With the Major League Baseball trade deadline looming, and with there being an endless array of articles, hypothetical and proposed trades for uber-superstar Shohei Ohtani, the question has come up a lot recently, as well as being one of baseball’s more recent memories over the last decade: how have the Angels sucked?
Going back to 2012, when the Angels had acquired a prime-Albert Pujols, fresh off a World Series win, they also called up Mike Trout, who has for the better part of the last decade, been the best player in MLB, you’d think the Angels would have opened a window in which championships wouldn’t just be contended for, they would be expected.
Obviously, everyone knows that baseball is a team sport and that one man does not a championship win, but a guy like Mike Trout is a generational talent, and with someone the talent of at least five good players, success in theory should have come by a little easier for the Angels than it would for like, the Seattle Mariners.
And over the decade, the Angels would go on to win the signing rights and acquire Shohei Ohtani, who wasn’t just the next Babe Ruth, he’s light years better than ol’ Herman, with his homerun hitting prowess, as well as his ace-caliber power pitching.
Seriously, here are the AL MVP rankings over the last eleven seasons:
2012: Mike Trout, MVP
2013: Mike Trout, 2nd in MVP voting
2014: Mike Trout, MVP
2015: Mike Trout, 2nd in MVP voting
2016: Mike Trout, MVP
2017: Mike Trout, 4th in MVP voting
2018: Mike Trout, 2nd in MVP voting
2019: Mike Trout, MVP
2020: Mike Trout, 5th in MVP voting
2021: Shohei Ohtani, MVP
2022: Shohei Ohtani, 2nd in MVP voting
The Angels have had the AL MVP in five of the last eleven seasons, which is pretty unprecedented. With such abundance of talent, you’d think the Angels would have been at the very least, in the playoffs every single year or something, right?
Well of course not! Otherwise a brog post like this wouldn’t ever come to fruition, and these are the kinds of things that happen in baseball that make baseball such a wonderful sport to be a fan of, because logic doesn’t matter sometimes, and wacky shit happens every single day in a baseball season.
Not only have the Angels won zero championships, they’ve made it to zero World Series over the last eleven seasons. In fact, they’ve only made it into the playoffs just once, in 2014, and they were promptly swept by the Kansas City Royals who had win the play-in Wild Card game just to get into the playoffs.
In this eleven year span, the Angels have finished 1st in their division just the once, 2nd once, and then placed 3rd in the AL West four times, and 4th place, five times. Needless to say, despite having two of the greatest players of the entire generation, and the greatest player from the previous generation, the Angels have somehow managed to be nothing short of mediocre the entire time.
How does this happen? The easiest way for me to explain such a baseball anomaly is to use basketball to make an analogy.
Imagine the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls. Despite being the greatest player in history, Michael Jordan couldn’t ever win a championship until he got some help. Scottie Pippen came aboard, but the team still fell short against the Detroit Pistons. Along came Horace Grant during the first three-peat, and Dennis Rodman during the second three-peat. Additionally, key utility pieces and role players emerged and began contributing, like John Paxson, Toni Kukoc, Steve Kerr, Luc Longley, Ron Harper and BJ Armstrong, and then the Bulls went on to win six championships over the span of a decade.
The Angels are basically the Chicago Bulls if they just never had any utility pieces and role players. It’s just Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani playing the roles of Jordan and Pippen, and Pujols being the third option whom himself began rapidly falling off a cliff a few years into his contract.
But over the last eleven years, aside from the production of their big names, the Angels vastly got nothing out of anyone else from their 25-man rosters. And in the old adage that pitching win championships, the Angels really haven’t had any reliable pitching over the last decade, and it’s a mystery within itself why the Angels never wrote blank checks to marquee free agent pitchers within that time to try and remedy that, while they already had Trout and a still-effective Pujols locked up.
There were a few decent seasons from Jered Weaver and CJ Wilson, but even when they were having good years, pretty much nobody else in the Angels’ rotations were. I know W-L records are like citing the Quran in Catholic church, but most years would be Weaver and/or Wilson being the only pitchers with a positive record, and the rest would be hot garbage. The only year where they had more than the two of them pitching well, was coincidentally 2014, the year they won 98 games and made the playoffs.
But aside from pitching, the Angels have just been tragically unlucky at bringing in guys that might have been good at various points of their career, but were all trash once they suited up for them. Torii Hunter, Justin Upton, and Anthony Rendon were all All-Stars prior to becoming Angels, and then all fell off a cliff once they were. Yunel Escobar, Andrelton Simmons, Danny Espinosa were all reliable glove guys, but all of them were shadows of their past selves once they came to Anaheim.
So in conclusion, the way to really explain how the Angels have sucked, despite having some of the greatest players ever, is that just never had any pitching, and never had nearly enough production out of players that weren’t Mike Trout, and then Shohei Ohtani. Especially at catcher, jesus christ, the Angels haven’t had a productive catcher since like, Bengie Molina. Their free agents all implode (Pujols, Rendon), and haven’t been good at developing talent.
Mystery solved!
Also, it just occurred to me that the Angels are actually coming to Atlanta in about a week from the time I’m writing this. With me shitting on the Angels right here, it’s all but inevitable that they are going to absolutely shit on the Braves when they’re here, so to the city of Smyrna and Atlanta, and the rest of Braves Country, I apologize for the massacre that’s going to occur when the Halos come to town.
