Angels Shock Baseball World With Sensible Free Agent Behavior

Bob Dylan can’t get no relief, but the Los Angeles Angels don’t have that problem. They just signed two veteran pitchers, Drew Pomeranz and Jordan Romano, to one-year deals worth $4 million and $2 million, respectively.

I’m starting to get worried that the Angels are becoming orthodox. For most of this decade, there have been two teams — the Angels and Rockies — that you could count on to be truly iconoclastic. The other 28 clubs differed from each other mostly due to flavor of ownership: How many resources their boss was willing to commit to the cause, and what time pressure, if any, was being placed on the executives to win. (It’s probably more like 27 other teams now, with the Buster Posey Era underway in San Francisco, though that’s another story.)

But for the most part, the way you run a baseball team is you hire some business school goon, give him a budget and a list of goals, and let him cook. He then goes out and hires as many quants and biomechanics experts as he can, and let the chips fall where they may.

The Rockies are self-conscious about their weirdness; they have their own way of doing things. They’re a literal City on a Hill, though if you look at the past seven seasons of the NL West standings, they’ve figuratively been more of a City in a Pit.

The Angels seem to have floated here, as their owner has been willing to spend on free agents but not on infrastructure. In 2023, a former pitcher told Alden González of ESPN that the Angels’ approach was like “buying a McLaren and taking it to Jiffy Lube.” It’s an incisive simile, in addition to being perhaps the most poorly camouflaged anonymous quote in the history of journalism. The Angels have been so completely adrift they could be claimed as legitimate salvage by anyone who encounters them on the high seas.

Earlier this offseason, Orange County’s major league team generated more snickering by trading for Vaughn Grissom and signing Alek Manoah, thereby acquiring two of the hottest young major leaguers of 2022. Never mind that Grissom and Manoah combined for -1.6 WAR from 2023 on, and zero major league games played in 2025.

But I worry that the Angels are turning into just another garden-variety bad team. Their payroll has stagnated in the 2020s — decreased, in real terms, as Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon have provided less and less. And no new eyebrow-raising contracts have been forthcoming; Trout and Yusei Kikuchi are the only Angels with guaranteed contracts past 2026.

So what do they want with Pomeranz and Romano?

The Romano deal is pretty straightforward. Back in 2023, he logged a second consecutive 36-save season for his hometown Blue Jays, employing a two-pitch mix of an upper-90s four-seamer with good rise and a little cut action, with a vertical upper-80s slider. Romano already threw hard, but being 6-foot-5 with spider crab arms, he was able to get almost seven and a half feet of extension, making his plus velocity play up even further.

In 2024, Romano was limited to 15 appearances by elbow troubles, and wasn’t very good when he did pitch. The Blue Jays cut him loose the following winter and the Phillies scooped him up. Under Dave Dombrowski in the early days, the Phillies liked to build their bullpen around fireman-type stoppers and have a veteran closer in almost an emeritus role for save situations.

The most successful maybe-this-guy-isn’t-washed closer of the bunch was Craig Kimbrel in 2023, which speaks volumes about how little the Phillies got out of Corey Knebel, Jeurys Familia, and most recently Romano.

Romano’s Phillies tenure was like a lab experiment to see how quickly a city can turn on its baseball team’s closer. He blew a save on Opening Day. It took him six appearances to record a clean inning. His ERA was in double digits into the second week of May, and it wasn’t until May 11 that his number of saves outstripped his number of blown saves.

Even at his peak, Romano was never a great quality-of-contact suppressor, and when he showed up for 2025 minus a tick of fastball velocity, he turned into a home run machine: He allowed 10 in just 42 2/3 innings. Opponents slugged .600 off his fastball, which would’ve been among the 10 highest marks of any pitch in baseball, had he faced enough batters to qualify for Baseball Savant’s leaderboard.

Romano also posted a 49.0% strand rate, which is the lowest in the past decade for a pitcher with at least 40 innings pitched. And since we’re talking about Romano as a historical outlier, here’s a fun fact: He ended the season with an ERA of 8.23, but an xERA of just 3.99. That seems like a huge spread; league-wide, ERA and xERA were within a couple hundredths of a run of each other. In the Statcast era (since 2015), there have been 4,091 individual pitcher seasons of at least 40 innings. In 2025, Romano had the only one of those seasons with an ERA-xERA gap of more than four runs. There had been only seven prior seasons with an ERA-xERA gap of three runs or more.

I think Romano might be cooked, but maybe he was just super unlucky. It’s only going to cost the Angels $2 million to find out, and he was awesome more recently than Manoah or Grissom, so what the heck?

Pomeranz, by contrast, was awesome in 2025. After a three-year layoff from the majors due to elbow injuries, he went to the Cubs and picked up where he left off: a 2.17 ERA in 49 2/3 innings. He held left-handed hitters to a downright penurious .176/.238/.203 batting line; righties hit .234/.320/.374 off him, which isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s more than acceptable for a lefty specialist in this three-batter minimum world.

The former no. 5 overall pick is still throwing fastball-curveball — kind of Romano-esque, but slower, in a mirror, and with less extension — but with less velo than he had before the elbow injuries. Which is fine, as pitchers tend to throw less hard at 37 than they did at 27. He’s a good mid-leverage left-handed reliever.

Why the Angels would want Pomeranz is obvious. Why Pomeranz would want the Angels, less so. This guy made six appearances in the playoffs a couple months ago and allowed just one of the 19 batters he faced to reach. (That one man on base was a home run in the decisive game of the NLDS, but the Cubs got that run back in the top of the next inning. Nobody’s perfect.)

The going rate for mid-leverage relievers this offseason is between $9.5 million (Kyle Finnegan) and $12.33 million (Tyler Rogers) per year. OK, Pomeranz is so old his major league debut was delayed by the biblical plague of locusts. And if you count the postseason, he’s logged fewer major league innings in the 2020s than Yoshinobu Yamamoto has thrown since the All-Star break this year. I get why he’s not getting two years with a double-digit AAV.

But $4 million is not a lot for a guy who can give a team meaningful innings in the playoffs. Compare him to other lefties like Gregory Soto, who got $7.75 million from the Pirates. Pomeranz’s salary is in line with what Caleb Thielbar and Hoby Milner got from the Cubs, but the Cubs are good and the Angels, well, aren’t.

“Put away some money so you can die someplace warm,” Robert Redford tells Brad Pitt in Spy Game. I’m reminded of another aging former Cub, Kyle Hendricks, who lived that line last year, closing out his career with a forgettable one-year stint with the Angels. I guess that might not look so bad to Pomeranz. And if he’s good, he could easily get traded at the deadline.

That’s what I would’ve said about Pomeranz had he signed with an ordinary also-ran, like the Marlins. It’s an extremely low-stakes signing, but undeniably a good one for the Angels. What happened to these guys, man? They used to be fun.