September 20, 2026
September 20, 2026
Los Angeles Angels 2025 Season: Treading Water in Anaheim
The Los Angeles Angels’ 2025 season delivered exactly what the previous decade had trained Anaheim to expect. Flashes of individual brilliance. Another summer with no October on the horizon. The Angels finished 72-90, fifth in the American League West, according to the final 2025 standings. That left them 18 games behind the division-champion Seattle Mariners and extended a postseason drought stretching back to 2014. Mike Trout reached a career milestone that transcended the standings. Zach Neto fought back from shoulder surgery to deliver a breakout year. None of it changed the math.
Anaheim opened spring training chasing answers it had failed to find for years. Third base remained the position nobody in the organization could solve. Anthony Rendon was limited again by injuries, and Yoan Moncada could not stay on the field for even half a season. Oswald Peraza arrived with prospect pedigree and did not deliver. Perry Minasian patched the gap with veterans like Kevin Newman and Chris Taylor, and none of them moved the needle. Zach Neto’s recovery timeline hung over the entire winter after his offseason shoulder surgery. The front office knew his glove and bat at shortstop were not optional pieces. Everything else rode on hope more than certainty.
For a team that finished with a losing record, the middle of the Angels’ order carried its weight all summer long.
Jo Adell finally cashed in on years of prospect hype. He stopped being a cautionary tale. He played all 152 games, launched 37 home runs, and drove in 98 runs. A franchise that had all but written him off had to reconsider what it had in the outfield. The strikeouts still piled up, and the swing still had holes a scout could drive a truck through. But the power was undeniable, and it played every single night. Rival executives noticed. Trade interest in Adell built steadily through the summer, proof that a former bust had turned himself into a genuine trade chip.
Taylor Ward did not chase headlines. He just kept hitting. He led the team with 36 home runs and 103 RBIs across 157 games, piling up 132 hits along the way. Ward manned a steady outfield week after week, without ever missing a beat. His consistency became the foundation the lineup leaned on when Trout was hurt and Neto was still finding his rhythm. He never demanded attention. By midsummer, it was impossible to talk about the Angels’ 2025 season without mentioning what Ward had quietly built.
Neto’s season nearly never got off the ground. Shoulder surgery in the winter cast real doubt on whether he would be ready for opening day. Doctors guided him toward a cautious buildup that had him watching, not playing, when the Angels broke camp. He climbed back steadily through spring training. Then he delivered once activated, playing 128 games and finishing with 26 home runs, 26 stolen bases, and 86 runs scored. Numbers like that from a 24-year-old shortstop coming off surgery do not happen by accident. They happen because a player refuses to let a scalpel define his season. Neto’s return became a genuine building block for the Angels heading into the offseason.
Ron Washington’s tenure ended the way no one wanted to imagine it. The 73-year-old manager stepped away on June 20 with the Angels sitting at 36-38. The decision was later tied to a heart condition that required quadruple bypass surgery. Bench coach Ray Montgomery took over as interim manager, with Ryan Goins sliding into the bench coach role behind him. Washington’s health, not his win total, defined the remainder of the season. Every clubhouse conversation about strategy took a back seat to concern for the man who had led it. He never returned to the dugout in 2025. When the year ended, the Angels moved on from both Washington and Montgomery, choosing to search outside the building for the next voice in the dugout.
Trout opened 2025 searching for answers, not milestones. He struck out at a career-high rate and slashed just .179/.264/.462 through his first 29 games. Those numbers would have alarmed any fan base less accustomed to worrying about him. Then, on May 1, he sprinted down the line against Seattle. He came up with a bone bruise in the same left knee that had cost him most of the previous season. The Angels had moved him to right field for 2025 specifically to spare his body this kind of strain. It did not work. He landed on the injured list again, one more entry in an injury history that had already stolen years of his prime.
Trout answered the only way he knows how, and he did it on the biggest possible stage. On September 20, he crushed a 485-foot blast for career home run number 400. He joined an exclusive club, becoming just the second active player, alongside Giancarlo Stanton, to reach the milestone. The moment did not erase a season of setbacks. It reminded Anaheim what the franchise still had, even in the middle of the Angels’ 2025 season unraveling around him. He finished with 26 home runs in 130 games, a respectable line wrapped around months of frustration.
Pitching depth, or the lack of it, decided how far this roster could climb. It never let the Angels climb very high.
Yusei Kikuchi held the rotation together almost by himself. He posted a 3.99 ERA and struck out 174 batters across 178.1 innings, the kind of workhorse season a thin staff cannot survive without. José Soriano won 10 games despite a bloated 4.26 ERA. Veteran Kyle Hendricks scuffled to an 8-10 mark, his 4.76 ERA reflecting diminishing stuff more than bad luck. Behind them, rookies like Ryan Johnson and Caden Dana got thrown into the fire before they were fully ready, part of a pattern of rushing arms straight from the draft.
The bullpen turned into the season’s most consistent source of dread. Kenley Jansen converted 29 saves and gave the ninth inning a steady presence. The innings in front of him wobbled all summer, though, with Brock Burke logging a team-high 69 appearances just trying to plug the gaps. Reid Detmers offered one genuine bright spot. He found real velocity gains after a midseason move to relief work turned a struggling starter into a weapon out of the bullpen. One converted starter could not fix what an entire relief corps had broken. The Angels needed length and stability, and for most of the summer they had neither.
The trade deadline arrived with a roster full of obvious sellable pieces, and the Angels sold nothing. Both Adell and Ward drew real interest from contenders hunting for outfield thump. Either one could have restocked a farm system that badly needed the talent infusion. Minasian held onto both, betting on a second-half turnaround the standings made almost impossible to justify. The front office added only two relievers in their mid-to-late thirties, a pair of moves too small to matter. One columnist captured the frustration bluntly, writing that the Angels were stockpiling role players while the rest of the division shopped for real reinforcements. The inaction left fans wondering whether ownership had any real plan for closing the gap.
Seventy-two wins does not sound like much, and it was not. It marked the tenth consecutive losing season for a franchise that has not smelled October since 2014. The Angels’ 2025 season will be remembered for Trout’s milestone home run, for Neto proving his surgically repaired shoulder could still carry a full year, and for a manager who left the dugout fighting for his health rather than his job. None of those threads add up to contention. What they add up to is a roster still waiting for its pitching to catch up to its bats. It is still searching for a third baseman, and now searching for a manager too. For the full statistical record of a forgettable summer, Baseball-Reference keeps the complete ledger. Anaheim fans have heard the promise of a turnaround before. This roster leaves them exactly where recent history suggested they would land: hopeful about individual pieces, exhausted by the whole.
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