The Angels have become the kind of cautionary tale that other teams point to when the payroll conversation gets serious. They lost 100 games this season, and only the Colorado Rockies were in the race to claim the title of baseball’s worst club.
That’s why the spending habits of teams like the Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Guardians matter so much in the current conversation. In a piece from Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, their playoff success was framed as a warning sign for clubs that keep trying to get by without investing properly.
The Brewers and Rays ranked 19th and 27th, respectively, in luxury tax payroll, yet both finished with the most regular season wins in the league and are now in the World Series. This is not some one-year anomaly, either.
The Rays and Brewers have been operating this way for years.
Rosenthal also pointed to teams that aim for the same model and miss the mark. He used the Cincinnati Reds as an example, arguing that ownership there lacks the patience needed to build the right way. He also noted that their home park makes sustained pitching success especially difficult.
But the Angels remain in their own lane in this discussion. They are a big-market team that has spent like a small-market one, and the whole point of Arte Moreno’s approach was never to spend much at all.
That shows up in moves like the Taylor Ward trade. Los Angeles dealt a productive outfielder to the Baltimore Orioles because his projected arbitration number was $13 million, a price that was still fair for a player who hit 36 home runs.
Coming back from Baltimore was pitcher Grayson Rodriguez, whose career has been weighed down by injuries. He was inexpensive and under team control for the near future, which made him exactly the kind of Moreno move this franchise has been built around. The result, though, was more losses for the Angels, thanks to his continued struggles on the mound.
None of this necessarily says exactly where the franchise goes next. Manager Kurt Suzuki has not been fired yet, and the message in Rosenthal’s piece is aimed squarely at the new ownership. There’s still no clarity on where new owner Stan Kroenke stands on the idea of a salary cap that almost certainly won’t happen, but whatever that discussion leads to, the lack of spending so far cannot be used as an excuse for not putting a winning team on the field.
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