Most of the time, you can count on early November to take a break from following baseball news. The World Series has just ended, but free agency hasn’t started in earnest. International free agents generally get posted closer to the mid-December deadline. Big trades are more of a December/January thing. But the Angels don’t operate that way. First they traded for Jorge Soler. Then they signed Kyle Hendricks. Now they’ve signed the first multi-year free agency deal of the offseason, linking up with Travis d’Arnaud on a two-year, $12 million contract.
At first blush, this feels like so much shuffling of deck chairs. The Angels have a lot of needs, to put it bluntly. Catcher was one of their best positions last year. They need more starters, more relievers, more outfield depth, more infield depth, and more top-of-the-order bats. Incumbent Logan O’Hoppe was one of only three hitters on the team to eclipse the 2-WAR mark. Why not sign a second baseman, or another starting pitcher, or pretty much anyone else?
I think there’s more here than meets the eye, though. We’re not talking about a blockbuster signing, and quite frankly, we’re not talking about a playoff team. A good season for the Angels in 2025 would mean flirting with .500 and developing a few new everyday players. Maybe Jo Adell will take a step forward and Mike Trout will play a full season at his normal standard of excellence. Maybe Zach Neto will continue on his current trajectory towards borderline All-Star production (once he’s back from shoulder surgery, of course) and Reid Detmers will rediscover his wipeout slider.
O’Hoppe is another key player to the 2025 team. After an injury-marred 2023, he played his first full major league season this year and showed flashes of the offensive potential that made him a Top 100 prospect. He also played his worst baseball at the end of the season, with a near-40% strikeout rate in the second half leading to a 64 wRC+. His defense flagged as the year wore on, and it wasn’t sterling in the first place.
Some of that is to be expected. Catching is tough! A full season of it, for the first time? That’ll wear on anyone. But the Angels made things particularly hard for O’Hoppe with their roster construction. Their backup catcher, Matt Thaiss, is probably better suited for first base at this point in his career. O’Hoppe handled a ton of innings as a result, and while the Angels have a better idea of how much that affected him than I do, it certainly felt like an unnecessary burden from my outside perspective.
Enter d’Arnaud, a perfect solution for what ailed the Angels last year. At 35, he’s not an everyday player, but he’s been one of the best part-time backstops in the game throughout his tenure in Atlanta. He’s capable of filling in for stretches, and he grabbed partial control of the Braves catching job last year, but 75-80 games feels like a realistic ceiling for how much he’d ideally play.
That’s a wonderful pairing with O’Hoppe, who really should be the full-time starter. It’s useful on two axes. First, it’s a meaningful upgrade for the Angels at a reasonable cost. Want to win more games? Upgrading your backup catcher from replacement level to a plus hitter with good defensive chops is a spectacular way to do it. On a pure add-up-the-runs basis, this signing likely improves the Angels by several wins. The price is right, too: Backup catchers just don’t command much on the market these days, which is why d’Arnaud only got $6 million annually.
For that amount of money, it’s hard to imagine a better upgrade for the Angels. We’re projecting d’Arnaud as an average hitter and defender. That tracks with his resume over the past few years. And while it might not sound like much, it’s hard to get either of those qualities at the toughest defensive position on the diamond. The market this year was Danny Jansen, d’Arnaud, Carson Kelly, and maybe Kyle Higashioka. No contender wants to trade backup catchers — they need them! If the Angels wanted to improve the position, this was about the minimum they could spend while ending up with a quality option.
Now, as I mentioned, those extra wins probably aren’t going to land this squad in the postseason. But if you want to make the playoffs in 2026, the first step is improving in 2025. Not only does d’Arnaud help on that front, the second year of his deal provides the Angels with a ton of flexibility. If he plays well this year, spectacular — that’s next year’s backup catcher spoken for. If age catches up to him, such is life. The financial outlay is hardly ruinous, and taking a bit of the burden off of O’Hoppe is worth the cost anyway.
Second, I’m never sure how to weigh catcher soft skills, but having a mentor like d’Arnaud doesn’t seem like a bad thing for O’Hoppe’s development. The one-time Blue Jays and Mets phenom has experience playing with expectations of greatness, and with managing a great variety of pitching staffs over the years. Good luck putting an exact value on that skill set, but I’m quite confident it’s worth more than zero. No position in the majors is more mentally taxing than catcher, or takes longer to learn. Having a wise backup could accelerate O’Hoppe’s understanding of the defensive side of the game. At the very least, it can’t hurt.
This being the Angels, the signing is at least a little puzzling. O’Hoppe has shown more promise offensively than behind the plate thus far in his career, to the point where he could use some time at DH to stay fresh while keeping his bat in the lineup. Signing a high-caliber backup would normally free the team up to do just that. Just one problem: they went out and traded for a DH two weeks ago.
Could O’Hoppe play first base to get both he and d’Arnaud in the lineup? Maybe – but the team probably wants Nolan Schanuel to get everyday reps there. Could he DH when Soler rests? Maybe – but Trout could presumably use a break from the everyday rigors of fielding too, and the team will correctly prioritize his health. Could Soler play the field? Eh, not really – the Braves tried it last year, and he looked like a DH out there. The pieces fit together awkwardly if the Angels are hoping to give d’Arnaud the same workload he shouldered in Atlanta (roughly 80 starts and 350 PA).
That makes me marginally less excited, but that’s more about Soler’s fit than d’Arnaud’s. I still think this signing was inspired, a great way to improve the team for the near future without breaking the bank or blocking any promising youngsters from playing. I reserve the right to revise my opinion if d’Arnaud starts meaningfully cutting into O’Hoppe’s playing time, but that seems unlikely. Instead, I think this is just a good deal for a veteran backup. I imagine that several teams will end the winter wishing they’d done the same.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com