Free Lucas Giolito. And Reynaldo López. And Matt Moore. And…

Hey there. Are you a major league general manager or president of baseball operations? Do you work in a front office role for a playoff-contending team? Do you wish you had another starter, a good closer, or maybe an outfielder? Well, I’ve got great news for you, my friend. Operators are waiting now for your call: the Los Angeles Angels just yelled “Everything must go!” and threw their roster on the waiver wire like a miffed fantasy owner.

More specifically, the Angels placed Lucas Giolito, Matt Moore, Reynaldo López, Dominic Leone, Hunter Renfroe, and Randal Grichuk on waivers. For the next 47 hours, any team in baseball can place a claim on any or all of their services. It’s an unprecedented maneuver that could inject talent into playoff races across the league, and in an unpredictable fashion. If you’re on the fringes, you’ll get the first bite at the apple, but there are so many players here that even some teams currently in playoff position might end up with someone. If you’re looking for more specifics on the waiver process, Jon Becker wrote a nice explainer here.

Let’s talk about the way this works for the Angels first. Coming into yesterday, we projected them for a competitive balance tax payroll of $234,398,925. The first CBT threshold for this year is $233 million. That means they need to save around $1.5 million to duck under that threshold. The players put on waivers are owed around $6.44 million over the remainder of the year, and a similar amount even when CBT tax calculations are applied. The total tax savings will be slightly less than that, because the Rockies are paying a portion of Grichuk’s salary, but assuming most of these players find takers, the Angels will end up below that threshold.

That’s the clear goal here, along of course with saving a bit of money. You might wonder why getting just a few dollars under an arbitrary threshold matters. After all, the CBT is a 20% tax on the amount by which you exceed that first threshold. That’s a miniscule amount, dwarfed by the savings the Angels will get if other teams pick up their players’ contracts. The tax part of the equation seems like a smoke screen.

But there’s a key consideration here: I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Shohei Ohtani seems likely to leave this offseason. The Angels are going to extend him a qualifying offer on the way out the door, though, and their compensation for that qualifying offer depends on whether or not they exceeded the first tax threshold. If you didn’t pay tax or receive revenue sharing in the previous year, your compensation pick falls just before the start of the third round. If you paid the tax, however, it comes just before the fifth round. That’s a meaningful difference.

From that perspective, this seems like a reasonable decision by the Angels. Let’s not mince words here: They’re cooked in 2023. It’s over for them; all they’re missing is a Vince Carter GIF. They’re 11.5 games out of the Wild Card chase, Mike Trout is hurt, and Ohtani is done as a pitcher this year thanks to a UCL injury. We give them a 0.0% chance of making the playoffs and honestly, that sounds about right to me.

Is this an anti-fan maneuver to save a few bucks at the expense of team legitimacy? I don’t think so. I don’t want to be overly harsh to these players, but nobody’s going out to an Angels game to see Matt Moore. The team tried to make the playoffs, and spent both real money and real prospect capital to do so. Did it work out well? It most definitely did not, and salary dumping after a bad month is sure to irk some people. But this isn’t a team deciding not to be competitive in January before any games have been played. The Angels could have acquired peak Barry Bonds and not seen their playoff odds budge. In fact, I confirmed that fact by having Dan Szymborski add peak Bonds to the current Angels roster, which pushed their playoff odds all the way to 2.9%. I then had him make Ohtani healthy again – if only this were real life – which got them all the way to 7.8%. In other words, this isn’t fixable.

If your competitive sensibilities are instead offended by the unfairness of it all, by the sheer lack of respect for the unwritten rules of the game that putting all these players onto competitive teams outside the trade process entails, that’s a defensible position, but I disagree. This isn’t some pointless exercise done to mess with the game’s legitimacy. The Angels are after a real goal, and teams strategically place pending free agents on waivers all the time. Harrison Bader and Carlos Carrasco are also on waivers right now. The scale of the Angels’ moves might be unprecedented, but the fact that useful players are available on the waiver wire certainly isn’t. Heck, Elvis Andrus was a waiver wire addition who nearly swung a playoff race just last year.

The Angels aren’t messing with their own future competitiveness to save a few bucks. None of these players would have been around next year, and none of them would have drawn a qualifying offer. We’re constantly on front offices for behaving irrationally; this one feels like a down-the-middle value play to me, though I’m not sure I get the point of putting Grichuk specifically on the wire given his small remaining compensation.

Of course, this kind of behavior could get tiresome if taken to the extreme. If every non-contending team cut all their impending free agents every year, the trade deadline might start to feel kind of silly. And the fact that it’s a record-based system, where you can’t bid more if you have greater need for a given player, makes the player movement feel arbitrary. Teams that did nothing at the trade deadline might get bailed out, through no ingenuity of their own.

To that I say: change the rules, then. We’re not looking at a complete mockery of the game here. The Angels aren’t putting MVPs on the waiver wire. They aren’t forfeiting games. Teams intent on securing a first round bye still have plenty of incentive to improve at the deadline so they can enjoy the services of good players longer, and unless this becomes a trend, I’m not sure it changes how fringe playoff teams understand their own deadline incentives much. No one’s going to declare the 2023 World Series trophy a sham if the Reds unexpectedly end up with Reynaldo López in late August. Baseball is full of teams gaming everything they possibly can: service time, arbitration, roster limits, injured list stints, you name it. At least this one puts deserving players into the playoff chase.

Ah, right, the deserving players. Let’s talk about them a little bit. Giolito has been downright atrocious in Anaheim, but he still looks like a nice depth option with upside, and a lot of fringe contenders could use a fifth starter. Moore and López are both better than that, though in more limited roles. Moore profiles as an excellent lefty specialist. López has been great out west and could be a setup man for pretty much any team in baseball. (Leone isn’t quite the caliber of the other two relievers, and I think he might actually pass through waivers, so let’s set him aside.)

We give 16 teams a 10% or higher shot at making the playoffs; by my count, all 16 could use Giolito, Moore and López. Naturally, though, all 16 can’t get them. In fact, none of the 16 might get them, because the Padres have a worse record than all of those teams but still harbor playoff dreams. They’re also in dire need of some pitching. I think that all three pitchers would be meaningful upgrades for them. Luckily, my friendly neighborhood Dan Szymborski was still around from the earlier Bonds shenanigans, so I asked him to run an alternate-universe ZiPS projection where the Padres get all three players and nothing else changes.

Adding those three pitchers nearly doubles San Diego’s playoff odds. Just one problem – it moves them from 5.1% to 9.6%, and from a 79-win median projection to an 80-win one. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s hardly an earth shattering change. No team needs wins more than the Padres right now, and with Yu Darvish on the IL and Robert Suarez facing a suspension for a sticky stuff ejection (he’s appealing), they have a clear need for pitching as well. It simply isn’t enough to move the needle, even if they take advantage of their waiver position and claim all three players. And hey, just in case you want the numbers in table form, Dan has you covered:

Okay, but those are the Padres. They weren’t likely to make the playoffs either way; throwing a few random guys on the squad is hardly going to change that. Throwing the aforementioned Barry Bonds on the squad might not change that, in fact. Let’s go way up the chain and try to find the most impactful roster change imaginable. One team in baseball is both locked in a tight playoff race and desperately in need of some undeserved pitching help: the Baltimore Orioles.

Are the trio of Angels likely to make it to Baltimore in the waiver claim system? I think not. As I mentioned, there are a lot of playoff hopefuls, and most of them could use pitching. But if we’re talking about potentially season-altering waiver claims, I can’t imagine a more monumental one from among our options here. More specifically, per ZiPS, it would move the Orioles from a 72.7% chance of winning the AL East to an 84.5% chance, which would move their odds of winning the World Series from 7.5% to 10.9%:

That’s nothing to sneeze at. It is, for example, a lot more than the Orioles added at the actual trade deadline. Even getting one of those three players would be a coup for them. But more likely, this will work with Mario Kart rules; the worse-off teams will exercise their waiver rights and claim some of the pitchers, so either the very worst team in the hunt will end up with all of them, or they’ll end up spread out across multiple squads.

The universal appeal of useful pitching – everyone needs dudes like this, which means not everyone can get them – makes their eventual homes difficult to predict. I think the Padres make the most sense, but I could see them letting Moore through in favor of Tom Cosgrove and allowing some other fringe contender to end up with him instead. I could also see them deciding to stop chasing wins with a roster languishing below .500 and letting the next teams in the queue make a claim.

The two outfielders, on the other hand, don’t have that many obvious homes. Renfroe is a weak side platoon bat having a down season, and Grichuk might be worse than that. Most of the playoff contenders have those kinds of players available already. But as an example of the biggest impact they might have, I asked Dan to place both on the Marlins, who are desperate for offense:

Oh. Well then. I guess this might not be the move that turns the season on its head. ZiPS isn’t particularly high on either outfielder, but given that they’ve combined for 1.1 WAR all season long, that seems like a fair assessment. The pitchers are the most exciting additions, and they’re likely to be scattered widely across the league unless a single team at the very edge of the playoff race gets frisky.

Will the Angels’ fire sale change the fate of playoff races? Definitely maybe, but certainly not definitely. An extra arm is always welcome, but no one is building a lockdown bullpen or rotation on the sly in these deals. Honestly, Bader might be the most impactful player currently on waivers, because that kind of center field defense doesn’t grow on trees.

So if you’re a fan of a team on the fringes of the playoff race, take heart: the more desperate your situation, the more likely you are to find a solid pitcher under the Angels-sponsored Christmas tree come Thursday afternoon. But also, be warned: a solid pitcher or two probably won’t change your team’s fate very much. That’s just where we are at this point in the season. It’s part of why teams in the hunt decided to add good players a month ago. The wins and losses that have already been banked are hugely important. Small upgrades are simply less so. The big winners in this whole saga are probably the players themselves, who will now get a second or third bite at a playoff race instead of playing out a depressing string in Anaheim.