Jordan Romano has a 7.11 ERA through nine appearances. Drew Pomeranz, who is nominally a professional baseball player, has a 7.00 ERA through nine of his own. Ryan Zeferjahn, the man who is supposed to cover the gap between those two and the rest of the bullpen, is at 6.10. George Klassen, the promising prospect who got a look after Ben Joyce stayed on the injured list, has an 11.57 ERA in two outings. That last one is technically impossible to sustain for an entire season, which is the only comfort on offer.
The Angels are 11-14. They are not 11-14 because of the offence — the offence has scored runs in bunches and kept them in games they had no business staying in. They are not 11-14 because of the rotation, which has been mixed but not catastrophic. They are 11-14 in large part because the sixth, seventh and eighth innings have become a kind of lottery in which the prize is a blown lead, and the odds are not in anyone's favour.
Romano is the one that stings most, because Romano was supposed to be a solution rather than a question. He came in with a track record — a legitimate closer, 4.25 years of major league service, a guy who had finished games for Toronto during some of their better recent seasons. He has four saves in 2026, so the saves are happening. But the ERA is 7.11 and the process of getting to those saves has been, to be charitable, alarming. You cannot run a 7.11 ERA out of the back end of your bullpen and expect to win baseball games at a rate that matters. That is not pessimism. That is arithmetic.
To be clear about what "costing games" actually looks like in practice: the Angels have had three leads of two or more runs after six innings this month that they did not hold. In two of those they were ahead entering the seventh. The bullpen is not doing something new or surprising — this is, if you have been watching this franchise since roughly 2015, extremely familiar terrain. The problem isn't that the pen blew up once. The problem is that there is no version of this roster construction where a 7.11 ERA closer is acceptable, and there is no plan in place to fix it before Joyce returns, which could be May, could be June, could be the sort of timeline that gets revised every two weeks until it suddenly isn't.
Pomeranz is the part that requires a different kind of conversation. He is 37 years old and signed for a year at four million dollars, which is not a great deal when he is throwing the ball like this but is also not the sort of contract that paralyses a franchise. The question is not whether Pomeranz is performing — he clearly isn't — the question is what the alternative is. The Angels have been through this particular problem enough times that you'd think someone would have a name ready. They do not appear to have a name ready. Klassen was the name, briefly, and Klassen's ERA is 11.57.
Zeferjahn at least has the excuse of being young and relatively unproven. He throws hard, his slider is a genuine weapon, and 6.10 ERA over seven appearances early in April is not the kind of number that ends careers. It is, however, the kind of number that makes you nervous every time he emerges from the bullpen in a one-run game.
The roadmap we put together before the season was explicit about this: Joyce returning as closer was a cornerstone of the whole thing. Without Joyce, the plan has a hole in it the size of the gap between Romano's ERA and a functional baseball number. That hole is currently being filled by Romano making it interesting, Pomeranz making it more interesting, and Zeferjahn occasionally making it genuinely exciting in ways nobody wanted. Joyce is doing his rehab. The timeline keeps moving. The bullpen keeps pitching.
It is April 22nd. There are 131 games left. The bullpen ERA as a unit is somewhere that requires several units of whisky to contemplate directly. The Angels are still in this, technically, which is a sentence that has been true of this franchise for parts of many seasons without ever amounting to anything. The difference this year is meant to be Soriano holding leads long enough for the rest of them to matter. He cannot hold leads for nine innings by himself. Someone in that bullpen needs to work this out before the summer, or this season will end the same way the last eleven have — with the playoffs happening to other people while we watch from a distance.