How Much Can A New Hitting Coach Help Halos Reduce Strikeouts?

There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit when it comes to targets and scapegoats for the Los Angeles Angels’ 100-loss season, but the hitting coach barely gets mentioned these days. 

That’s because the Halos barely had one. Brady Anderson was the nominal hitting coach during the season, but he was nearly invisible during the season, especially as the Angels offense continued to deteriorate and the games with big strikeout totals continued to increase. 

A bit of backtracking is necessary here. Johnny Washington was the Halos’ hitting coach back in 2025, and his basic approach could be described as “swing as hard as you can until you make an out.” 

That aligned with much of modern baseball, but with the Angels the results were particularly onerous. The team nearly set a record for strikeouts in 2025, but somehow they barely avoided setting that mark. 

Enter Anderson, who was lauded for his different approach initially. The Athletic did a puff piece on Anderson before the season that focused on his work helping first baseman Trey Mancini, who was signed by the Angels in yet another veteran retread move by former GM Perry Minasian.

Mancini was gone by midseason, however, and he retired not long after that. Anderson wasn’t gone, but he did disappear, as did subsequent pieces on his supposedly relevatory approach. 

Meanwhile, hitters struggled -- mightily. The diamond was littered with victims of the hitting coach void, with the two biggest ones being young infielders Denzer Guzman and Oswald Peraza, both of whom started well, then fell into disastrous slumps that cratered the respective seasons of both players in the second half. 

As that happened, an interesting development occurred in parallel. The Milwaukee Brewers blitzed their way to a World Series win based in part on hitters making contact and putting the ball in play, which goes contrary to the current approach in MLB that’s basically an exhibition of high velocity and home runs where the scoreboard is basically running tally as a side note. 

So how much could this approach help the Angels? A lot, as it turns out. Players like Guzman, Peraza and Wade Meckler are basically contact hitters waiting to happen, and a unified approach with a good hitting coach could produce vastly different results. 

The flip side of this is that hitting and pitching coaches are popular scapegoats these days. They’re often the first to go when their charges struggle, largely because they’re the lowest on the pay scale, so when stuff flows downhill it lands on them. That’s sad, but it would be nice to see the Angels try something different, mostly because we’ve just seen how it can work.