The Freeway Series starts May 15th. Three games at Angel Stadium, the Dodgers coming to Anaheim, the thing that fills the seats regardless of either team's record. The Angels went 6-0 against the Dodgers last year while finishing 72-90. It was the most perfect encapsulation of what this franchise is capable of — genuinely beating the best team in the sport six times in a row, and doing it while being nowhere near good enough to matter in October. This year the Dodgers will be back, the seats will be sold, and the question worth asking is whether any of this actually tells us anything.
The short answer is: not much. The slightly longer answer is: maybe a little, but not in the way people will talk about it.
Winning the Freeway Series does not prove the Angels are good. The 2025 Freeway Series proved that perfectly. What the series does tell you is something narrower — whether the Angels can hold a lead against a lineup that features Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, and Shohei Ohtani, which is a lineup that is not really comparable to most of the teams on the schedule. If the bullpen implodes across these three games, it will be visible against a team whose hitters are good enough to make every mistake count twice. If Romano or Pomeranz gives up four runs in the seventh against the Dodgers, there will not be a comeback. There will be a loss that feels familiar.
That's the real test. Not whether the Angels win. Whether they can hold a one-run lead in the seventh inning against hitters who do not forgive the kind of imprecision that the current bullpen has been offering on a nightly basis.
The Angels will have Soriano lined up for one of the three games if the rotation stays on schedule, which is the one matchup where Angels fans can watch with something approaching confidence. Soriano against a Dodger lineup is a proper test, a good game, the kind of evening where you find out something real. The other two starts will be Detmers or Kikuchi, and both of those have been fine without being dominant, and fine-without-being-dominant against Freddie Freeman is a precarious position to pitch from.
There is also a second Freeway Series three weeks later — June 5-7, at Dodger Stadium. The full six games will tell a more complete story than any three-game subset. In 2025 those six games told the story of a team that could compete with anyone on a given night and could not compete with the playoff field across a full season. The question for 2026 is whether the structure underneath the competitiveness has improved enough that the results are not accidental. Soriano suggests yes. The bullpen suggests the jury is still very much out.
All of which is to say: watch the Freeway Series, enjoy the Freeway Series, understand that the Freeway Series is not a referendum on whether this team is genuinely good. The referendum comes later. It comes in July, when the trade deadline forces a decision. It comes in August and September, when the schedule tightens and the margins get smaller. It comes at the end of the year when we either have a playoff spot or we don't. The Dodgers, arriving in Anaheim in three weeks' time, are a measuring stick for the evening and not much more.
The thing actually worth watching is the seventh inning. Not the score. Not who wins. Watch whether the Angels can get from the sixth inning to the ninth without unravelling. That's the question the season turns on right now — not whether they can beat the Dodgers on a Tuesday night in May, but whether they have a bullpen capable of protecting the leads their starting pitchers are building. When Joyce is back, maybe. Before Joyce is back, every seventh inning is an adventure, and some adventures are more enjoyable than others.
We will see you at Angel Stadium on May 15th. Bring patience for the late innings. Bring optimism for everything before them. Soriano might pitch. It could be excellent. It could go wrong in the eighth. It is the 2026 Los Angeles Angels, and that is the experience on offer.