Dtwncbad

I would bet a good amount of money there is no way on earth you are going to support the team spending money on premium free agents next season. Nobody believes you because it’s not in your DNA. Could you maybe spare us the phoniness?

“START some sort of rebuild”? Dude, they are mostly done with the “rebuild” that is somehow invisible to you. 6 of the 8 position players are young guys with upside. Four of the five starters are in the same category and you have a few good young live arms for the bullpen. At this point in the process, you supplement the team with the few additional players needed to be competitive. Sometimes, the success year happens a year earlier than people think. That could be 2024, so you don’t punt on 2024. The timing of the success of this rebuild will fall on how much/how many of all these young players take significant steps forward this season.

Yeah, they should trade Neto for a young shortstop. And Schanuel for a young first baseman. And Rengifo for a young infielder. And Adell for a young outfielder, hopefully with some power. And Ohoppe for a young catcher. And Bachman and Joyce for some live young arms for the bullpen. And trade Sandoval, Detmers, Canning and Silseth for some controllable starting pitching. What are they waiting for?

Yes please

Adding to the FRONT of the rotation is the best way for the Angels to be relevant in 2024. You can go a long way with excellent starters, even with a club flawed in many other ways.

But they don’t have to pay the airlines until 2034.

Right. Just like classic car collectors low on inventory should load up on 2014 Honda Civics.

Oh I get it now. Sign Brandon Belt and then trade him for two top 100 prospects at the deadline. Now it makes sense.

It seems a little weird that a 28 year old would consider a 6 year deal. Who PLANS to hit free agency at 34?

I love how you complain about being stuck in a purgatory of being mediocre and yet every suggestion you have is more or less doubling down on being mediocre.

You don’t think a team with an adequate offense and a rotation of: Snell, Burnes, Detmers, Sandoval, Canning, with depth of Anderson and Silseth can be a contend-for-the-postseason team?

Maybe. But it’s defendable. If the team wants to punt on being competitive for a year or two then you don’t do this. But the consensus opinion is the team intends to be competitive now. So how do you do that best without killing or really hurting the developmental movement? If you made a deal like this to get Burnes, trade Ward for more pitching and heck go ahead and sign Snell. . . You add about $66m to the payroll, stay under the luxury tax, and you suddenly have a stacked rotation and you try to win by being dominant and deep in the starting rotation with a functional offense. And this really does not cost the Angels any prospects or controllable young players (except Ward, who is not all that young anymore, and you can assume they would be moving him for someone they could at least control for more than 2024.) So what is the real downside other than spending some money BELOW the luxury tax to improve the team?

The Angels absolutely do not want to trade away any good young players. Would anyone be interested in improving the team for 2024 by trading for Burnes by taking in the Yelich contract? Yelich has five years and $120m remaining ($23.9m per year), and was a 4.1 WAR player last year. We could all speculate how the details would be worked out but it at least appears that marrying Burnes to Yelich would facilitate someone acquiring Burnes. Burnes is projected to get about $15m in arbitration. If he was a free agent, what would the Angels pay him on a one-year contract? $25m? If the Angels acquire a pitcher that has $10m in value for 2024, that effectively makes the cost for Yelich 5 years $110m, or $22m per year. While that isn’t a steal by any stretch, it’s digestible. The points of criticism for this kind of transaction are surely money related. But the Angels don’t have many options to improve by other means. Further, if you had Yelich, that frees up someone like Ward to move in a deal elsewhere to improve the team some other way. Anyway, it is at least notable that taking the Yelich contract matches up with acquiring Burnes. . . and there isn’t much else to talk about.

This is the biggest Angel move of the offseason so far (Ohtani signing with the Dodgers is a Dodger move, not an Angel move).

Why would they want to drive the price down on a player they don’t want, making him more affordable for their competition?

Me neither. It just can’t be resolved in any fair way. We really have no idea who was doing it. And the assumption that these hitters had an unfair advantage ALWAYS just assumes he wasn’t facing a juiced pitcher, which seems just so naive and blind considering how much steroids would directly help pitchers recover better between starts, allow them to throw harder, and allow relievers to be effective three days in a row, etc. I recall reading through a report on a batch of random testing of minor leaguers and the positive tests were more prevalent among pitchers than hitters. So it seems logical to assume it was fairly common among pitchers and hitters, and we are never going to know now who they really were. The era was “contaminated” by steroids, but there is just no way to clean it up. I tend to fall back on. . . if it happened in a mlb game, then it happened in a mlb game and it counts. I am ready to totally ignore it and judge them all on what happened in the field. Side question: Why did Kirby Puckett get zero scrutiny for steroids? And by the way, and he had domestic issues, and they bum rushed that guy into HOF as fast as possible.

And was a phony. If you are going to be a dude that chases chicks, then own it. Whatever. Be who you want to be. But Garvey put forward this perfect Mr. Clean model citizen, model teammate, model husband persona while he was banging teenagers behind his wife’s back.

Agreed. And I will keep posting this glaring data. Here is list of guys by lifetime WAR from Johnny Bench at 75 to Kenny Lofton at 68. It is literally grating to my nerves to see Bobby Grich effectively equal to Derek Jeter in lifetime WAR and he gets zero traction on being recognized by the museum whose purpose is to display the best players.

I always ask myself to view the HOF as a museum with a purpose, rather than an award to a player. Obviously a player will FEEL honored and I get the induction ceremony and the jacket. . . .I get all that. But I don’t like that so many people primarily view it as a lifetime achievement award to the player and therefore their interest in including them or excluding them is tied to wanting that player to FEEL honored or not. The vast majority of people against Bonds or Rose are against it because they want to starve those players of the personal satisfaction (how the player FEELS) of getting in. From a truly historical perspective, that shouldn’t matter. In 100 years when these guys have been dead for decades, what you have left is basically an inaccurate museum. I choose accuracy as a historical museum over trying to manage it to produce the “correct” feelings of inclusion or exclusion in the individual player as an individual reward or punishment.

Agreed. But we are also at the point where fans can argue what it really means to be in the HOF. Does it still mean you are one of the greatest players of all time? Or does it mean you were at least almost as good as another guy in the HOF? The HOF has basically set itself up to invite another private entity to be created that only honors the highest tier, slotting itself above the HOF due to its exclusivity.

“If so-in-so is a HOF, then so-in-so should also be in. Look how similar or close they are.” There are true oversights like Bobby Grich. And then you have these borderline guys where the exercise is to just keep lowering the bar to include one more guy that “seems” deserving compared to the last borderline guy. If Harold Baines is a HOF, of course Kenny Lofton is. And so is Carl Crawford, Jake Peavy, Jesse Barfield, Rafael Furcal, Reggie Sanders, Ryan Zimmerman, David Price, Andy Van Skyler, Jason Kendall. . . At least if they were going to put 1/2 a player into the HOF, instead of Harold Baines, it should have been Omar Vizquel. At least Vizquel was truly special at what he did while Baines was never special at what he did.

The city of Anaheim should change its name to California. So Anaheim, California would now be California, California just like New York, New York. Then go back to the name California Angels and stick to your guns that the team is named after the city, not the state. The initials CA would stand for California Angels (the city!), and yet could also be cleverly marketed to attract fans across the whole state.

Actually I saw fireworks over Legoland last night out the window of a nice Carlsbad restaurant.