With five games left in the 2026 season, the Angels are staring at something no club in Major League Baseball has ever done: lose 100 games. For a franchise that has managed to avoid that mark until now, it would be a brutal finish. For Arte Moreno, it would feel like the last page of a long, ugly chapter.
That’s the strange arc of Moreno’s ownership. He took over a team that had just won the World Series in October of 2002, and he inherited a strong foundation under the Disney Corporation: Bill Stoneman running baseball ops, a respected scouting department, and homegrown talent like Tim Salmon and Garret Anderson already in place. There was more talent on the way, too, enough to suggest the window could stay open for years.
At first, Moreno benefited from that structure. The Angels kept drafting and signing useful players such as Jered Weaver, Howie Kendrick, and Erik Aybar, and then came the 2009 draft class that brought in Mike Trout, Randal Grichuk, Tyler Skaggs, Garrett Richards, and Patrick Corbin. That should have been a franchise-defining haul.
Instead, 2009 became the point where everything started to slide. Moreno put John Carpino and Dennis Kuhl into major leadership roles, valuing loyalty over competence.
Stoneman retired and was replaced by Tony Reagins, who had no executive level experience. The scouting director and most of the scouts tied to that 2009 draft were pushed out and replaced by less qualified people or not replaced at all.
The Angels would go 17 years without a GM who had experience in the job, and the results kept getting worse.
Carpino eventually left with no TV deal in place and the longest playoff drought in MLB hanging over the organization. Kuhl is still listed as chairman, though he is rarely seen at the Big A.
If there’s one label that sticks to Moreno’s run, it’s cheap. He slashed scouting and development spending, fired every scout during the pandemic, and abandoned Latin America for years.
The farm system that had once been among the best in baseball sank to the bottom of the rankings. At one point, national media pointed to the Angels as having the worst living conditions for players in all of baseball.
When the minor league players unionized under MLBPA, the Angels’ system became the face of complaints about pay and nutrition.
That kind of neglect had a direct baseball cost. When a club stops investing in player development, it has to buy its roster one free agent at a time, and the Angels did exactly that. It was an inefficient way to spend money and a dependable path to losing, but Moreno never changed course.
The most revealing moment of all came when Moreno said publicly that fans do not care about winning. That was the moment, more than any other, that turned frustration into open fury.
Fans stopped hoping he’d sell and started showing up to chants of "Arte sucks!" night after night.
Moreno never clarified the remark, never walked it back, and never tried to explain it away.
The reaction was immediate and unmistakable. The anger spilled across the airwaves, social media, the parking lot, and the upper decks at Angels Stadium. Moreno eventually stayed away from the stadium, apparently unwilling to face the noise.
The final verdict on his ownership is hard to miss. He turned a World Series champion into one of the league’s worst teams.
He had Mike Trout and a minimum wage Shohei Ohtani on the roster and still couldn’t get the club into the postseason. And now, with a 100-loss season looming, the ending matches the ownership run.
For players like Mike Trout and Reid Detmers, that’s the ugly reality of it. For Moreno, it’s a fitting way to be remembered: as the biggest loser in Angels history.
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