LA Angels Tuesday News Crash: Player of Week

I’m not claiming to be any expert in the baseball “industry” for starters… but yes, I’m 100% on board for doing a massive rebuild of trading away every player who can give us some value, who isn’t signed beyond 2028 (with some possible wiggle room on that date).

There are those who say they want to hang on to a few of our players because they are good. But the shape of our franchise is so bad that we’re not going to turn everything around in 2 or 3 years. We’ll end up having some really good players (say Neto, Soriano, Adell) on a 77 win team for the next few seasons. And then those guys leave, or they sign expensive contracts so that Arte is unwilling to sign anyone else. We have way too many holes in the next 2 years. That is exactly the strategy we’ve done for 11 years. Just take “Trout/Ohtani/etc.” and replace that with “Neto/Soriano/Adell etc.” and you get the same exact thing happening again. A few good players providing “Entertaining Baseball” at Angels Stadium. It’s Arte’s playbook. It doesn’t work.

We need our farm system and development pipeline at a point where in addition to having guys like Neto/Soriano/Adell etc, we also can field above-replacement-level guys at 3B, Outfield, 2B, Bullpen, etc. We aren’t right now. And it is apparent that Arte isn’t going to open his wallet like the Dodgers and sign high-priced FA’s to fill all our holes.

I’m not interested in watching 2 or 3 more seasons of Neto, Soriano, Adell etc. play “entertaining” Angels baseball and see the team win 77 games, and then all those guys walk, or we sign 1 or 2 of them to a huge extension, and then we’re locked into repeating the past decade.

I would rather see us cash out on all of those guys, and flood our farm with solid prospects, so that in 3 years we might have a wave of a solid team, that is so cheap that then hopefully Arte would be able to splurge for like 1 or 2 players to made a solid team into a contender.