Apparently, Nobody Wants To Play For The Los Angeles Angels

This isn’t a rant about the Angels being the worst team on the diamond. Owner Arte Moreno has never hesitated to spend money. But as I’ve shown time and time again, he’s got a gift for pumping money into the wrong people. Right now, Angels fans are preparing the Anthony Rendon section in the team’s Wasted Money Hall of Fame.

It’s not even a delayed take on the fact the Angels couldn’t keep Shohei Ohtani. Everybody knew the game’s biggest star was destined for the bigger stage just 45 minutes up Interstate 5. Face it, fellow Angels fans…we know our team is the “red-headed stepchild” of southern California baseball.

Believe it or not, this is about something far more troubling. There is no team in Major League Baseball which has a longer postseason appearance drought than the Los Angeles Angels. The last time the Halos saw October baseball was 2014.

To that end, this team hasn’t had a winning seaon since 2015. For a bit of perspective, during that time, the Los Angeles Angels have gone through…

  • Countless millions in payroll dollars
  • Roughly 300 hundred players (40-man roster)
  • Four managers
  • Three general managers
  • One owner

For my money, it’s that last bullet point that’s the key. Mao Zedong once said “The fish rots from the head down.” Granted, Chairman Mao was speaking in sociopolitical terms, but his overarching theme of how dysfunction in any organization begins with its leadership applies completely to Arte Moreno’s Los Angeles Angels. Since Mao was one of history’s most murderous dictators, he knew a little something about dysfunction.

Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” and Moreno’s Angels: Two of history’s great failures

To get exactly on point, Moreno has created such a dysfunctional culture within the Angels’ organization that it has one of the worst reputations amongst active major-leaguers in terms of the quality of the work environment.

That was the finding of an anonymous player survey published by The Athletic earlier this season. Yeah, I know that publication is so much electronic fish wrap, but the 100 responses it collected  from players tell an undeniable tale.

Right off the bat, there’s an obvious correlation between the teams with the most negative marks being the same who are chronically terrible.

  • Future Las Vegas Athletics (39)
  • Chicago White Sox (31)
  • Miami Marlins, Colorado Rockies (25)
  • Pittsburgh Pirates (24)
  • Los Angeles Angels (19)

Second, what sets the Angels apart on that list is the aforementioned piles of cash they dish out. Every other team listed above has a long-standing reputation for punching pennies so hard they could make Abe Lincoln fart. But as I’ve pointed out, Arte Moreno will pay players handsomely for them never to see post-season success.

But ironically, the bottom line is player free-agency decisions aren’t always about the money. The archetypical example of this comes in the form of Korean infielder Hye-Seong Kim. Because of the way contracts are handled with players coming from the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO), there was a dispute over the actual numbers which were offered to Kim by both the Angels and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It’s a distinction without a difference because of a very telling choice Kim made. 

He could have signed with the Angels for a  major amount of money where he would have been their Opening Day starter at second base. Instead, he chose the Dodgers…who began Kim’s career in America by optioning him to minor-league Oklahoma City. 

Let that sink in for a minute.

There’s a reason why the Angels get a lot of “sinking” references

Here’s a guy coming all the way from Asia with the goal of playing big-league ball. Instead of taking a guaranteed gig with Angels, he takes the “maybe, maybe not” option that easily could have seen him humping the “bus leagues” to Triple-A “garden spots” like Omaha and El Paso.

If you’re the Los Angeles Angels, I have no idea how you don’t take that as a serious wake-up call…unless you’re Arte Moreno happy letting the fish continue to rot.

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