Playoffs serving as constant reminder of what could have been for Angels

The 2025 Angels, despite their best (?) efforts at the trade deadline, missed the playoffs for an MLB-worst 11th consecutive season. They will be moving on to their fifth manager since Mike Scioscia retired and have a general manager in Perry Minasian who once again had fans calling for his job. Meanwhile, the ghosts of Angels' past are killing it in the MLB postseason.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are haunting the Angels in the most obvious ways possible. They’ll be to another World Series, and will be heavy favorites after mowing down the Brewers. Shohei Ohtani just had the best postseason game of the millennium (or ever) to end the NLCS, hitting three times the amount of home runs Mike Trout has in his postseason career in a single game. They are the absolute gem of the entire league, and the Angels have been living under their shadow forever. While sweeping the Freeway Series in the regular season is fun, watching the Dodgers mow down opponents in the postseason is a constant reminder of the shortcomings in Anaheim.

The Seattle Mariners are haunting Halo fans in their own right. They're run by the former general manager of the Angels in Jerry Dipoto. After his firing/resignation in July of 2015, Dipoto was hired by the Mariners a few months later. Since then, Seattle has reached the post season twice and become one of the truly elite rosters in the American League. Dipoto was allowed to see his vision fully flushed out, something he never received in Anaheim. He received a promotion to president of baseball operations in 2021, and the Mariners have yet to stop improving. 

And finally, there are the Toronto Blue Jays. While there are no former Angels superstars or coaches or front office executives running things in Toronto, there is the biggest miss in Angels’ history driving his team to the cusp of the World Series. In 2015, the aforementioned Dipoto had already blown any chance he had at signing Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to represent the same franchise represented by his father in the Hall of Fame. He signed Roberto Baldoquin by spending the entirety of his international free agent signing bonus pool, and then some. This made it impossible for the Angels to offer Guerrero Jr. anything close to the $3.9 million he signed for with the Blue Jays. And now, the kid who used to take batting practice at The Big A is terrorizing the Mariners and the thoughts of Halo fans in the post season.