Quantifying the Badness of the Perry Minasian Era

I’ve been trying to find a way to quantify some of the poor work done by the Angels front office to see if there was some empirical measure of the failings that we’ve seen from the Minasian regime.  It occurred to me that one of the most important jobs for a front office is to make sure that the players on the field are of major league quality.  I noticed that the Angels have been plagued by rostering and fielding players who don’t appear to be ready for the major leagues.  I wanted to know if it was just my own personal observation bias or whether or not there was some objective way to measure this.

I think I came up with an objective methodology.  The concept of a replacement player in the Wins Above Replacement calculations is supposed to signify the value of a player than can be readily obtained.  These can be thought of as the best players at AAA or on the waiver wire.  For a host of reasons, not every player that gets playing time will end up getting a WAR that is greater than zero for the season.  Sometimes, it isn’t really the front office’s fault as promising prospects struggle, players try to work through injury, or veterans finally lose out to father time.  However, when a team is consistently giving large amounts of playing time to players who are below replacement, I think that’s an indication of a systemic problem.

Using the baseball reference stats, I calculated the sum of negative WAR that each team in history accumulated for each season.  I did this by taking every player who had a negative WAR for a season and then adding those together for each team.  To narrow my analysis, I looked at every team of the expansion era (1961-present) which happens to include every season that the Angels have played and no others.  Under Minasian (2021-2025), the Angels have given playing time to below replacement level players at a rate that is among the highest in the era.

Before I get into the findings, here is the context.  There are 1,626 teams in the data set.  Exactly two teams have managed to keep their negative WAR under 1 while 2 teams have managed a negative WAR of greater than 19.  The median is -6.43 WAR per team.  In other words, the typical team will get -6.43 WAR from players below replacement level.  Here’s a look at the best, median and worst teams:

Those late 60s/early70s Orioles teams were excellent top to bottom; the 1969 team won 108 games. Seeing the 2025 Rockies at the bottom of the list is not too surprising.

The Angels historically aren’t too much different than the typical teams although they don’t quite have any examples at the extreme ends.  The 1989 team did the best at having better than replacement level players, but the 2002 World Champs and the 2005 ALCS runners-up are near the top of the list.  The bottom of the list is filled with Perry Minasian teams.

As is evident, the five Perry Minasian teams from 2021-2025 all show up among the worst 9 Angels teams in this measure.  Perry has yet to do better than -10.6 WAR and his average is 

-12.7 WAR.  That means he’s 6 WAR worse than the typical team during that period of time.  Kyle Tucker is a 5 WAR period (or has been close to that for 4 straight years) and he just got an average annual value of $57 million.  This loss is hugely problematic and it’s costing the team wins and money.  

I took this one step further andI calculated a five year running average for every team.  The best were the late 60s/early70s Orioles teams with the 1969-1973 teams accumulating a 5-year sum of -7.69 WAR.  The best Angels stretch was the 2001-2005 team which totaled -18.5 WAR for the 5 year period.

However, the more interesting part for this article is the bottom of the list.   

The Perry era Angels are the 3^rd worst in history and it took a record breaking 2025 Rockies team to keep them out of 2^nd place.  

I can imagine a host of reasons that cause the really bad outcomes: injury prone players, shallow farm systems, poor training facilities, poor development practices, bad scouting, poor analytics, etc.  Anecdotally, I don’t think the Angels are good at any of those components.

I also don’t see a ton of hope for 2026.  This is a poorly designed roster that will be counting on several injury prone players without obviously qualified fallback options.  There are injury concerns throughout the lineup and four positions where the projected starters had 0.1 WAR or less in 2025 (Soler, Lowe, O’Hoppe, 2B).  The rotation is full of question marks and the bullpen doesn’t look great.  

There are a few things I like about this team.  I don’t know how much a pitching coach matters, but Mike Maddux is a good choice.  Zach Neto is fun to watch and I appreciate the aging Mike Trout when he’s playing.  Christian Moore seems to be so close to good and I’ve enjoyed Jo Adell’s breakout.  

However, I’m fairly confident that I’ll be watching a significant number of games with players who should still be in the minors.  This organization needs significant investment toward the bottom of the roster to raise the floor of the team and quite frankly make the team more watchable. 

Photo credit: Rex Fregosi