NBCsports.com recently unveiled their Angels preseason preview and you have to like what you read. The story on the Angels is great pitching and good hitting and while they lost a couple of guys and probably way overpaid for Gary Matthews, Jr., they’re probably the favorites to win the AL West.
The news about Bartolo Colon is a bit discouraging. While I don’t think our laurels rest on Colon’s shoulder, he’ll definitely make a good rotation better if he can come back healthy. And the sooner the better. In the meantime, I like the idea of Joe Saunders filing in. While we can’t expect him to have the start like he did, I think he’ll make for a very good fifth option in the rotation.
And what about Jered Weaver? We’ll get a full season out of him and I like his PECOTA projection. His weighted mean average of a 1.22 WHIP would be very acceptable although I’m hoping for something closer to his 75 percentile, which would put him at a WHIP of 1.17. The one thing to note for Weaver is, he has a 61% collapse rate so there’s a high chance that we could see a little bit of regression before he makes the leap forward to a Cy Young contender.
