Moreno's Big A report card deserves an F

A $2.2 billion fixer-upper hit the market on Tuesday, a property too dilapidated for even Chip and Joanna Gaines to consider.

Arte Moreno, the all-hat, no-pennant owner of the Angels since the end of 2002, announced he was exploring the marketability of the franchise in the midst of what will become its seventh consecutive losing season. That ties an Angels’ record set from 1971 through 1978.

Through Monday night’s action, there were nine MLB clubs with a winning percentage of .434 or lower. Only two of them had an Opening Day payroll that ranked in the top half of the game. They were the Cubs (14th) and the Angels (8th). Such franchises as Pittsburgh (28th), Oakland (29th) and Miami (26th) had no intention of winning this season. Moreno’s Angels did, and in fact were 27-17 on May 24 and led the A.L. West by two games.

What is more intolerable? Abject surrender or well-intentioned failure? The Angels have Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s Most Interesting Man, and Mike Trout, the homegrown, 3-time MVP. They also have lefthander Reid Detmers, who has thrown a no-hitter and pulled off an immaculate inning this season.

But, in typical ready-fire-aim fashion, the Angels fired manager Joe Maddon 12 games into a losing streak, and the club responded by hitting .200 in July. Through Monday night’s games they had struck out 99 more times than any other club, and ranked a consistent 13th in on-base percentage, batting average and slugging.

Still, the Angels are fourth in the league in attendance, despite a stadium Moreno considers outdated. He was trying to buy Angel Stadium from the city of Anaheim, but that deal ended when the FBI charged Anaheim mayor Harry Sidhu with illegally feeding insider information to the Angels, then soliciting campaign contributions.

Yes, we’re living in irony’s Golden Age. In 2005 Moreno renamed the club the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim for marketing purposes, and survived Anaheim’s suit to stop him. This was a gratuitous slap at a city that threw the Angels a career lifeline in the early 60s when they were sharecroppers in Dodger Stadium.

The Big A gave both the club and the city an identity. Los Angeles, of course, is 25 1/2 miles from Anaheim in normal times and light-years away in late afternoons, when the traffic paralyzes the southbound freeways from L.A. Moreno, from Arizona, obviously never unerstood that dynamic, and now a small-town hustle leads him to sell the team, which, considering the price tag and Moreno’s 76 birthdays, is totally understandable.

Moreno’s “hometown newspaper,” the Los Angeles Times, doesn’t even cover Angels’ road games anymore, unless they happen to be at Dodger Stadium.

So it’s hard to remember the general elation when Moreno reached an agreement to buy the club from Disney in the midst of 2002, just before the Angels made their only appearance in a World Series and won it. At last the Angels would launch themselves into the free agent market as Gene Autry had.

And the Angels followed up 2002 with playoff appearances in five of the next seven years. That was attributable to general manager Bill Stoneman, manager Mike Scioscia, and scouting directors Bob Fontaine and Eddie Bane and the muscular organization they built. Disney hired them all.

Stoneman retired after the 2007 season. Searching for the new GM, Moreno found himself beguiled by Jerry Dipoto, a believer in the analytical approach. With scant credentials, Dipoto still felt entitled to dictate terms to Scioscia, who to this day is the only Angels manager to win a postseason series. That ruined the harmony that had carried the franchise, and when Dipoto basically commanded Moreno to choose one man or the other, Moreno went with the manager.

The next GM was Billy Eppler, who found himself in rebuilding mode and signed a bunch of defective blowout patches. He and Scoscia were friendlier on the surface, but then the Angels nudged Scioscia out the door after the 2018 season.

Since then they are 227-279. They have not made the playoffs since the Royals skunked them in the 2014 Division Series. Their pitching staffs have ranked 8th, 8th, 13th and 9th in WHIP. Worse yet they have utterly failed to develop viable starting pitchers with the possible exception of Detmers. In 2021 general manager Perry Minasian desperately drafted a pitcher with every pick.

From 2011 through 2018 the Angels picked 80 pitchers in the first 20 rounds of the draft. Only two ever started a game for them.

The Angels last won a playoff game in 2009, when the Yankees eliminated them from the ALCS in six games. Their four best starters were John Lackey, Ervin Santana, Joe Saunders and Jered Weaver, all drafted or signed and then developed by the Angels.

Moreno will be criticized for his free agent misadventures, culminating with Anthony Rendon, who has played 103 games the past two years but will be pulling down $38 million in each of the next four seasons (feel free to read that again).

But in his early years, when firm hands were on the wheel, the Angels got high value from Vladimir Guerrero, Bartolo Colon, Torii Hunter and Bobby Abreu.

Moreno took a big swing at Carl Crawford and, when that failed, made an impulsive trade for the washed-up Vernon Wells. He was lucky that he failed to sign Trevor Bauer but whiffed in a bid to sign Orange County’s own Gerrit Cole. He gave Justin Upton $106 million over five years and wound up releasing him in April with $28 million still due. He lost Mark Teixeira after the 2008 season and stewed about it until years later, when he realized that the compensatory draft pick, executed by Bane, was Trout.

Most famously he signed Albert Pujols in December of 2011, triggering a ceremony that resembled the day that the gold shipment pulled into Mayberry. Pujols had better years in Anaheim than people might admit, but then Moreno went big to sign recovering addict Josh Hamilton the next year. That became a $125 million fiasco when Hamilton relapsed, without the support system he had in Texas.

Last month the Angels were helpless sellers at the trade deadline, like the misers that surround them in the standings. Starting pitcher Noah Syndergaard and closer Raisel Iglesias were shipped elsewhere for prospects. They did get catcher Logan O’Hoppe from the Philllies for Syndergaard, which gave them exactly one (1) player in Baseball America’s Top 100 prospect list. O’Hoppe had six homers in his first 11 games for the Angels’ Double-A affiliate in Madison, Ala.

This is the same Baseball America that ranked the Angels’ system dead last in baseball, leading to the departures of manager Terry Collins and general manager Bill Bavasi. Three years later, products of that system won a World Series. So we’ll see.

And let’s acknowledge the tragedy and misfortune that seems to live in the Angels’ bloodstream, whether it’s Tyler Skaggs dying of an overdose in a hotel room in Texas, or Nick Adenhart pitching an April gem against Oakland and losing his life that night at the hands of a drunk driver.

Taking a baseball team to a World Series wasn’t as easy for Moreno as writing a check to get rid of an Arizona football coach. Bravado and swagger were rendered worthless at the sound of “Play ball.” But it will take quite a series of bank shots to find someone (A) rich enough to buy the Angels (B) smart enough to find the right people and let them work (C) realistic enough to keep the Angels in Anaheim or thereabouts, since their fans keep supporting such rubble and (D) reticent enough to know it’s not all about him, or her.

The smacking sound of high fives around the Southland on Tuesday will fade into oblivion just as the celebrants realize they thought they were glad to be rid of Disney, too. But Moreno’s legacy, other than maximizing his investment, is clearly embossed. Just as John Wooden warned us not to mistake activity for achivement, Arte leaves behind nothing but a hollowed-out Pyramid, wrong side up.