Angel announces right-handed Robert Stephenson It was placed on the list of injuries for 15 days today due to inflammation in the right elbow. With one week left in the regular season, IL placement ended Stephenson’s 2025 season. Right-handed Sam Bachman Recall from Triple-A, occupying Stephenson’s place on the list.
Stephenson, 32, signed a three-year deal with the Angels before the 2024 season. So far, it has not been going well. Although Stephenson had a lifetime of 2.70 ERA in the Angels uniform, he had a sample size of just ten innings after he missed the entire 2024 campaign and the first two months of 2025. He made his debut in Halos on May 28, but he only played two games before a bicep injury shut him down again.
That injury caused him to lose nearly three months, but he returned to the mound in late August and managed to make regular appearances for the Angels over the past few weeks. He will end up with a sufficiently stable number on a small portion of the outings of just 12: the aforementioned 2.70 ERA paired with a 3.65 FIP, 23.8% strikeout efficiency and 7.1% walking rate. These numbers are certainly not bad, but they are not the kind of dominant work that Angels certainly hoped for when they guaranteed $33mm for two years ago. At the time, Stephenson stood out in Tampa’s otherworldly, earning a 2.35 ERA in 38 1/3 innings while hitting his 42.8% opponent.
Although Stephenson’s elbow surgery last year unlocked the 2.5mm club option in the 2027 season, which makes this contract still salvage overall, Stephenson needs to stay healthy and pitch at least, and in the next few seasons, the Angels will get a meaningful return on investment. This may make today’s diagnosis of elbow inflammation sound frightening, but Stephenson told Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register today “Not so caring” About his illness last year, it put him in trouble. He added that he hadn’t done the imaging yet, and he would have known more at the time, but at the time, he thought the problem wasn’t “So serious.”
Of course, there is always a worry about an elbow injury, especially for Stephenson’s history of injury. The good news is that the right-hander will have a full offseason recovery, so even modest injuries can still be seen on the Angels’ opening day roster next year. Until more tests were performed on the right elbow, it will be unclear in the end, but at the same time, they will turn to Bachman in the final few games of the season. Righty has 4.96 ERA in 19 games this year, but the 3.52 FIP shows that his results may be better than in the future.
