The Los Angeles Angels are a mess, and are likely best served by opening the floodgates this trade deadline. They leaked on Thursday that they are interested in trading shortstop Zack Neto, but perhaps the single most-likely-to-be-dealt player on the entire market is lefty starter Reid Detmers.
Detmers just turned 27 and is under team control for two seasons after this. He’s always been decent enough, with a pair of two-win seasons and a strong bullpen year in 2025 that was cut short by elbow injury. This year, it’s a bit of a coming out campaign for Detmers, with a 3.27 FIP and 3.32 xERA contributing to a 3.0 fWAR across 120 innings so far in 2026.
If he played for a functioning franchise, he’d probably be approached with an extension — 3.5-4 win seasons from guys in their age-27 seasons are nothing to sneeze at. But this isn’t a functioning franchise, and the returns from dealing away a player like this are probably more in line with the direction that a (in theory) rebuilt front office would want to go. Once again, teams like this are an object lesson that Yankee fans, for as frustrated as we can get with them, have it better than most.
Detmers features one of the best arrays of breaking pitches in the sport, especially his slider, which he’ll often front door against southpaws and run hard away from right handed batters. It’s been a +14 (!!) run pitch for him this year, running a 35 percent whiff rate. His curveball, which has seen usage drop off this year, gets a whiff 38 percent of the time, and you wonder if the right idea is to lean into pitching backwards even more. Neither of his four-seam nor sinking fastball are all that good, and that may be what keeps him outside the inner circle of elite starters. Then again, the Yankees have had success developing all kinds of fastballs making him the kind of pitcher that fits Matt Blake’s pitching lab — play up the breaking balls that are working, and add some shape to a fastball while in a rotation that features some damn good heaters.
The added benefit of trading for Detmers is that you also functionally trade for a reliever at the same time. We’ve batted around all year which guy in the rotation is best suited to shore up a bullpen that desperately needs some reinforcement, and landing Detmers, who would be a better option than both Ryan Weathers and Will Warren, in my opinion lets you transfer one of those two to the relief corps. Even if you don’t want to do that, you give the rotation margin for rest. You may want to give Max Fried or Gerrit Cole the odd day off, or save Cam Schlittler’s arm in a random September start and hope that helps him in the postseason, and an additional very good pitcher gets you that room to breathe.
The downside is cost. Detmers’ skill and team control means he’s going to be pricey, and you almost drool at the potential he could reach in a pitching lab like the Brewers’. The bidding for Detmers will rival any other player on the market, and if the Angels are able to play that well — a significant if — they should be able to kick start a rebuild off the return.
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