If I Was Perry Minasian Ground Rules 2026

Welcome to another season of putting on our GM hats and laying out our visions for what Angels GM Perry Minasian should do to fix our ailing Halos. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take the Angels existing roster and upgrade it to something respectable for 2026. Or tear the whole thing down and build the best farm you can. Whatever you think Perry should do, lay it out here.

Rules are important and here they are:

Salary information comes from Spotrac.com. In doing a 2 year average of payroll and adding in some guesswork, you must keep the Angels 2026 payroll at $210,000,000 meaning you have $24 million to spend before trades and non-tenders. You can backload a contract a bit to help it squeeze into the $24 million bucket but Arte has yet to do massive deferrals so no deferrals.

The list of players eligible for arbitration is here and you must you use their projected salaries if you keep them around. Conversely you gain their salaries if you non-tender them.

For free agents you must you the salary projections from MLBTradeRumors or the salary projections from FanGraphs. You can mix and match for what suits your needs.

Trades need to be realistic. While the simulator at baseballtradevalues.com is not perfect, it has been refined to be good enough to use for this exercise. Most of you won’t have a paid account to use the simulator so here’s a tip: go to the Trade Boards and type in the name of the player you wish to trade. A list of trades involving that player should pop up and you can see his most recent value. Search for players you wish to acquire and line them up. You can also try emailing me to run a scenario but with my schedule I can’t guarantee a quick turnaround.

Please keep in mind that players acquired via trade also have salaries and those must be reflected in your numbers.

So, let this be your guide as you prepare your own pieces and expect to see the staff’s versions rolling out over the coming days. Go all in for 2026 and try to save your job? Trade away everything and wish for better days? Maybe a bit of both? It is your call. Just be ready to back up your moves using logic and data and know you’ll get feedback from the board.