The Angels have Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout, and I want to watch them right now

START THE SEASON, AND GIVE ME AN ANGELS DOUBLEHEADER, PLEASE.

It was so easy to laugh at the Angels just a few sweet months ago. They still — still! — owe Albert Pujols $125 million. Their farm system has been in tatters for years. They couldn’t spend last year because of money owed to C.J. Wilson and Josh Hamilton, and it might have cost them a wild card spot. Every season with Mike Trout and no postseason appearance felt like a waste, and it was a slow trudge to the inevitable time when they wouldn’t have Trout at all.

Welcome the 2018 Angels, the freshest and most exciting team in baseball. They still have Trout. They now have Shohei Ohtani, who makes their rotation and lineup better and sneezes Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They already had momentum going into the offseason, and they somehow convinced the most exciting free agent to play for their team at a price that will help them acquire more talent.

Don’t forget the part where Justin Upton is still young enough to motor along for a few years, and he’ll be back.

Don’t forget the part where Andrelton Simmons is perhaps the most watchable shortstop since Ozzie Smith.

Don’t forget the part where Garrett Richards is going to be back, and he’s secretly the most forgettable excellent pitcher in the game.

It’s too early to suggest the Angels are favorites for the AL West. For one, Ohtani could hit like the version of Joc Pederson that got demoted last year. For another, he could pitch like Kevin Gausman, a confounding mix of stuff and enigmatic results, for years. For as low-risk as Ohtani is, there certainly isn’t a guarantee that he’ll instantly be a two-way star. There isn’t even a guarantee that he’ll be a one-way star.

But you’ll watch. I’ll watch. And if Ohtani is as good as everybody is hoping, we’ll watch and watch and watch. Trout isn’t a free agent until after the 2020 season, so we’ll get to watch and watch and watch and watch. The Angels are suddenly baseball’s must-watch team, even after they spent a yearly Department of Defense budget on a player who aged like an unpeeled banana.

There will be a game this year where Simmons makes a physics-bending play, Trout hits a triple that should have been a double, and Ohtani gets 10 strikeouts and two hits. That one game will justify the Angels’ existence and turn youngsters today into sentimental old fools in 50 years as they talk about what it was like to watch the Angels back in the day. If you think that’s hyperbole, that’s fine. But we already know that Trout is one of baseball’s most special creations, and there’s every reason to think that Ohtani will be, too.

If you want to jump on me for being too quick to hop aboard the Angels’ bandwagon because of one player, let me establish my bonafides. Back in January, I made people yell at me for suggesting the Angels weren’t as bad as everyone thought, describing them as sneaky almost-contenders. They’ve always had good bones. It’s just that they’ve been drinking malk for those bones, and a lot of them kept breaking. I can’t imagine how Ohtani and his agents looked at the history of young Angels pitchers getting sucked through a pasta maker and being over-boiled until they were gummy globs of nothingness and thought, yes, this is the team I need to foster my development, but that’s beside the point.

Here’s what I’m willing to assume for the Angels in 2018:

1. Mike Trout is still a baseball deity.
2. Andrelton Simmons is still excellent.
3. Shohei Ohtani is an imperfect-but-excellent rookie pitcher who also contributes more than a little as a hitter.
4. Kole Calhoun is still a solid player.
5. Garrett Richards will be healthy because, dammit, baseball is more fun that way.
6. The Angels will build a bullpen out of twigs and berries because they’ve done it before.
7. They will get at least one competent starter out of Tyler Skaggs, Matt Shoemaker, and Andrew Heaney.

And here’s what I’m thinking they need to fix:

1. Everything else

It’s a lot! C.J. Cron isn’t much at first, and Pujols is an abject disaster these days, sucking up wins with his sub-.300 OBP and league-worst foot speed. If you think his 100 RBI make up for that, please shoot me an email at jeff.sullivan@fangraphs.com, I’d love to chat about it. There still isn’t much in the way of immediate farm system help, and the rotation still has a couple of huge holes. They’ll need a second baseman, maybe a first basemen, and some serious improvements from Luis Valbuena and Pujols. They’ll need to replace Yusmeiro Petit and find some healthy pitchers to round out their rotation.

And they’ll need to do this all with a payroll that’s coming in around $145 million after arbitration.

It won’t be easy, but they already had the best head start in baseball with Trout. Now they have the second-best head start in Ohtani, who allows teams to dream on two fronts, while also making rookie wages because of a ridiculous specification in the new CBA. There was no reason for Trout to fall 23 spots to the Angels in the 2009 MLB Draft, just like there was no reason for Ohtani to be available to a cost-conscious team looking to build their credit. But here we are. Both things happened, and the Angels are suddenly the easiest team to watch in baseball.

That doesn’t mean the best team to watch in baseball. I’m not even sure they’re the second-best team in their own division. All of the gains from the triple-7 that Trout and Ohtani represent need to be built upon. They’re a foundation, not a roof.

But as someone who forced himself to watch the Angels last year because I knew I’d miss out on Trout if I didn’t, this changes so much. The Angels are instantly the team I’ll seek out on MLB.tv. They’re the team that will make me perk up more than any other with a hot April.

How that translates to postseason appearances and wins is an open question. But for now, the Angels will play about 500 hours of baseball in 2018. More of those hours will be watchable than any of those peers. If you think that doesn’t count for anything, goodness, you haven’t attempted to watch a team for 500 hours before. Fun teams are fun. They make baseball fun. I like fun things and so should you.

The Angels are instantly fun. We’ll see if they’re good, but considering the salary hell they were in just a short time ago, this is one amazing turnaround.