Alek Manoah threw two innings against Arizona on Saturday. Zero earned runs. Statcast had him sitting 93-94 mph.
In September, working back in the minors, he was 89-92. Four miles per hour is not a rounding error — you can't manufacture velocity, and the beat reporters covering camp weren't hedging when they wrote about it. Rhett Bollinger's notes called it the best he's looked since before the injury. Jeff Fletcher said the same. These are people who were actually there, and they were not being polite.
I'm following this entirely from box scores and dispatches, so I'll take their word for it and try to resist the Angels fan instinct to immediately reach for the caveat. Manoah healthy and throwing 93 is genuinely meaningful. The rotation behind Kikuchi has enough question marks that a functional Manoah is the difference between a manageable situation and a real problem.
The caveat exists anyway, because it always does with him. He missed all of last year with what the organisation carefully declined to call Tommy John surgery while everyone involved knew what it was. He hasn't thrown a quality inning in the majors in two years. Two spring innings in February aren't a résumé. If the velocity doesn't hold as the workload builds — if it's back to 90 by late March — then the rotation has a hole in it that nobody addressed this offseason.
But the numbers from Saturday are good. I'll be refreshing the box score every five days.