed just three runs in 11 innings and will get a third turn through the rotation while Tyler Anderson is on the IL. Farris’s stuff does not stand out very much; his fastball comes in just a hair over 90mph and his best pitch is a screwball-style changeup.

Caden Dana entered the season as the Angels top prospect but his struggles this year have caused his ceiling to trend sharply downward. He was able to quickly ascend through the Angels farm system last year, debuting as a 20-year-old last September. At that point, Los Angeles was merely dreaming on his tools, but things didn’t go well in his three start cup of coffee. He started the year in Triple-A and was knocked around pretty thoroughly; both his ERA and FIP were a hair under six and the command problems that looked like they had been solved in Double-A last year made a roaring return. He made a couple of cameo appearances earlier in the season but has been thrust into the rotation since rosters expanded.

With both Texas teams winning yesterday, the M’s kept pace in both the division and Wild Card race with their extra-innings victory. Houston will wrap up their series in Toronto today and will head to Atlanta this weekend. The Rangers are off today and will begin a three-game set against the Mets on Friday. The Yankees and Red Sox are effectively tied atop the Wild Card standings and those two AL East rivals will face each other in what could be a decisive three-game series in Boston this weekend. Down a little further in the standings, the Guardians leap frogged the Royals by winning two of the first three games in their big four-game set. This weekend, Cleveland hosts the White Sox while Kansas City travels to face the Phillies.