LA Angels Monday News Crash: Road Trip

It is true. A sliver of goodness. This year is different because, instead of Ohtani sucking all the air out of the room and FA support players looking miserable and bored from June 1st onward while Trout gets hurt in April we have a team that has mostly sucked together.

THIS at least gives us a clear sense of what we are working with. Adell, for example. I think I am ready to believe he’s an MLB player. Maybe he gets better, maybe he gets traded. But this year made me sure he’s a guy that fills a spot. Same with Nolan, who I do still think will get a little better with age. Neto is clearly good.

O’Hoppe is clearly an important member of the clubhouse and will likely be held onto and invested in to try to make him a little better.

So that’s nice. The same C- but it’s with a group with lower expectations who showed development as a team unit to get that C-. And that’s a fairly important distinction.

Buuuuuttt…. things get a lot less happy when you look at the fact that the work that has been done on the road to building a contender just sort of peters out like the roads in Las Vegas used to do back in the 1980s. We pushed ourselves a little as an org, but didn’t really do the hard painful stuff needed to actually achieve much.

Things can change fast. Say Bremner and Klassen suddenly turn out to be viable in the next year and a half. Add that to Koochi and Soriano. That’s a different situation.

Say the mountain of pen arms shakes out to having five pretty good relivers. Hell, this is actually semi-likely given the shear number of arms we are talking about. Again, the team looks very different if this happens.

Most magic of all. Say Moore manages a .700 OPS. And some other young player comes along who can do the same. And some FA retread works out well at 3B for more than 70 games. Now you have some gas.

Problem is that I know for A FACT that the same logic is being applied to the Rays, Guardians and A’s, who have a lot more prospects to point to. The Reds fan site is ablaze with “just wait for next year” juice. I don’t follow them at all but the Giants are likely thinking the same way. Other than the Rockies there is hardly a team out there that doesn’t look just a few lucky breaks away from contending.

And they all have farms. We don’t.

So it’s a more positive C- than past years. And it’ll likely progress to be a positive C+ at some point and we can all celebrate getting there without tearing it down but just shooting loads all over it.

We will celebrate finally finishing above .500. Then all we have to is ignore the fact that the A’s are finishing ahead of us and we are just the best last place team in baseball.