The Los Angeles Angels tried several ways to find a new closer, and they all backfired badly.
The Los Angeles Angels have been bad for plenty of reasons this season, and nearly all can be traced back to the lethal combination of owner Arte Moreno and GM Perry Minasian. One is gone and the other is about to be, but their legacy of bad baseball lives on.
We could write a book about this, but let’s focus on some of the most important chapters, which revolve around the effort to find a closer. The attempts to do this have been borderline comedy at times especially if you consider blown saves to be form of comedy.
Start with Jordan Romano, who’s now toiling with the Colorado Rockies after blowing his brief tryout with the Angels ( you'll notice plenty of variations on the word "blow" here). Then there’s Kirby Yates, who tried to close games while laboring in the low 90s, which was another very bad idea.
Now we have Ben Joyce, who was thought to be the answer. He certainly has the velocity to handle the job, as Joyce breaks 100 mph on a regular basis.
The rest is a mess right now, though. The Angels gave Joyce plenty of runway, which made sense given his lengthy absence to due to injury. But Joyce has shown time after time that he doesn’t have the mettle to do the job, at least not based on what he’s shown.
Some would suggest that the Angels give Joyce even more runway going forward, but does that really make sense? New ownership is coming, along with the ability to spend more freely (i.e., spend at all), and it would be sad to start the roster rebuild , then watch Joyce continue to blow games in hide-your-eyes outings that are painful to watch.
Joyce could be traded this offseason, but it would be a sell-low move. It makes some sense to keep him on the staff as a low-leverage arm given the velocity and potential, but Joyce clearly shouldn’t be considered anything more than that right now.
The Angels actually had an effective closer, but Moreno wouldn’t pay to keep him. Kenley Jansen would have been perfectly happy to take something resembling market rate of about $15 million and try to post another 30 saves, but he’s moved on to put up 21 saves for the Detroit Tigers for $11 million as a secondary option. That would lead the Angels by a lot, of course.
We’re not suggesting that the Halos bring Jansen back given that he’s 38, but the Angels clearly need a younger veteran with a recent history of being able to do the job. It’s not the biggest need given the Triple-A lineup the Angels are putting on the field right now, but it is a serious hole that needs to be filled without messing around with retreads, has-beens and potential.
