Morning Angels fans, have links or reject them
Angels News
Royals are interested in Taylor Ward. Interesting, write that down!
Jordyn Adams and Eric Wagaman are DFA-ed. Welp, it was fun while it lasted. And by fun I mean no depth at all WOW.
Angels are looking at Japanese player Tomoyuki Sugano. He is rather old, 35, but he is a true Free Agent and the Angels need arms as he is a pitcher.
Around Baseball
It is Qualifying offer day, which means that Nick Martinez is not a free agent, and the following ones are.
Remember, the way this works is that anyone who signs these players loses a 2nd round draft pick, and the team who lost them get a comp round pick which depends on market size or whatever. Meaning that the Brewers will get a better pick than the Dodgers or Mets because the Brewers cry about being poor. And a bunch of other factors, read the link, that is what it is for!
Manfred wants to create National TV Baseball and with MLB getting the rights to more teams, it may happen eventually. Imagine MLB.TV but without blackouts. That would be cool.
Trade time! Siri to the Mets for Orze who is now a Ray.
Speaking of Rays, their new stadium is being postponed. Oh Florida…
AL Manager of the Year is Stephen Vogt of Cleveland. NL is Pat Murphy of the Brewers.
Who has spent the most money in FA since 2020? Well, the Dodgers duh, but what about everyone else?
Anything I missed? post below for upvotes!
In case anyone has the The Athletic or a way around the paywall, this is a great in depth story about what is happening with all of the broadcast rights both Locally and nationally for all of the Major League teams.
In a nutshell many of the teams contracts are expiring in 2028 and Manfraud & co. are trying to increase revenue sharing of local TV revenues across the league by eliminating all blackouts and providing more streaming content as well as MLB network oversight. Not sure if this is doable without some of the juggernaut teams participation but for long term health league wide this probably needs to get done.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5933299/2024/11/19/mlb-plans-new-national-tv-packages-for-2028-changes-to-revenue-sharing-cba-crucial/
Copy and paste. Put it into Chat GPT. Tell it to spin it like gitchogritchoffmypettis and you’ll get a doozy of an article.
If Manfred can pull off an all week baseball version of Sunday Ticket online? AND get the pitch clock established? I may have to hate his guts a little less.
Though the true savior of baseball will be the terrifying beast of a human that convinces the players union to allow for a salary cap and the owners to institute a salary floor.
Jahmai Jones off the board-D@mmit! There goes 2025!
For all the talk about being competitive and aggressive from the club, excepting a trade, I think we’re pretty much done and what you see is what you get. We’re not going to be serious about anything until 2027, which is not bad because it will give us good draft picks and allow us time to acquire young players. Whether or not we do that effectively is a whole other story. I think in all likelihood, Arte will sell the club sometime in the next 3 years.
It won’t shock me if they bring in some type of OF and pitcher
We will bring in another pitcher, even if he is in a wheelchair. Flaherty may be the next “Innings eater” that Arte ropes into baseball purgatory. Maybe even that geriatric Japanese player too.
But nothing of any real value I don’t think.
Same.
The key is to be able to sell just enough pre season hopium to get tickets sold and get the team talked about.
As of now we’ve added a good bat in Soler and nice depth in d’Arnaud. We need to add an arm that we can dream on a bit and somebody to spell Trout “so we can keep him healthy.”
The team looks just good enough to consider following but then has a ton of trade chips in Anderson, Rengifo, Ward, Newman, Hendricks, etc. to add talent along with another top 10 draft pick.
The bottom line is that Arte doesn’t want to lose a possible top ten 2025 pick, so he needs to “Increase spending” which we all know can literally be one more dollar than last year’s budget.
I literally still can’t believe that the BloSux and the AAAAs didn’t “Increase spending” to rack up top picks for future trades to make other teams better.
Good point.
I love how we talk about Arte like we’re running on a 45M a year roster payroll.
How/when would we lose a Top 10 draft pick in 2025? Asking honestly, not trying to gotcha. We have the third-best draft odds at this point to get the No. 1 (per this link) and the worst we could lost from a FA signing would be a second round pick no?
https://www.thescore.com/mlb/news/3084726/2025-mlb-draft-lottery-odds-marlins-rockies-have-best-shot-at-no-1-pick#:~:text=The%20Chicago%20White%20Sox%20are,lottery%20pick%20in%20consecutive%20drafts.
LOL, It’s Nov 20th and no notable FAs are off the board, check back in early Feb.
Matt Thaiss to the Cubs for a few bucks.
From first round pick with the most projectible bat in the college class to traded for cash and likely not much of it. I wish him well on the North Side.
I’m all for adding Sugano.
I’m a big fan of the art of pitching over just raw velo and Sugano does that. I also realize there’s not much intrigue on the current Angels. Seeing how he transitions to MLB is a storyline and we sure could use one.
2 years plus a vesting option would be awesome, but if they had to go 3 years it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Anderson is off the books after 2025 so we could basically hand Sugano those bucks for 26 and 27.
You must be thrilled with Hendricks and his 89mph heater
Not really. I do hope he regains his groundball tendencies but we know Hendricks at best is a stopgap 4 or 5 in a rotation.
Sugano has a nice array of pitches and there’s the allure of the unknown.
Isn’t 89 MPH more of a warmer?
Pondering thought of the day:
I was just thinking, if Jeremiah was actually a bullfrog and didn’t speak coherently to or with the Bard, how was he so confident that he was a very good friend of his?
Not sure but…
Can he Pitch?
IDK, but he ALWAYS has a mighty fine wine.
Look at those O’s on the chart! Averaging only around $12.5m per season in free agents over the last 4 seasons yet winning 192 games in the last two seasons. I am so unbelievably jelly.
It’s all about the farm.
I thought it was all about the Bass, no Treble?
or all about the Benjamins, right P-Diddy?
when you’re beyond horrible for 5 years and get the #1 twice, that’ll happen
How many years have we been beyond horrible?
The problem is we were not horrible enough as (Surprisingly) several teams out-horribled us by great lengths.
Objectively speaking, we were only outhorribled by one team this year, but they managed to sweep us near the end of the year.
Even they got it wrong as they didn’t “Increase spending” and are IE to get a top 10 pick.
we’ve been bad, but not bad enough. The orioles were the worst team in baseball 3/4 years
That right there Is the problem with trying to be “competitive” every season rather than committing to a rebuild. You usually end up somewhere in the middle, which is the worst place to be in MLB. It is the hardest place to escape from.
Yeah, the Orioles running out Chris Davis and his .180 BA at clean-up every night really illustrated how bad things were in B-More.
#GOALS
The Astros, the Braves, and the Cardinals have all had very good success without spending like the drunkin sailors at the top, And we are a great example of being in the top 3rd and still being terrible.
Brewers… Rays… Indiguards… Royals… Tigers
Yes, them as well.
By the way – how do the Twins and Blue Jays outspend the Angels??
Are you really asking Arte to SPEND BIG right now?
The answer is the last two years.
No im definitely not. But was still a bit surprised to see that.
I presume this chart includes payments to Rendon and Trout and the 30m to Ohtani in his last season with the Halos? If so that would make up a big portion of the FA spending in the last 4 seasons (about $350m worth). Accordingly while the Angels may be 11th in FA spending based on existing contracts- the are probably more like 25th or lower with regard to contracts initiating in 2020 and beyond.
I’d like to see the chart of new FA contracts starting in 2020 to the current time. Trout and Rendon would not be on there so I suspect the Angels location on that chart would be quite different.
Rendon was signed prior to 2020 and neither Trout or Ohtani were free agents.
This chart only shows money spent on free agents, not total payroll. We’ve outspent the Twins considerably over this timeframe.
Please don’t, I think Justin Turner is available for a horrible overpay.
Sugano to Halos or click bait?
https://www.mlb.com/news/tomoyuki-sugano-rumors
35 year old pitcher that has only pitched in Japan? What could possibly go wrong with that…..so of course we’re likely “in” on him!
If they are serious hopefully Perry wise enough for a short term offer with club option to out after 2nd yr, or something like that.
Two years isn’t such a bad contract, just defer his money for 10 more seasons….
Arte Logic 101:
Ohtani was a Japanese pitcher
Ohtani was marketable and attracted lots of attention
Ohtani put lots of people in the seats
Sugano is a Japanese pitcher therefore….
You can figure out the rest
Yep. I’m pretty sure he can’t tell the difference between this guy and Ohatni. It’s probably cause he’s racist too. I hate my dad… I mean the owner of my baseball team.
Sugano will definitely put tens of people in the stands.
He wouldn’t really be veteran leadership with the language barrier. I say pass unless he’s getting a really low salary.
An interesting Rule 5 pick for the Halos could be Jerming Rosario, a RHP Dodger farm product that rose up to AAA last year-He was not protected.
big BB issues
He did well in the AFL.
And of that $1.59B that the Doyers spent, almost half of it was on one player.
…and the other half was on that player’s bookie.
u betcha!
What will Apple do with Orze?
Default to Alexa?
I talked to Float, a guy that lives in the wash by Anaheim stadium, and he hasn’t heard any chatter concerning potential blockbuster acquisitions by the Angels.
But if you want a 13-year-old copy of the Placentia Times or used toothbrush, he’s your guy.
Wait ……. What?????………… Ron Washington didn’t win Manager of the Year? …….. Conspiracy, MLB hates the Angels. He was the obvious choice. I mean, if it wasn’t for his 14 wins, The Angels would have lost 113 games!!!! Those 14 wins were huge and impactful to this organization and ALL of baseball.
I’m aghast as well. I blame Arte and his minion Putin for this egregious outcome.
I thought it was 15 Win Wash?!
In all fairness, Wash was in the top 30ish for consideration though….
🤣
win