Arte Moreno’s lack of pitching investment has seemingly ruined yet another season

Other than a few flashes of hope early in the season, the 2024 season has been pretty disappointing for the Los Angeles Angels, even if it was to be expected. At 9-14 as of Tuesday, there is little to hang your hat on if you are an Angels fan right now.

Mike Trout has looked mostly great, Taylor Ward and Logan O'Hoppe have played well, and Reid Detmers has pitched his brains out. The rest has been a range of "meh" to "bad" on both sides of the ball. Oh, and Anthony Rendon is hurt again.

The offense hasn't been great to be sure. The Angels 96 wRC+ isn't exactly formidable. However, LA does have some dangerous hitters and are right in the middle of the pack when it comes to runs scored in 2024. Just by dumb luck, the Angels should be closer to .500.

The problem, of course, is pitching once again, as it has been throughout Arte Moreno's entire tenure as owner, and it looks like his hesitance or outright refusal to invest in pitching has seemingly prevented any hope that this season could turn around.

Can the Angels ever build a pitching staff under Arte Moreno?

Beyond the weird draft where the Angels took nothing but pitchers back in 2021, they have largely ignored pitching since Moreno bought the team. The results in 2024 show it as LA has one of the worst bullpens in the league, and only have middling rotation numbers because Detmers is carrying that group.

The Angels had real opportunities to make strides this past offseason. Blake Snell was available to them and apparently wanted to go to Anaheim, but the front office couldn't even muster a short-term deal for him. Clearly general manager Perry Minasian is willing to make moves for pitchers if that aforementioned draft as well as last year's trade deadline is any indication, but the buck stops with Moreno, and he has made Minasian's job exceedingly tough.

There are at least some signs that the Angels could finally be changing on the pitching side as an organization. The team is finally updating their pitching development infrastructure, which is great, but the reality is that the big league team won't see much in the way of tangible results from that for years, in all likelihood.

Fixing this problem is going to require a real investment either in free agency or via trade if the Angels want to compete anytime in the near future. However, if Moreno wasn't willing to invest in pitching when he had prime Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani in his lineup, it's hard to imagine he's interested in doing so anytime soon, even if the team shows signs of life this year.

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