The Angels Dared to Dream, But the Past Week Was a Nightmare

Everyone likes an inspiring story. They don’t call it a Hollywood ending for nothing; people love it when the hero wins before the credits roll. Over in near near-ish the center of American film-making, it looked like the Angels were setting up for another iteration of that classic arc. They were down and out, deciding whether they could stomach trading the best player in the game before losing him forever. The previous best player in the game was out with injury, and the ship was taking on water. Then, a classic mid-story twist: they ripped off an 8-1 run in the latter half of July and decided to go for it one last time.

Yeah, about that. Since trading for Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo López to lean fully into this year, they’ve gone 2-9, slipping back below .500. After their playoff odds reached 22.7% on July 27, the Halos have crashed down to 1.3% in short order. That’s a seasonal low for their chances of making the postseason. Things are decidedly non-magical in the land of Disney these days.

What’s gone wrong for the Angels? Well, one thing’s for sure: it’s not Shohei Ohtani. He’s started at DH for all 11 games of the stretch and has hit a ludicrous .405/.542/.649, even better than his seasonal line. He left his lone start in that span early with hand cramps, but pitched four scoreless innings before departing. To the extent that one player can power a team, Ohtani is doing his best.

The problem lies where it always has: with the rest of the squad. The Angels are both thin and hurt; they have a whopping eight hitters and 10 pitchers on the injured list at the moment. The hitters represented most of the team’s planned lineup coming into the year: their starting catching duo of Logan O’Hoppe and Max Stassi didn’t even last through April, Anthony Rendon and Mike Trout have been out since the Fourth of July, and the injuries have picked up even more recently. Taylor Ward will miss the rest of the season after a horrific facial injury he suffered a week ago. Rookie sensation Zach Neto has cooled off, and now he’s also on the IL thanks to lower back tightness.

The replacements haven’t been able to pick up the slack. Mickey Moniak is having a tremendous season, but he’s hit a wall of late, with a 48.7% strikeout rate and 11 wRC+ in his last 11 games. Matt Thaiss hasn’t been much better; he’s hitting .111/.200/.222 while handling primary catching duties.

The various in-season acquisitions who were supposed to shore up weaknesses haven’t been much better. Eduardo Escobar looks cooked; he put up a 1 wRC+ in this recent bad stretch and has lost playing time even with all the injuries. C.J. Cron has started his second tenure with the Angels in a slump. Randal Grichuk and Mike Moustakas have been better, but hardly world-beaters. That group of names itself is troubling; that’s a bunch of players who didn’t have obvious spots on good teams and instead are starting for the Angels. Here’s the whole list (min. 15 PA) of recent performance:

These 11-game stretches aren’t particularly useful from a predictive standpoint. Everyone has cold streaks here and there. But consider this: per our Depth Charts projections, the Angels have the best DH situation in the league. After that, the falloff is extreme. They have four different positions (catcher, first base, shortstop, left field) projected in the bottom third of the league. Only right field and center field project to be above average, both only by a hair, and center field relies on a strong return from Trout.

None of this will come as a surprise to followers of the team. The Angels have been built in this general stars-and-scrubs style for years. It’s almost poetic that the end of the Ohtani era has recapitulated the team’s last decade of struggles. Take a thin organization that never seems to develop average regulars, sprinkle in the inevitable injuries incurred during the long arc of a baseball season, and the result is almost a foregone conclusion: tons of playing time for guys who aren’t quite up to snuff.

The other constant of this recent era of Angels baseball has been lackluster pitching. That hasn’t been as much of a problem as feared during this recent terrible stretch. Two starters have stepped up – though Giolito is very much not one of them:

Again, cut up the major league season into stretches of 10 games, and plenty of teams would have runs like this. The bullpen has made it worse, though. Carlos Estévez has blown up twice in this recent stretch, allowing four runs to the Mariners in the ninth inning last Thursday and then six to the Giants in the ninth last night. The bullpen has a collective 5.58 ERA in that span, driven heavily by those two outings, and four of their last nine losses have come as a result of runs scored in the eighth inning or later.

As much “fun” as rubbernecking at their sudden collapse is, there’s a broader question to be answered here: Should the Angels have gone for it at the trade deadline after deciding not to trade Ohtani, and should they have held onto him in the first place? The results have been undeniably regrettable; the guys they traded for after taking Ohtani off the market have produced a combined -0.3 WAR since joining the team, and their earlier-season acquisitions have also been below replacement level thanks to Escobar’s swift decline.

The question of whether to trade Ohtani is more complex than just an on-field decision. It surely involved questions of owner and team legacy, fan interest, and other things that are enduringly difficult to quantify. Between the fact that the team never seemed particularly eager to deal him even when they thought that they should and the difficulty properly valuing Ohtani must have posed to both the Angels and teams trying to acquire him, they chose to stand pat. I guarantee that the first thing people will remember when they talk about the 2023 Angels will be Ohtani’s season and the decision to keep him. I don’t have anything more to add to that discussion at the moment, so let’s just take not trading him as a given and follow things from there.

From a process standpoint, I think you can separate their decision-making after deciding not to deal Ohtani into two phases: whether to add, and how to go about doing so. I’ll handle whether to add first. That’s a philosophical question. The Angels were long shots to make the playoffs when they started buying, and their trades couldn’t possibly move the needle enough to make them anything more than an unlikely contender. They were three games out of the final playoff spot, with two teams to pass in between and several teams right on their tail.

You can argue that adding this year is throwing good money after bad, hoping for a miracle instead of doing the long-term sustainable thing and writing this year off as a lost cause. From an extremely broad view – imagine an alien in 100 years who wants to know how many games the Angels won from 2020 through 2040 – they inarguably sacrificed wins this deadline. I contend that they aren’t giving up long-term playoff equity, though, or at least not much of it.

Because let’s face it, the Angels aren’t making the playoffs next year. Want to hear a wild statistic? Excluding the 2020 season, with its compressed and shifted timeline that makes calendar-based comparisons meaningless, the last time the team reached July 27 with even a 10% chance of making the playoffs was 2017. That’s before Ohtani debuted in the majors, if you’re keeping score at home. It’s not like they were playoff juggernauts before then, either, but it’s been a long dry spell in Anaheim. I don’t think it’s likely to get better after the best player in baseball leaves.

In other words, a single win this year might be worth many multiples of future wins, at least as it translates to the team’s odds of making the playoffs. They were still unlikely to pull it off. The odds were stacked against them, and their injury luck would have to turn around, which clearly didn’t happen. But this is it for the immediate future when it comes to the Angels competing for a playoff spot, unless there’s a seismic shift in how the team is run.

A year ago, that felt possible; Arte Moreno was exploring a sale. But now that he’s walked that back, and with the front office seemingly incapable of finding solutions, this deadline decision was a slam dunk to me. Even if you’d rather maximize fan happiness instead of playoff appearances, now is the year to double down. What will fans enjoy more: adding help around Ohtani in a noble attempt to snag just one playoff berth with him in the fold, or winning 70 games instead of 65 in 2026?

Maybe I’m painting too grim a picture of this team’s future. But they looked rough before the deadline. They came into the season as our third-worst farm system. The big league roster is in such shambles that the team is playing .500 baseball with Shohei Ohtani. They’re not exactly awash in young big leaguers, either; aside from Neto and O’Hoppe, the best of the bunch might be Patrick Sandoval and Reid Detmers. Next year’s Angels are going to be Trout and hope, and that’s been a pretty bad strategy historically.

Of course, that logic held all year, and the Angels only went for it because a winning streak brought them from far out of the playoff hunt to right on the fringes. If you’re making a counter-argument to my point, it’s that surely there is some cutoff below which they should capitulate. I happen to think that cutoff is very low; with a 20% chance of making the playoffs and Ohtani leaving after the season, I would have been sacrificing future for present all year. Honestly, the team has been doing that in various ways for years, whether it’s in pursuing free agents or drafting for near-term major league relevance. This is just another step down that path.

Okay, let’s stipulate that the Angels were going to trade from the farm system to bolster this year’s team. Did they make the right choices? Obviously, the early returns have been bad. The guys they’ve acquired have been below replacement level (though maybe not below specific Angels replacement level — this farm system is bad). But leave that aside for a second, and let’s consider the alternatives.

The biggest move the team made was trading for Giolito and López. Edgar Quero was the team’s only top 100 prospect, their best chance of getting help in the majors. Giolito wasn’t the best starter on the market by any means. But I’m not convinced that the Angels had the juice to get anyone better than him. The Cardinals traded a similar two-pitcher package – Jordan Montgomery and Chris Stratton – for a similar return, but they were targeting impact pitching prospects in their deals, and that’s not exactly a strength for Los Angeles. Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander almost certainly weren’t in the picture; no-trade clauses aside, those guys were both signed for next year and both cost money that the Angels clearly don’t want to spend. Aaron Civale would be a strange fit, since a lot of his value comes in the future. Jack Flaherty isn’t better than Giolito, at least in my estimation. Lance Lynn? Michael Lorenzen? I think that they did a good job of surveying the pitching market and picking a reasonable target. Giolito just hasn’t worked out. López was a nice complementary get, too, and he’s looking solid.

On the hitting side, I’m much less enthused by their tactics. Cron isn’t even last year’s news; he’s 2021’s news. The bloom is off that rose, to say the least. Grichuk hasn’t eclipsed 1.0 WAR since 2018. I’d rather have gotten Mark Canha to play first base, or Tommy Pham to play left field. I’d rather have torched the farm system a bit more to get Jeimer Candelario, who didn’t exactly fetch a mint. Is Ramón Laureano, who just changed teams for free when the A’s DFA’ed him, worse than Grichuk? If you’re going to go all in, do it! There were moves to be made on the hitting side, but the team threw up the Mission Accomplished banner instead.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that going slightly up-market would have changed much in the past few weeks, and we don’t know all the moves the Angels tried to make but ultimately couldn’t. The team needed to catch a hot streak both from its acquisitions and its existing players to make up ground in the Wild Card race. Instead, Ohtani continued to go nova and everyone else went dark. Candelario has been maybe the best hitter in baseball since being traded – .480/.552/.760 – and even he probably wouldn’t have led them to a better record than 5-5 at the very best.

So, what is there to learn from the past few weeks of Angels hijinks? The first lesson, to me, is that you should go for it when you get a chance if you’re rarely good. The second lesson is that long shots are still long shots. The third lesson is that even if you come up with the right strategy, executing on it isn’t easy, and sometimes you end up with Rockies leftovers instead of impact bats. The Angels aren’t completely done just yet, but they’re eight games out of the last playoff spot and daylight is quickly waning. That doesn’t make their unlikely bid at a playoff spot any less valid of a decision – but it’s fair to say that it hasn’t worked out like they hoped.