Success Of Brewers, Rays Puts Angels On Notice

The Los Angeles Angels lost 100 games this year, and the Colorado Rockies were their only competition to be named the worst team in baseball. 

The Angels were one of the lowest-spending teams in the league, and according to a piece from Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the playoff success of teams like the Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Guardians is putting teams like the Halos on notice. 

It’s a valid point, and Rosenthal brought the numbers to back it up. The Brewers and Rays ranked 19th and 27th, respectively, in luxury tax payroll, but they both led the league in regular season wins and have now advanced to the World Series. Neither team is a fluke, either, as the Rays and Brewers have been doing this sort of thing for years. 

Other teams aspire to the goal but botch the execution. Rosenthal used the Cincinnati Reds as an example of this, saying their ownership lacks the patience to build properly. The Reds also play in a bandbox ballpark where pitching well consistently is close to impossible, so there’s that, too. 

He went on to list other examples of small market teams that fail, but the Angels are close to sui generis in this category. They’re a large market team that doesn’t spend like a small market team; the goal of skinflint owner Arte Moreno was not to spend at all. 

The most recent perfect example of this was the Taylor Ward trade. The Angels sent a productive outfield to the Baltimore Orioles because his projected arbitration number was $13 million, which was more than fair for a player who hit 36 home runs. 

The player they got from the Orioles was pitcher Grayson Rodriguez, who’s had an injury-filled career so far. But Rodriguez was cheap and under team control for the near future, so he was a perfect Moreno acquisition who proceeded to lose game after game for the Halos with his ongoing poor performance. 

Presumably this is all in the past, but we really don’t know that for sure yet. Manager Kurt Suzuki hasn’t been fired so far, but the “put on notice” part of Rosenthal’s message is directed to the new ownership. We still don’t know where new owner Stan Kroenke stands about the possibility of a salary cap that almost certainly won’t happen, but the lack of spending to date is no excuse for not fielding a winning team.