LA Angels Tuesday News Crash: Questions

Sorry that you feel that way. It’s not an emotional thing for me – I’m just looking at the outcomes and the data in an MLB-wide context.

To me, it would be “cuck-ier” (if you actually mean servile and in-bondage to some theoretical master) to try to hide the fact that Angels develop players poorly vis-a-vis other teams because my emotional investment in the team was such that I need to obscure their weaknesses and praise the front office accordingly. I’ve never been a fan that cathects to management or coaches to prove my fandom.

There’ve been solid objective analyses of the Angels’ underperformance in drafting and developing hitters. Baseball America put one together just under two years ago that looked at the decade of drafting between 2012-2022, and found the Angels were the fourth worst team in the MLB in that span in terms of drafting and developing positional talent. Whether you looked at number of players who made the MLB, or runs created by those players, the Angels were near the bottom of the list. A separate analysis showed that Angels were 30th in baseball in WAR produced by a decade of drafting over a similar span, hitters and pitchers inclusive.

Houston was tops in developing hitters in BA’s analysis – they graduated 38 hitters in the period of 2012-2022, and those hitters created 3485 runs. The Angels graduated 14 hitters in the same span, who generated 863 runs. And that was despite the Angels biasing toward hitters in the top draft rounds in that period – Ward, Thaiss, Adell, Adams, Jones, Marsh, Paris, et al.

I’m not sure why I’d need to bend reality to credit minor league coaching for one month of solid play in Jo Adell’s sixth MLB season. There are other teams, like the Rays, and yes, recently Baltimore, who have been much more successful at matriculating hitters. It’s it’s “cucky” to say so, so be it – but I’m not getting where you’re coming from.