ANAHEIM — At its heart, baseball runs on hope.
It’s the only thing that keeps people coming back to the ballpark in some cities, the idea that better times are in the future – whether that be the near future or a few (or more) years down the road.
As usual, it’s much of the reason that Angel fans continue to come to the ballpark. But this season the motivation is slightly different. Shohei Ohtani is now a Dodger, Mike Trout is entering the back nine of his career, and the odds are that if there is to be a story of triumph written about this franchise it will be written in future years rather than the coming months, maybe by names like Nolan Scuanuel, Logan O’Hoppe, Mickey Moniak and Zach Neto.
Possibly even Jo Adell, too, though the clock seems to be ticking on the outfielder who was once the franchise’s brightest prospect.
There was plenty of reason for hope when the Angels came home Friday off a 4-2 trip after being hammered twice by Baltimore in Games 1 and 2. The Orioles are really good, and the Marlins really aren’t – they were 0-9 before winning Sunday – so the three games in Miami turned out to be a get-right series for the Angels.
They split the first two games of their home-opening series against Boston, but on Sunday hope wasn’t nearly enough. This was a 12-2 disaster, with Chase Silseth giving up solo home runs to David Hamilton, Rafael Devers and Tyler O’Neill in the third, José Suarez surrendering a three-run shot to Reese McGuire in the sixth (en route to a five-RBI day) and the Red Sox piling on in the ninth with four runs against Guillermo Zuñiga.
Learning experience, right? There will be more games like this – baseball’s law of averages says so, just as it says the Angels will win a few laughers as well – but keep in mind that this team’s magic number is not 2024. When manager Ron Washington talked during the Baltimore series about how his players needed to learn to win, just as the Orioles had to during their rebuild, that was the tipoff. Think ’26, maybe, or ’27.
Have we said that Angel fans are loyal beyond all reason for being so? They may be the most stubborn fans in SoCal in that sense. Their team hasn’t reached the postseason since 2014 and hasn’t won a postseason game since 2009, the red on that “2002 World Champions” pennant in center field fades more every year, and it’s fair to say a majority of Angels fans can’t stand the owner.
The fans who fill my inbox were prepared to party two seasons ago when Arte Moreno decided to explore selling the team, and most of them went into a funk that winter when Moreno pulled the team off the market. It has not yet reached the point where Angels fans wear “SELL” T-shirts to the ballpark like in Oakland, and I’d be curious how the stadium ushers would handle it if they did.
But Moreno’s unpopularity hasn’t lessened. As the stadium elevator headed upstairs Sunday morning, it stopped on the second floor, where Moreno’s box is located. One passenger mistakenly started to get out and his buddy stopped him, saying something along the lines of, “We don’t want to watch the game with him, anyway.”
It could be worse, remember. It is worse, way worse, in Oakland, where A’s fans in the East Bay are about to lose their team and owner John Fisher remains impervious to public opinion, unswayed by not only the idea that Oakland fans hate him but those in the A’s supposed future home of Las Vegas haven’t rolled out a welcome mat, either. (For the record, This Space remains convinced that the plan for a Vegas ballpark is going to fall through. Who knows? They may wind up being the Sacramento A’s permanently.)
There’s no hope in Oakland. There are possibilities in Anaheim, albeit distant ones, and maybe there should be a reality check here as well.
The Angels – and I would suspect that means Moreno – have resisted a full teardown throughout this non-playoff drought. The reasoning is that you just don’t do that in the continent’s second-largest media market, because fans won’t put up with it, and in most cases that’s true.
As late as last August, general manager Perry Minasian made moves at the trade deadline in a last-ditch bid to stay in contention and convince Ohtani to re-sign. The strategy failed when the Angels lost seven straight to begin August and 11 of 14 to fall 13½ games out of first place and eight games out of a wild-card spot, and Minasian wound up waiving Lucas Giolito, Dominic Leone, Matt Moore, Reynaldo López and Hunter Renfroe to get the team under the luxury tax threshold.
So when Moreno demurred this past winter after given the last chance to re-sign Ohtani, and then passed on all five Scott Boras-represented free agents – Blake Snell, Cody Bellinger, Jordan Montgomery, Matt Chapman and J.D. Martinez – as February turned into March, it was pretty evident what the strategy would be.
And to be honest, a rebuild is about as sound a strategy as is available to the Angels. Yes, Snell and maybe Martinez would have looked good in Angels red, but would they have provided enough of a boost to catch the Rangers, Astros and Mariners in the AL West?
At this point it’s better to start over, and that not only means giving the kids on the big-league roster a solid chance, but also committing additional resources to scouting and player development and shoring up the underpinnings.
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Having a plan, one that might conceivably get the Angels back to the postseason some time in the remaining six years of Trout’s contract after this one, makes a lot more sense than the blind hope with which the Angels have operated for a decade or so. Granted, this does assume that there is such a detailed plan, and I realize that’s a hefty assumption.
In the meantime, seeing the youngsters grow is a reason to watch, even when the result is as excruciating as it was Sunday.
And as long as we’re talking about hope, there’s still that chance Arte could reverse course again and sell the team.
jalexander@scng.com
