The Angels’ season ended with two firsts nobody in Anaheim wanted to see: their 100th loss, and their final game under Arte Moreno’s ownership.
Those two milestones landed together for a reason. This wasn’t just a bad year; it was the kind of finish that put a hard, ugly stamp on Moreno’s run at the top.
A franchise can survive one broken piece. The Angels spent years breaking just about everything.
Even with breakout seasons from Reid Detmers and Walbert Urena, plus All Star production from Zach Neto and a long-awaited answer at the top of the order in Wade Meckler, the club still sank to 100 defeats. That kind of collapse doesn’t happen by accident. It took a rotten bullpen, no real depth, shaky coaching, and poor in-game decisions to get there.
The warning signs showed up early. The Angels’ rough April put them on a path toward the century mark, and the idea of 100 losses was already being raised on Angels on SI back on April 29th.
That trajectory fit the recent pattern all too well. In the Moreno years, the Angels kept piling up roster holes and kept finding no trustworthy relief help to protect leads.
After seasons of 99 and 98 losses, nudging over the edge to 100 was ugly, but not exactly shocking.
The bullpen told the story in a way that was almost cartoonishly bleak. Jordan Romano, who was the team’s saves leader until the final two weeks of the season, had just 4 saves before being released in April.
Ben Joyce finished as the saves leader with 5. That alone says plenty about how thin the staff was and how badly the bullpen construction failed.
And the problems didn’t stop there. The Angels led the league in strikeouts for a second straight season and ranked among the worst defensive teams in Major League Baseball. Put all of that together and 100 losses starts to look less like a surprise and more like the inevitable result of being poor in every phase of the game.
Perry Minasian’s tenure fit that same pattern. He arrived as a first-time general manager, taking over from another first-time GM, who had followed yet another first-time GM, after an internal promotion with no executive experience. None of them were given the kind of organizational support that is common elsewhere in the sport, and all of them were operating under Moreno’s habit of skimping on player development.
That left the Angels constantly scrambling to patch over problems that should have been solved internally. Minasian had to sign Romano and Drew Pomeranz because the farm system didn’t have enough arms, even after the club spent its entire 2021 draft class on pitchers. Yoan Moncada got another chance at third base for the same reason: there was no ready-made replacement waiting in the system.
That shortage became a theme. The Angels routinely entered the big league level needing to fill a dozen holes because the pipeline behind them was empty.
Moreno’s answer was usually to shop for low-cost free agents and hope the math worked out. It didn’t, again and again.
The other side of that equation was the money spent on the wrong names. Moreno poured resources into expensive misses like Vernon Wells, Josh Hamilton, and Anthony Rendon, then tied the hands of his general manager on payroll.
The result was predictable: a roster built on patchwork, a front office forced into desperation, and two generational stars - Mike Trout in his prime and a minimum wage Shohei Ohtani - never surrounded by enough to make a real October push. Moreno wouldn’t go into luxury tax territory, and the Angels paid for it.
So when the season ended at 100 losses, it felt like a final accounting. Moreno bought a defending World Series champion and ran it into the ground, leaving behind the kind of season that matches the last decade of the franchise under his watch.
There is now a different name attached to the future. Stan Kroenke is described as the opposite of Moreno: someone who buys teams, installs competent front offices, and wins.
The example list is long - the Denver Nuggets, Arsenal, and the Rams all come up as proof of that approach. Moreno, by contrast, publicly said fans do not care about winning.
Kroenke, according to the source, talks only about building winners.
What comes next for the Angels under Kroenke is still unknown, but one thing is presented as obvious: he won’t be putting unqualified college buddies in charge the way Moreno did. The bigger idea is simple, too.
Running a sports team is not that different from development work. It needs a competent architect, a plan, and a foundation.
In baseball, that means investing in the front office and building a real talent pipeline through the minors.
The turnaround will take time. John Mozeliak has already started a true rebuild, and the farm system now has more talent than it has in years. There is even a sense that Kroenke may have been working behind the scenes before the sale was finalized, though that can’t be known for sure.
For the players, 100 losses hurts. For the fans, it should stand as the clearest possible symbol of the Moreno era’s failure - and maybe, finally, a marker for where rock bottom actually is. After years of getting here the hard way, the Angels hit 100 losses on the way out.
Now the task shifts to the new era: getting to 100 wins instead.
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The timing matters because the Angels already had other defensive options in center in 2026 who graded out better than Trout. With the club weighing a position change to better fit the roster and sharpen the defensive alignment, Trouts willingness to shift could open the door to a cleaner fit for everyone involved, even if the exact shape of that arrangement is still taking form. [Read more 🡒]