Are The Los Angeles Angels Breaking New Ground In Baseball Futility?
Picture a baseball team in 2009, the end of the last decade. That team has dominated its division, winning it four out of the last five years. That same team would, that very year, draft a player who would go on to make an argument for being one of the best to ever play the game, certainly the best of his era. That franchise has a reputation for strong scouting and development, and an owner that is unafraid to spend money on big free agents to improve his club. How many times does that franchise make the postseason over the course of the next decade?
The answer is one, because the previous paragraph describes the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and where their franchise stood eleven years ago, when they drafted New Jersey high schooler and future three-time MVP Mike Trout. Since drafting Trout, the Angels have only made the playoffs one time, in 2014, and were swept in the American League Division Series by the Kansas City Royals.
Their farm system and development pipeline dried up, unable to produce seemingly any quality big leaguers besides Trout- and the few it did turn out, such as starting pitchers Garrett Richards and Matt Shoemaker, were consistently hamstrung by injuries. Big name free agent signings such as Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton ranged from underwhelming to disastrous. Nevertheless, Trout showed his commitment to the franchise by signing a record extension for twelve years and $430 million.
The 2019–20 offseason seemed to herald, finally, a new dawn for Anaheim in the Trout era. Star Japanese two-way player Shohei Ohtani would once again be available to them both on the mound and with the bat, Ohtani being one of those incredibly rare players who demonstrated an All Star level on both sides of the ball. The Angels acquired Anthony Rendon, the best free agent position player on the market, to man the hot corner at third base and pair with Trout in the batting order. And prospect Jo Adell, ranked one of the ten best in baseball at the start of the 2020 season, was set to make his major league debut. And to bring it all together, the Angels hired Joe Madden, the man who had led the Chicago Cubs to break their curse in 2016, as the team manager.
Unfortunately for the Angels, their 2020 has been yet another exercise in futility, this year perhaps even more so than the last. As of this Sunday, the team just endured a sweep at the hands of their crosstown rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers. That sweep dropped them down to a record of 7–15 and a winning percentage of .318, good for the third worst in the American League and fourth worst in all of baseball. In this shortened season brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, their hopes at the playoffs may be already over for the seventh year in a row.
As usual, Mike Trout has not been the problem. Through seventeen games (Trout missed several due to the birth of his first child) he is hitting .304, with an on base percentage plus slugging of 1.069, and nine home runs. Anthony Rendon, after missing the first few games of the season due to injury and then starting slow, seems to be rounding back into form. The team has also seen one of their offseason trades pan out in a major way in the form of Dylan Bundy- acquired from the Baltimore Orioles for four minor prospects, Bundy has become one of the best pitchers in baseball so far through this shortened season.
Unfortunately, little else has gone right for the Angels- with injury being yet again a major factor in crippling their season. Shohei Ohtani will be unable to pitch for the rest of this season after sustaining a forearm strain early in the shortened season. With the bat, Ohtani is hitting a mere .203 with an OPS of .725. The Angels were expected to have one of the best right sides of the infield in baseball between Rendon and shortstop Andrelton Simmons (considered one of the best at his position defensively)- unfortunately Simmons has only played four games so far this year due to injury.
Besides injury, there has been good old fashioned underperformance and disappointment. Outfielder Justin Upton has hit a mere .107 so far. Starting pitcher Andrew Heaney has been, according to advanced metrics, the second best starter on the team after Bundy, but has an inflated ERA of 4/74. Promising young starting pitchers Griffin Canning and Patrick Sandoval have failed to live up to their expectations so far. And Jo Adell, for all of the hype, has looked extremely overmatched so far in the big leagues- in just seven games, he has struck out in nearly half of his at bats and is hitting .167.
The team needs Adell to improve, and quickly, because little other help is coming from the farm system. Their second-ranked prospect, Brandon Marsh, is out with injury, and no other prospects are projected to be impact contributors this season. The team also traded away Will Wilson, their first round pick at 15th overall in the 2019 draft, to the San Francisco Giants in order to rid themselves of the underperforming contract of Zack Cozart.
Angels General Manager Billy Eppler was a highly regarded member of the front office for the New York Yankees prior to being hired by Anaheim. But he has been in his position since 2015 with, it must be said, nothing to show for it. If Anaheim’s season continues this way, owner Arte Moreno will likely make changes to his front office, bringing in a new GM. That GM will have a most uniquely challenging task ahead of them- how to turn a team into a winner when, by all rights, they should be given they have the best player of his generation to build around?
