The Mariners may have just lost one of the AL West’s most reliable safety nets.
For years, the Angels have been the division’s poster child for wasted opportunity. They had Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani at the same time.
They had a major market and an owner willing to spend huge money. And yet all of that turned into one postseason appearance since 2009 and no playoff trips since 2014.
That failure has mattered in Seattle, even if nobody wanted to say it out loud. While the Mariners dealt with their own issues, the Angels usually sat there in the background, making noise only when they were supposed to be good and weren’t.
That backdrop is about to change. Arte Moreno has agreed to sell a controlling interest in the Angels to Kroenke Sports & Entertainment.
MLB still has to approve the deal, and it’s expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. The teams didn’t reveal the financial terms, but multiple reports have pegged the sale at an MLB-record $4 billion.
Moreno gets richer. The Mariners get a new reason to pay attention.
Kroenke’s name carries weight for a reason. He already owns the Los Angeles Rams, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids and Arsenal, and all four of those franchises have won championships in recent years.
Baseball brings its own challenges, but Kroenke at least knows what a real sports operation looks like. He understands infrastructure, competent leadership and the value of giving a team enough support to chase more than just respectability.
That’s a stark contrast to what the Angels have been under Moreno. His interference became part of the franchise’s identity.
Big contracts missed, front-office plans shifted and two generational stars came through Anaheim without winning a postseason game together. The club’s longest-running habit was finding new ways to waste its advantages.
Kroenke arrives with the money and the track record to stop that pattern. Even basic competence would make the Angels a much more dangerous team.
That should get Seattle’s attention, especially when the Mariners look inward. Compared with the Angels, the Mariners have built a more coherent operation.
They have an identity, a strong pitching-development program and a front office that can find value. But ownership still too often asks the baseball side to thread contention through a tiny window.
Too many winters hinge on internal growth, exact trades and the hope that everything lands just right.
That formula gets a lot harder to defend when another division rival decides to act like it means business.
The AL West already includes Houston and Texas, two clubs willing to spend aggressively. The A’s are also gearing up to spend some cash when they get to Las Vegas. If the Angels become a legitimate force again, Seattle will have one more opponent with the resources to punish hesitation.
Kroenke may take years to clean up the mess, and what he’s done in other sports doesn’t guarantee anything in MLB. But the Mariners can’t keep building around the assumption that Los Angeles will stay incompetent forever.
That was a useful edge for a while. It isn’t a safe one anymore.
In Other News...
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The twist has come elsewhere, with Alex Hoppe turning into a real weapon for the Orioles out of the bullpen and showing better pitching indicators than he had before the swap. Luis Castillo has also had a rough go of it with the White Sox, which only sharpens the sense that Seattles gamble is looking shakier by the week, even if the final judgment on the deadline still has some time to play out. [Read more 🡒]
Mariners Fans Know Why Luis Castillo Is Suddenly Hard To Trust
Luis Castillo looked like a stabilizing arm when the White Sox brought him in from Seattle in early August, and his first outing in Chicago only reinforced that impression. For a stretch, it seemed like Chicago had added the kind of veteran starter who could take the ball in a big series and give a division leader exactly what it needed down the stretch.
Since then, though, the confidence around Castillo has faded fast. His recent starts have featured more damage, with opponents piling on runs and leaving the yard, and that has only sharpened the concern in Chicago about a rotation that has already been under pressure. For Mariners fans watching from afar, it is a familiar kind of tension around a pitcher who can still flash quality, but whose current form leaves plenty of questions about what he would look like in a playoff game. [Read more 🡒]
Mariners Suddenly Have A New AL West Threat To Worry About
The Angels have spent most of the past two decades chasing relevance rather than the Mariners, but their new ownership situation adds a fresh layer of intrigue to the American League West. Stan Kroenke, who owns multiple professional sports teams, has purchased the club, and that kind of deep-pocketed, multi-team ownership often comes with a different appetite for long-term investment in infrastructure and player development.
For Seattle, the timing matters. The Mariners have been trying to hold their place in a division that can shift quickly, and a more aggressive, better-resourced Angels operation could change the balance over time. Los Angeles still has plenty to prove after years of disappointment, but if Kroenke treats the roster and the organization like a project worth pushing forward, the Mariners may have one more serious contender to keep an eye on. [Read more 🡒]