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This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on September 3.
There is a legacy of bare competence behind the Angels’ 65-year run of never losing 100 games that shouldn’t be taken for granted. If this year’s iteration finally uncorks that bottle of swill, it will be a fitting monument to outgoing owner Arte Moreno who, finally, mercifully, agreed to bow out this week. What Stan Kroenke’s ownership will be like beyond the inevitable shiny new sports palace and adjoining pre-fab “neighborhood” remains to be seen, but the bar is as low as it was after Bob Quinn’s stewardship of the Red Sox or Frank McCourt’s misuse of the Dodgers.
The Angels were born in 1961. They were an immediate success by the standards of later expansion teams, putting up three winning seasons in their first seven campaigns. They were less successful in building their post-expansion rosters, with the result that they were stuck towards the bottom of the AL West from 1971 through 1977. It took free agency to get the club launched in earnest. Building from within flummoxed owner Gene Autry and his ever-changing rotation of front office staffs and managers. Kids were just chips to be traded. Veterans on big contracts, though, that they understood.
This method of team-building was ugly and inefficient, but it worked better for the Angels than it did for other teams. Certainly the Angels possessed beautiful players, albeit of a certain creaky vintage. For example, in 1982 they presented a lowkey entry in the derby for “best-hitting outfield of the postwar era” with gardeners Brian Downing (left), Fred Lynn (center), and Reggie Jackson (right). The trio combined to hit .277/.358/.481 in a league that averaged .264/.328/.402, helping to push the team to its second division title. Downing, a former catcher and early weight-training enthusiast, walked, hit for power, and almost literally never made an error. Lynn hit .299, the closest he would come to .300 after being deprived of Fenway Park’s average-inflating magic. Jackson, in his first season after being discarded by George Steinbrenner’s Yankees, led the American League with 39 home runs.
Almost every iteration of the team from 1982 through their next division title in 1986 (their last until 2004; they won the 2002 World Series as a Wild Card entry) carried one of the oldest rosters of position players in history. The team that lost a seven-game ALCS to the Red Sox had nine players older than 30 total at least 250 plate appearances: Downing, Jackson, Bob Boone, Rick Burleson, Doug DeCinces, Bobby Grich, George Hendrick, Ruppert Jones, and Rob Wilfong. It would have been 10, or even 11, but longtime Angels Rod Carew and Juan Beniquez had departed after the previous season.
The Angels of that period tried to stick with the graybeards for the pitching staff, but as George Steinbrenner amply demonstrated during those same years, pitching excellence is the province of the young. In 1982, Mariners pitchers led the American League with 6.1 strikeouts per nine. The Angels’ aging arms struck out 4.5.
And yet, these silver-haired aggregations were so talented that they won, and if they didn’t win they were respectable. In subsequent years, the Angels became more successful in developing their own talent. Many of the key players on the 2002 championship team came up within the organization: outfielders Tim Salmon (third-round pick, 1989) and Garret Anderson (fourth round, 1990), catcher Bengie Molina (amateur free agent, 1993), outfielder Darin Erstad (first-overall pick, 1995), third baseman Troy Glaus (third-overall pick, 1997), and pitchers Troy Percival (sixth round, 1990), Ramon Oritz (international free agent, 1995), Jarrod Washburn (second round, 1995), and John Lackey (second round, 1999).
This would have been unthinkable earlier in the Autry regime, but much as with his east coast counterpart, Autry had to adapt and adjust as his 1980s roster aged out and ownership’s anti-player conspiracy to limit free agent contracts prevented him from doing business in the same old way. The short-lived Disney ownership inherited this group at the rather flukish moment it came to fruition.
It would be inaccurate to say that the Mouse handed off to Moreno in 2003 and the party immediately crashed to a halt; the Angels regularly reached the postseason, albeit without joy, through 2009 and won 98 games as recently (well, not that recently) as 2014. One season later, the Angels had their last winning season to date. It seems as if that was the point that Moreno began running the team by strange fiat. Nothing has worked. There have been errors both comic and tragic, millions of dollars and irreplaceable seasons of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani wasted, players in distress neglected or even enabled, and crimes against player development.
Fans have responded appropriately. Despite Moreno’s assertion that the Angels’ customers care more about affordability than winning, Anaheim hasn’t seen 3 million spins of the turnstiles (or beeps of the scanner) since the year before the pandemic. The club had reached that figure annually from 2003 through 2019.
Human beings are finite, but major-league teams are functionally immortal. Regardless of what he or she spent to gain their baseball team, every major-league owner is a mere caretaker of an entity that will survive them by decades at minimum, or for however long professional baseball remains a viable business. The terms of their ownership may seem to be absolute, but there are limits: time and again, the other owners have moved to remove one mad king or another who was in the process of destroying an asset that they require to succeed in order for their own investments to remain valuable. The Yankees without strong opponents are the sound of one hand clapping, a Dodgers team that spends more on cut flowers than on players wounds every team, not just itself. It takes a lot to move the leagues to action. They never rush in, but ooze like something reluctant and oleaginous, given the possibilities for litigation and how narrow the difference between a bad owner and a good one can be.
Moreno never stimulated the cartel to that sort of action, not that we know of; yes, the gate had fallen off, but not so much that the road teams were despairing of their share. That doesn’t mean his reign wasn’t a disaster. Putting the truly noxious, perverse environment that permitted Tyler Skaggs to proceed unimpeded to his doom to one side, we’ve seen numerous careers damaged, if not ruined, because Moreno and his hirelings rushed kids to the majors rather than acquire a quality veteran to fill the gap until the kid had had sufficient time to prepare. Jo Adell, Logan O’Hoppe, Christian Moore, and perhaps even Zach Neto should sue for malpractice.
It’s one thing to rush prospects on the theory that, despite 150 years of baseball orthodoxy, a period of apprenticeship is somehow unnecessary, another to keep doing it despite abundant evidence to the contrary. In this, Moreno was the RFK Jr. of baseball. He wasn’t as voluble, but his actions shouted crackpot do-your-own-research fallacies and a vicious antipathy for expertise, not to mention an unbecoming tendency towards miserly self-harm. Moreno paid his favorites, like Albert Pujols, but acquiring a get-me-through-June journeyman so a player could have two extra months in the minors didn’t interest him, not when he already owned more meat.
No owner thinks of themselves as a mere trustee responsible for the preservation of an organ that represents 1/30th of a healthy body (the Los Angeles Angels: baseball’s spleen) just as none of us think of our collections of Star Wars action figures, puffin mugs, or our boxer shorts as possessions that only temporarily belong to us. Plastic and granite and collective nouns representing the concept of “team” persevere long after someone has stuck us in a box or an urn. It would seem inapt to compare a baseball team to a national park, although there are some commonalities; the analogy fits if you think of a mountain as a permanent feature that has momentarily come under the control of a transient political entity.
Teams are seemingly more vulnerable. Like Sears or Bethlehem Steel, companies that had seemed permanent, our ballclubs will be here until, like the Athletics, Braves, Browns, Dodgers, Expos, Giants, Pilots, and Senators I and II, they pile into moving trucks and cease to exist. (Yes, Major League Baseball has never had a club “go out of business” and teams by those names still exist in some cases, but that is mere sophistry; those clubs are deader than disco.) Yet, as fleeting as these teams may prove to be in real terms, their longevity vastly exceeds own short lifespans. More tortoise than fruit fly, the Cubs have been around since 1876, the Cardinals, Pirates, and Reds since 1882. They can’t be treated like museum pieces and thrive, but they can’t be profligately damaged either.
Ultimately, Moreno’s ownership will shrink in importance as it becomes a smaller part of the Angels’ larger tapestry. The same has been or will be as true as other failed ownerships, from the CBS years in the Bronx to the Fisher period in Oakland, Sacramento, and Las Vegas—we’ll get there, trust me. Until then, we would do well to have all those in positions of power, in baseball and out of it, remember that this thing they possess, whatever it is, isn’t theirs. It some instances we may legitimately claim a share of it, in many others not, but in either case they’re just borrowing something that used to belong to (say) Chris von der Ahe, Helene Britton, and Sam Breadon, or George Washington, Richard Nixon, and the Georges Bush. As such, it would do to have a bit of humility as they round their way through the revolving door, certainly more than Arte Moreno managed to conjure in over 20 years in Anaheim.