Perry Minasian finally spoke to the Angels media again, and the reviews are not flattering

It's hard to know if Perry Minasian truly gets it. On an expiring contract, his job is on the line, and his club has won just two of its last 14 games, including a 0-6 road trip against the slumping Chicago White Sox and Kansas City Royals. The Los Angeles Angels general manager hasn't spoken much this season, but with fans wanting answers, he finally stepped to the podium. It went about as well as you'd expect.

Sam Blum of The Athletic did us all a solid and catalogued Perry's highlights (lowlights?). The general themes of the executive's comments were head-in-the-sand optimism and a level of accountability for roster construction that amounts to not much more than a shoulder shrug and a befuddled, "Who me?"

Minasian isn't big on the accountability thing. At the end of last season, the Angels' second consecutive last-place finish, Minasian spoke about how Ron Washington and company didn't put together a good enough on-field product, but refused to evaluate his own performance in giving the well-respected coach enough pieces to work with.

This go-around had a similar feel, as Minasian regularly missed the forest for the trees in his assessment of what has gone right, and more importantly, gone wrong for Los Angeles in 2026.

Perry Minasian refuses to acknowledge the dire bullpen and lineup issues that are sinking the Angels

One of the confusing moments was when Minasian was answering questions about Jordan Romano's DFA. Romano was cut shortly after a heated exchange with Kurt Suzuki. As Blum points out, when asked, Minasian first pretended to be unaware of the situation, asking, "You’re saying like a negative exchange?” Per Blum, Minasian eventually acknowledged the issue after some prodding, but insisted it played no role.

Romano had looked lights out over his first handful of outings, but a few rough ones, beginning with the series against the New York Yankees, quickly sealed his fate. Romano's blow-ups led to a 10.13 ERA, but as Blum points out, there's an inconsistency there considering what's going on with another veteran Angels' reliever, Drew Pomeranz.

"The Angels are paying Drew Pomeranz $4 million on a one-year deal, but have made no inkling of letting him go, despite a 9.26 ERA entering Sunday," Blum wrote. Pomeranz's ERA is now sitting at 8.53, but his 7.57 FIP is much worse than Romano's 4.40 mark, and his 16.7% K-rate pales in comparison to Romano's 28.6% rate. Given the bullpen's struggles overall, wouldn't it make sense to see if Romano could work things out, especially given his better underlying metrics, since that grace is being extended to Pomeranz?

The bullpen has been a revolving door of characters, and owns the second-worst ERA in the bigs at 5.62. It's been a while, and he's had a lot of injuries, but why not let Romano try to right the ship, especially when you have so few internal options thanks to years of mismanagement and poor development practices?

Minasian also boasted about the lineup's potency, citing OPS. For context, the Halos have collectively posted a .712 OPS, which ranks a hair better than average at 13th in the bigs.

“If you look at where you’re at on offense, we’re in a pretty good spot, relative to the league where we rank in OPS,” Minasian said.

That's a strange take. That's simply average performance, nothing to brag about, and it's also an incomplete view of what's going on. The Angels have the league's worst strikeout rate at 25.6%. They had the worst mark in the league last season, too, at 27.1%. This has been a recurring issue, and it's killed rallies. Minasian has failed time and time again to address it.

The Angels' offense does have some nice pieces, and Mike Trout's resurgence has been huge. At the same time, we've seen that there are holes and that teams aren't afraid of pitching around Trout and daring the rest of the lineup to beat them. The team's current skid proves that when that happens, the Angels will more than likely lose.

Overall, Minasian believes everything will be just fine. "We’ve got good arms,” the lame-duck GM said. “We’ve got good people. We’ll be fine.”

To anyone with eyes, that couldn't be further from the truth. The Angels don't have enough arms, and while there are likely a lot of good people hanging around the organization, it doesn't look like they'll be fine. It doesn't look like Minasian will be fine once the dust settles, either.

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