Frieri Meatball

I hope this distracts Ohtani all year long. What’s crazy is he was in the dugout this morning. 

Who gives a flying fuck about that dude anymore 🤬🤬

Sorry but I feel like this belongs in the thread for dead celebrities who don't merit a thread of their own

He doesn't seem to have a long term plan for anything.  I think he's just a bored, rich old man that wouldn't know what to do with himself if he actually sold the team.  His response about the stadium seems to coincide with this, which was practically "I'll probably be dead in 2038, who cares?"
It's funny that he's so big on selling "entertainment", yet winning is likely the biggest part of a team being interesting and drawing new fans.  Entertainment for him is a splashy name, not an actual good baseball team.  This is the entire root of the franchise's problems. 
He's had two all-time, HOF level players fall into his lap and has zilch to show for it.  Garbage, penny pinching player development, continually a garbage tier farm system.  A lot of people are huffing the hype pipe on Schanuel, Neto, and O'Hoppe, but these are more complementary pieces, not guys you build a team around.
Sorry to be such a downer, but man this a dark time for Angels fans.

$20 says if he’s on the dodgers he’s top 10 in all of baseball 

The offense needs to be addressed we need another lefty bat and another bench piece that can play the infield (for all that love stefanic we need someone better if we are trying to compete)

I'd be fine if the Angels make zero moves for the rest of the season if it means they have a new owner.

No way in hell.

Nobody wants to come here until Moreno is long gone

I hope the dodgers keep signing players until owners get pissed.  
 
I know a lot of you sad sacks “wish Shohei well,” but his deal to defer that dough is really making the sport lopsided.  
 
fuck that guy, the dodgers, and everyone on that team.  

oh and their POS fans too.  Oralé

I like that Plesac didn't regret breaking COVID protocols since shelter in place was stupid and evil to start with. However, his pitching hasn't impressed anyone for a couple years now. 

I am happy. Re-signing him would have been a franchise paralyzing disaster. But, I am not optimistic. There's no evidence suggesting that the Angels will change course anytime soon. I don't think there's a more poorly run professional sports franchise at the moment. 

Skaggs dying was obviously horrible. Same as Adenhart. There are worse things 
But damn, looking back at the past year... it's hard to not see this as the worst "period" in team history.
Moreno finally decides to sell... then changes his mind. That was the warning of things to come...
We finally aquire depth. Then it all gets hurt. Including our recently acquired blue chip catching prospect. 
And the guy we traded to get him turns in a good year, hits home runs in the playoffs 
We trade from our shit farm to aquire guys who end up not helping out, at all. Like literally at all. Giolito... dear Lord did that one backfire on us.
Everyone hurt...
... and when we finally show signs of some life and hope, the team makes moves and immediately goes on a losing streak that crushes the season.
And all you had left to watch (aside from some interesting young guys) was Shohei.
.... then he gets hurt and doesn't finish the season, while he was on a possible course to break Judge's new HR record 
Season ends with a whimper. 
Ohtani bails to the probably worst case scenario team for Angel fans. And signs this ridiculous contract that absolutely helps the Dodgers... so we don't even get the hope of him crippling them going forward like the Pujols deal did to us.
Now we're left with literally nothing. And the team is far worse off with not a lot of hope (like suddenly freed up from a shit contract, exciting farm, etc). Moreno still the owner.
Like I said, people dying is far worse. But this is pretty much the magnum opus of pathetic from a franchise that has plenty to choose from.
Not just Ohtani leaving, but how literally everything that could go wrong this past year did.
Cherry on top is that roughly within the same time frame of the past year, we got to watch MLB adoringly cheer Albert Pujols suddenly find his old self and reach the HR milestone.
And we were paying him as he did it.
Holy shit its been a bad decade.

I wish Shohei well.  Also, I don’t give a shit about him anymore.  Not my problem.  Fuck off imo. 

I think it will be a much needed lesson for baseball if he fails spectacularly. The imbalance between teams is becoming extreme because of money. 
The Dodgers have been respected for smart management. Trades and their farm system have been the backbone of their success. But being greedy and going into unprecedented free agent spending on Ohtani deserves karmic payback. It also contradicts what their philosophy stood for. 
I appreciated what Ohtani did on the field as a player. But never felt comfortable about the preferential treatment he got. 
He was a silent prima Donna. It was always about him and his well strategized career goals first. The team was just the supporting cast. When it came out how he mapped out the different stages and goals he wanted to achieve as he got older there was nothing about 'team' in there. Any team. Just personal  career and life objectives. And it will be intriguing watching how the Dodger organization and players adapt with him now. It will be a big change in team chemistry. 
Realistically I think he'll continue to put up big numbers as a slugger. But it's a different league now, with less familiarity. 
His two way play is really what his identity is about. But by the time he pitches, he will have been with the Dodgers for a year, and who knows what will happen before he throws his first pitch in 2025. The novelty of him as a Dodger will be over. And anything less than a championship will be a disappointment. That's the reason they got him. Other than off field income generation. 
I think it would be more fun watching him fail (as a ball player)  and have to deal with different media and people he never had to before. 
I also would like the history books to show that his best years were with the Angels. 
 

Don't make me laugh.
Shigetoshi Hasegawa will always be my favorite Japanese to play for the Angels.
Shiggy time > Sho time

Best owner-fan relationship I can think of is one where he allows his baseball people to do what they want and pays the bills.

That's why he should have sold the team. But he had "unfinished business" which apparently involved letting Ohtani walk to the Dodgers.

Parenthetically, it needs to be said that we cannot worry about getting into the playoffs during the "Trout window" - this can no longer guide our thinking.  No need to recap this past season's catastrophic "reload for a playoff run".
Like you say, we need to build using improvements in scouting (both US and international), player development, analysis, and while we're at it,  get our names out of the "bad press" business - treat players and their families better, at all levels - no more articles about guys living in their cars and going hungry or being one of the only clubs voting against things like increased spending caps.  I guarantee you, this team has a bit of a crap reputation among players - not Oakland A's terrible, but not the Dodgers, either.  
Arte's had 20 years to figure this out, and I see few signs of progress - he needs to sell the team to someone with the vision and the will and the money to fix all this broken culture and infrastructure.  
 
 
 
 
 
 

Look, the simple fact here (allegedly) is that Ohtani would have stayed an Angel if Moreno would have matched the offer.  He did not.  
After the debacles of Pujols, Hamilton and Rendon, you can understand that position (to an extent).
But the insanity of trading the farm away at the end of July (and not trading Ohtani) for an outside chance of getting to the playoffs can’t be understated.  It sets the club back years.
And was it all because an aging owner, faced with his own mortality, figured he’d give it one shot before he sells or dies?  That’s a selfish and terrible way to run a sports franchise. 
And it also makes it clear that had he sold to a competent group or individual last offseason, Ohtani would likely still be here as the crown jewel of their new franchise.  
So basically: Fuck you Moreno.

The takeaway for me isn't that he wanted to -- it's that nothing had changed and the "unfinished business" guy is still keeping his GMs from being successful.
I was hoping maybe that had changed.

So it changes my opinion of Ohtani if he did in fact want to stay with the Angels but took the Dodgers money when Moreno wouldn’t match.  
And it’s absolutely asinine for Moreno not to match whatever was being offered by other teams after he chose not to trade him.  
What it tells me is the Angels front office severely underestimated what he was going to get (like most of us here).

And from August first of 2023, the Angels had zero shot of keeping him.  Their only chance to prove to Shohei that they could do what was necessary to win was 2023.  Just prior to the deadline they were within shouting distance of the wild card.  Injuries had piled up and Perry was essentially forced to make a bunch of trades to maintain what he was able to piece together from earlier in the season.  The problem was that his deadline was an absolute miserable failure that ultimately left the team with 73 wins and zero chance to re-sign him.  If you pull out all of the stops and end up with 73 wins while going 17-38 over the final 55 games of a must win season, you have zero chance to keep a guy who's main priority is winning.  
The long term success of any baseball franchise is the farm system.  You might be able to occasionally piece together a halfway decent team via the free agent market and some trades, but ultimately, to create sustainable winning, you need to have a capable farm system.  This is not a mystery to any of us.   
And it's not just about having a young, club controlled, major league team.  You always need to worry about the next guy.  Injury and poor performance happen as we've seen.  Over and Over and Over.  
Having Ohtani and Trout.  Two generational players and not being able to piece together a winner just tells you how important this really is.  And the real kick in the teeth is that the farm was kinda moving in the right direction yet to convince Ohtani to stay, you have to essentially put a major dent in what little progress the system had made.   And because they're stubborn and short-sighted as a franchise as they've been for the last 20 years, they were never going to trade their golden goose for what is actually even more important that a Unicorn.  
So here we stand once again.  With the worst farm in baseball.  Yes, there is some young talent on this roster but in order to win it will take everyone reaching their potential and very few, if any, injuries.  
I actually don't care that they didn't keep Shohei for that kind of money.  I'm most annoyed because of the double bitch slap at the end.  Not trading him AND selling off a bunch of prospects to try and keep him.  Recently I have wanted to believe that this franchise was doing things to move in the right direction.  Nope, they just doubled down and put themselves in a lose lose.  
I really don't think I'm gonna feel a lot of positivity toward this team until Arte no longer owns it.  

And to be clear we could have locked Ohtani up a couple of years ago and probably at about 50% less than what he just signed. Of course Ohtani would have to be agreeable to sign it, but this could have played out a lot differently, years ago, if Arte had the balls.

I don't give two shit's how Arte is feeling. This is just another nail in the proverbial coffin of the Angels franchise, because he didn't have the foresight to lock up Shohei Ohtani. To his credit he did lock up Mike Trout, but at what cost when he didn't have the balls to be a large market franchise and make large market moves to surround Trout (and Ohtani at the time) with the right supporting cast. He just contributed to some big fumbles over the last decade to make the "splash", rather than consistently smart baseball moves.
The day that he needs to sell the franchise hopefully comes sooner, not later. Like Scioscia, he has been at the helm too long, no matter what you think of him, good or bad.