The Los Angeles Angels: A Crime Scene

Who murdered what was arguably the best-run baseball organization from 2002-2009?

When word leaked out before the July trading deadline that the Angels were open to moving Howie Kendrick, it was more than mere admission that Arte Moreno's once-model franchise was writing off yet another win-now season. By considering a salary dump for one of the game's half-dozen best second basemen even though he's only owed $18.85 million from ages 30-31, General Manager Jerry DiPoto was signaling that his team is desperate for even an inch of wiggle room under its massive, backloaded free agent burden. The message to Mike Scioscia in his 14th and most tenuous year as manager was that the last vestiges of the ballyhooed first generation of Scioscia/Bill Stoneman homegrowns had been reduced to rebuilding-bait instead of pennant-waving advertisements for the Angel Way. And the Kendrick trial balloon, which was still floating at the beginning of the offseason, heralded a shocking if long-rising reality: This franchise has utterly squandered what was once one of the sport's largest surpluses of talent. Failure in Anaheim, to invert a cliche, has had many fathers, most of whom are still in senior management positions. To right this foundering ship they're going to need a clear-eyed look at what went so horribly wrong.

It's kind of hard to remember now, but for a good while there it almost felt like the Angels had beaten baseball's business cycle. From 2002-2009, the Halos averaged 94 wins a year and made the playoffs six times. The only team to top those numbers during that period was the Yankees, and they spent almost twice the money. The Angels of Anaheim, unlike the Empire of Evil, managed these feats while also cultivating one of baseball's best farm systems: From 2003-2007, the organization never placed lower than 5th in Baseball America's annual minor league rankings; the Yanks during that stretch only once finished higher than 17th. New waves of cheap talent allowed older favorites to seek their golden parachutes elsewhere, often bringing back valuable draft picks in return. Darin Erstad would yield to Casey Kotchman, who could be flipped for a great half-season of Mark Teixeira because Kendrys Morales was coming right behind; the compensation pick for a departing Teixeira was a kid named Mike Trout. From 2004 to 2010, while the average Major League team raised payroll by one-third, the Angels increased theirs by a rounding error of $4 million. In 2009, when they won 97 games and yet another AL West crown despite the tragic death of highly touted pitching prospect Nick Adenhart, the team picked 5 of the first 48 players in the June draft, then conducted their offseason such that the next year they would control 5 of the first 40. Moreno’s juggernaut seemed on the verge of self-perpetuation, yet it's been all pratfalls ever since. As Fred Willard once put it, wha’ happen?

It's too easy to blame it all on DiPoto's predecessor Tony Reagins (2008-2011) and his deservedly infamous January 2011 trade of Mike Napoli and Juan Rivera for the right to owe Vernon Wells $84 million. While that foul swap exposed three of Mike Scioscia's most glaring tics--fetishization of catcher defense, intolerance of clubhouse partiers, and stubborn deference to past-prime veterans long after their sell-by dates--it also reflected a panicky organizational short-sightedness that had set in long before, and continues to this day.

You can trace the Angels’ 21st century arc through the rise and fall of its bullpens. Last year, for the fourth time in five seasons, Halo relievers were just brutal, blowing 17 saves, walking nearly 4 batters per 9 innings, compiling an ERA of 4.12, and allowing one-third of inherited runners to score. The only ERA+s above 104 in the pen among those who pitched 10 innings or more belonged to Scott Downs (who was flipped to Atlanta before the trading deadline), and 30-year-old rookie Dane De La Rosa. Though such giant sucking sounds have become depressingly familiar in Orange County, it was not ever thus.

From 2002-04, Angels bullpens led the American League in ERA each year, with a mostly dirt-cheap mix of homegrown talent (Scot Shields, Frankie Rodriguez) and diamonds-in-the-dump reclamation projects (Ben Weber, Brendan Donnelly), topped by the lone high salary of Troy Percival. In 2005, after Percival walked (bringing the team back two draft picks), the Angels bullpen still had just the 7th highest ERA in the Major Leagues while costing less than $4 million. Of the many reasons other teams were busy trying to hire away Scioscia/Stoneman coaches and scouts, bullpen management ranked right up there. Yet the regime was already entering a cycle of careless stewardship and reckless ring-chasing that by 2007-2010 would produce consistently poor relief results for more than five times the 2005 price.

Beginning after the 2004 season, the Angels started giving away talented young arms for nothing, and importing expensive mediocrites on multi-year deals. Derrick Turnbow was the first to go, claimed off waivers by Milwaukee, for whom he saved 39 games with a 1.74 ERA in 2005. Then the Angels signed Esteban Yan and his career 90 ERA+ to a 2-year, $2.25 million contract, during which he (surprise!) put up an ERA+ of 89. To make way for Yan, the Angels dropped three-time Baseball America top-100 prospect Bobby Jenks, who went on to record the final out of the next World Series. Jenks was a five-cent head and Turnbow was a former drug-test failure, but the same couldn’t be said for the similarly unprotected Joel Peralta and Jake Woods after their decent 2005 rookie seasons, nor for Kevin Gregg and Brendan Donnelly after 2006, when the two were traded for guys who combined to pitch just 4.1 more innings of Major League ball.

Meanwhile, joining Esteban Yan on the multi-year gravy train were disappointments Hector Carrasco (2/$5.6 million), Justin Speier (4/$18 mil), Brian Fuentes (2/$17.5, plus a #32 draft pick), Fernando Rodney (2/$11), and Hisanori Takahashi (2/$8). The six would combine to produce 2 WAR in Angels uniforms, or the exact same amount put up in 2013 alone by not one but two squandered former-Angel relievers: Baltimore’s Darren O’Day, who was Rule Fived after being unprotected in 2008; and Tampa’s Alex Torres, who (along with Sean Rodriguez and a minor-league scrub) was part of the midseason 2009 package that allowed Anaheim to pay Scott Kazmir more than $20 million for 188 innings of 5.31-ERA baseball.

So lopsided was this exchange of cheap meat for expensive spam that the Angels started trying to address it with yet another surplus: an unparalleled collection of infield talent. So 21-year-old shortstop Alexi Casilla, on the verge of launching a big-league career that’s still active 8 years later, was exchanged before his 2006 debut for a single 6.70-ERA season of J.C. Romero. 23-year-old second baseman Alberto Callaspo, then stuck in the graduation line behind Howie Kendrick, was traded for wild AAA strikeout artist Jason Bulger, who would produce exactly one helpful season in 6 forgettable years in Anaheim; near the end of which the Angels belatedly realized that Callaspo could fill their perennial hole at third base, a head-slapping moment that cost them top left-handed pitching prospect Will Smith. The once-magic coaching touch that seemed to convert every random Al Levine or Lou Pote into a solidly above-average reliever seemed to depart the team altogether with the poaching of pitching coach Bud Black after the 2006 season. A bullpen that never finished lower than 7th in Major League ERA under Black from 2000-2006 has only twice finished higher than 19th under Black’s embattled successor, Mike Butcher.

It’s notable that the Angels’ most prominent moves six weeks into the offseason came at the coaching level: former Rockies manager and Angel hero Don Baylor as hitting coach, former Pawtucket manager and Angel favorite Gary DiSarcina as third base coach, former Nationals hitting coach and brother-of-Angel-favorite Rick Eckstein as a hybrid coach; plus former Diamondbacks AA manager Rico Brogna as a minor league instructor and special assistant to DiPoto. While gossip outside of the team interpreted this infusion of decidedly managerial talent as a not-so-veiled threat to Scioscia’s job security, it may also represent a long-overdue recognition that instructional and motivational levels have sagged on the big club since the brain-drains of Black, Joe Maddon, and Ron Roenicke. The Angels of the past few years, quite unlike the Maddon/Black/Roenicke days, have been sluggish in the field and stupid on the basepaths—converting a woeful 68.3% of batted balls into outs (same as clubfooted Detroir), leading the Majors in baserunning outs and outs at third base, even while swiping a Scioscia-era low of 83 bags. Some of this is attributable to changing personnel, as the team goes from a 1980s Cardinals-style construction of talented rabbits clustered around a lone thumper, to a sluggers-and-starters model that better resembles the 1978-79 Angels. But, coupled with several recent slow-out-of-the-gate starts, such disheveled performance suggests a team no longer responding to its collegiate-style manager.

But coaching alone can’t make an empty cupboard look full, and for that Scioscia’s organizational rival in the general manager’s box deserves his share of blame, too. DiPoto fans in the analytics community tend to pin the mammoth and so-far disappointing Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton contracts on Arte Moreno instead of his young GM, but even within those friendly parameters DiPoto’s performance has been mixed at best. Yes, the Angels are no longer blowing $20 million per year on a bullpen filled with multi-year contracts, but the results still stink: DiPo’s dumpster-diving for the likes of Sean Burnett, Ryan Madson, Latroy Hawkins, Jason Isringhausen, and Mark Lowe has yet to produce even one pleasant surprise.

The GM’s golden straightjacket, which requires penny-pinching in every other category even while payroll balloons to accommodate the Big Four contracts of Pujols, Hamilton, Jered Weaver, and C.J. Wilson (whose combined haul grows from $61 million in 2013 to $73 million this year, $86 million in ’15 and $98 million the year after), has led to such highly questionable long-term decisions as nickel-and-diming Mike Trout’s salary increases instead of locking up the game’s best player long term, and effectively trading Ervin Santana and Dan Haren (as well as former All-Star fireballing reliever Jordan Walden), in exchange for salary relief and the extremely unlikely hope that career meatballer Joe Blanton and shoulder be-hamburgered Tommy Hanson could reproduce Santana/Haren’s deeply disappointing 2012. When they couldn’t—and they really couldn’t, going a combined 6-17 with a 5.82 ERA in 205.2 innings, compared to their predecessors’ 21-26, 4.75 in 354.2 IP—the season was toast, regardless of Pujols’ bum heel and Hamilton’s shaky nerves. That’s because DiPoto had finished off the squandering of a third surplus: an entire generation of hot young pitching prospects whose achievements will likely be haunting Anaheim for the next decade.

This is where the Kendrick trade rumors (and those involving his keystone partner Erick Aybar) really come back home to bite. The Angels have announced to the world that they’re ready to consider trading their reasonably priced, prime-age, up-the-middle talent for cost-controlled, MLB-ready rotation help. Even though DiPoto traded the last of the organization’s middle-infield depth and rotation prospects in panicky in-season 2012 moves for closer Ernesto Frieri and a half season of compensation-less Zach Greinke. So not only does the team get to watch Jean Segura make All-Star teams in Milwaukee, it does so knowing that #2 on the shortstop depth chart in Anaheim is a guy (Andrew Romine) four years older, whose career minor-league OPS is .721; and that Kendrick’s putative 2014 replacement, 26-year-old Grant Green, both looks and measures horribly at the pivot. And that’s not the worst of it.

Those well-stocked 2009-2010 drafts, in addition to producing Mike Trout, brought forth a stable of young pitching studs—Tyler Skaggs, Patrick Corbin, Garrett Richards, Donn Roach. The draft before turned up Tyler Chatwood, Will Smith, and Johnny Hellweg. Appallingly, only Richards from that generation remains an Angel. In 2013 already, Corbin (who came in the blockbuster mid-2010 Dan Haren trade engineered by then-interim Arizona GM Jerry DiPoto) and Chatwood combined to pitch about as well as Angel aces Weaver and Wilson: 22-13, 3.32 ERA, 122 ERA+ and 6.2 WAR in 319.2 IP for the C&C boys, for the less than 4% the salary of W&W’s 28-15, 3.34 ERA, 113 ERA+ and 7.0 WAR in 366.2 IP. And all the Angels have left to show for those two is two more years of Chris Iannetta.

Will Smith, a 6’5” left-hander, struck out 43 and walked just 7 in 33.1 innings of 128 ERA+ relief for the Royals in his age-23 year, after ripping up the Pacific Coast League as a swingman. Skaggs (Haren trade), another 6’5” left-hander who logged a half-dozen mediocre starts in each of his first two seasons in Arizona (aged 20 and 21), has gone from #83 to #13 to #12 in Baseball America’s pre-season prospect rankings. Hellweg (Greinke trade), a 6’9” right-hander with control issues, pitched well at AAA in his age-24 season though bombed in 7 starts in Milwaukee. Roach (Frieri trade) had a good year in AA at age 23, as did Ariel Pena in the Brewers system at 24. All these departed pitchers are younger than Garrett Richards; all but Pena are younger than the Angels’ youngest AAA starter in 2013--A.J. Schugel, who had a 7.05 ERA in Salt Lake. The only thing the Angels still have in return for this clutch of cost-controlled starters are Ernesto Frieri (he of the career 4.4/9 walk rate, in addition to the outta-sight 12.3 K/9 rate), and the fallen if intriguing infield prospect Grant Green.

So is all hope lost? Not on a team with Mike Trout and Jered Weaver, and not in an American League where Boston can go from worst to first with a canny mixture of contract-shedding, free agent-shopping, and strategic coaching turnover. While the Angels’ rotation, bullpen, and third base spot had gaping holes entering the offseason, the emerging markets for genuine power hitters and quality center fielders suggested strongly that the Angels could pocket overpays for the surplus parts of Mark Trumbo and/or Peter Bourjos. Josh Hamilton’s face-plant in 2013 thankfully did not come with any serious injury, and his strong second-half finish--.285/.345/.486 over his last 76 games, .329/.392/.518 his last 45—pointed to a reversion much closer to his core comp group of guys like Andre Dawson, Carlos Beltran, and Jim Edmonds. And if Albert Pujols can indeed run faster to first base than 8 seconds flat, he’s a solid bet to hit more like his last year in St. Louis than his first two in Anaheim. Getting 9-10 WAR out of those two instead of 3 would certainly go a long way.

Like Walter White in the final episode of Breaking Bad, the Angels are going to have to have nearly everything go their way to get back on top. While this would provide a temporary reprieve for DiPoto and Scioscia (the latter of whom especially looks vulnerable should the team get off to another lousy start), the quick hit of a return playoff engagement still won’t fix the organization’s long-term trajectory. For that they’ll need to re-stock a depleted farm system, re-build a broken international scouting system, and figure out a way to not lose Mickey Mantle 2.0 as he enters his prime. Winning now might sound fun, but Arte Moreno & Co. need to start remembering how to win next year, too.

Originally appeared in Baseball Prospectus 2014.