After a decade of ownership failures and roster mismanagement, Anaheim looks toward a future beyond Arte Moreno as emerging young talents offer hope amidst a historic losing season.
Monday’s 5-2 defeat to the Boston Red Sox made the Los Angeles Angels the first team in baseball to be eliminated from postseason contention. It may now be official, but in reality, they were never considered a club capable of reaching October.
Last offseason saw the Angels stay on course with their typical approach of bringing in players past their peaks on prove-it deals. Alek Manoah, Jordan Romano, and Jeimer Candelario are just a few of the names who fit that description, and Candelario is the only one still in the organization, albeit with Triple-A Salt Lake.
Additional offseason moves brought Kurt Suzuki in as the manager on a one-year prove-it deal, and Josh Lowe, Vaughn Grissom, and Grayson Rodriguez to Anaheim. Though Suzuki’s future at the Big A is certainly in question, the trades for Grissom and Rodriguez are looking like a solid deals.
Grissom has been just a hair under league average at the plate, but has provided great value with his defensive versatility in the infield. Splitting games at first, second, and third base as needed has allowed him to be in an everyday spot after struggling to find that with his previous club.
After a rough start with the Halos, Rodriguez had a stellar month in August where he posted a sub-3.00 ERA. His season totals might not look great, but he’s proven that that former top-10 prospect arm is still in there somewhere.
So there were some good and some bad moves made by now-fired general manager Perry Minasian last offseason, but none were big enough to move the needle for a struggling Angels ball club. Now, they’re more likely than not to finish with their first 100-loss campaign in franchise history. Adding insult to injury, 2026 will now be their 12th consecutive season in which the Halos have missed the postseason.
Where has it gone so wrong for the Angels, who were once regulars in postseason baseball in the 2000s? By now, everybody knows the answer – ownership. Arte Moreno has finally sold the team after holding the club and the fans hostage for years on end, but he made sure to leave his impact in Anaheim before signing off. Unfortunately for Angels fans, that impact led their team to be one of the biggest laughingstocks in all of American sports.
Moreno had a rare mix of spending big and being the cheapest owner in baseball. He signed players like Albert Pujols, Anthony Rendon, and Josh Hamilton via free agency, but all three contracts proved disastrous for the club, severely hindering its ability to build a competent roster around them.
To go with his poor decision-making with money, Moreno also halted the club from following the movement into a more analytic approach, something that is now a non-negotiable for almost every franchise.
He even initiated a saga surrounding the team’s name, changing from the Anaheim Angels to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in 2005, before dropping the ‘of Anaheim’ in 2016. Now, the club has no attachment to its Orange County roots.
Countless stories serve as evidence of Moreno’s incompetence as Angels’ owner, such as the poor player facilities and the failure to bring the duo of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani to the postseason, but it is all in the past by now.
The standings still reflect Moreno’s stain, another season out of the postseason, but the sun seems to finally be coming up for the club after the $4 bllion acquisition by Stan Kroenke. The deal is expected to be closed by the first quarter of 2027, so there’s still some time before a full franchise makeover will take place, but it’s the first real positive news for Halos fans in years.
Kroenke’s reputation as owner of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, NBA’s Denver Nuggets, NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, and the Premier League’s Arsenal Football Club speaks for itself – and with the Halos now added to that prestigious list, it’s impossible not to be excited for the future of Angels baseball.
It may take another few seasons before postseason baseball returns to Anaheim, but there’s no doubt the future is brighter today than where it was just a week ago. In the meantime, the club’s focus needs to be on development and building up a future to finally lay this dark period to rest.
