The terrible contracts the Angels hand out are even more pathetic than you imagined

A recent article in The Athletic compared the average payrolls of each major league team from 2022-2025 with their regular season winning percentages. In it, author Andy McCullough groups teams into five categories: powerhouses, overachievers, the middle, the basement and finally, in a bracket all by themselves…your Los Angeles Angels Angels.

The Haves, the Have-Nots...and the Los Angeles Angels

The top and bottom teams in his argument are precisely who you would expect. Headlining the powerhouses are the Dodgers, with an average payroll (as calculated for the Competitive Balance Tax) of $329.4 million, and a winning percentage of .638. At the opposite end, the Athletics have paid out an average of just $85.5 million per year, and won games at a .380 clip, slightly higher than the Rockies and White Sox but at less than half the cost.

The Angels earn their own category by spending like the top half of the league, but losing like the basement dwellers. They’ve averaged a payroll of $208.8 million, good for 13th highest in the majors. That puts them right between the Giants and the Cardinals – both of whom have won more than half of their regular season games since 2022. The Angels, at a .429 percentage, have not. They also sit roughly mid-way between the payrolls of the Diamondbacks and the Rangers, who fought it out for the 2023 World Series. At this stage, any day when they aren’t dead last in the AL West is cause for celebration in Anaheim.

The conclusion here will not be news to any Angels fan. This organization, led by Arte Moreno, spends money, but they do not spend it well. There are some glaringly obvious examples of how. Anthony Rendon’s contract has been a $245 million disaster. He’s the highest paid player on the 2025 roster, and it’s highly possible he’ll never put on an Angels uniform again. Mike Trout’s salary is slightly easier to justify, but only when he’s actually on the field. And that 2022-25 timeframe doesn’t even cover some of the more infamous deals this team has been involved in. In all fairness, no one -- not even Moreno -- can be blamed for how all of these deals panned out, but the fact remains that the Angels haven’t posted a winning record in a decade, or as McCullough succinctly puts it:

"No team in recent memory has spent more and achieved less. "

Andy McCullough, The Athletic

The murkier areas are where the Angels haven’t spent. They have resisted signing a desperately needed ace pitcher for years, preferring to go after middle of the pack guys like Tyler Anderson, or to gamble on one-year reclamation projects, such as throwing $21 million at Noah Syndergaard in 2022. They failed to put anything even close to a contending roster around Trout and Shohei Ohtani for the full six years they wore the same uniform at the same time, and reportedly never seriously considered matching Ohtani’s eventual offer from the Dodgers.

It’s indicative of the dilemma the Angels have been stuck in for years. Moreno likes high profile position players, but balks at expensive pitchers.  He takes great pride in providing cheap beer at the stadium, but seems ambivalent about providing a great team to watch while you drink it. He has consistently used the luxury tax threshold as a salary cap, but was one of only four team owners to vote against raising it in 2022.

There are no signs that anything is changing. There has been no word, at least publicly, about contract extensions for any of the young core. The one 2026 free agent who seemed to clearly fall into the Moreno mould, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., just re-signed with Toronto on the type of long-term megadeal that the Angels seem determined to avoid.

This is a team that feels perpetually stuck in the middle, between aspirations of contention and a full rebuild. Stuck between spending money on what the owner wants at the expense of what the team needs. They are, when it comes to money versus results, in a class of their own – and it’s not a class that anyone else should be striving to join.  

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