Angel Stadium, Anaheim (MLB #9 - Payroll and wins don't always go together)

Why can't the Los Angeles Angels and San Diego Padres win? The Angels haven't had a winning season since 2015 and haven't made the postseason since 2014. The Padres, despite going all-in last season, didn't make the playoffs, and have won a total of one World Series game (that's one World Series game, not one World Series) since they started play in 1969.

Let's start with the Angels 

For most of the time since their last winning season, they've had the two best players in baseball. Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani have each won the American League Most Valuable Player award twice in that stretch (Trout also won in 2014), while no other player in either league has won more than once. The 2023 World Baseball Classic ended with a very close championship game, in which Japan beat the U.S., 3-2. The game ended with Ohtani striking out Trout. 

An obvious possibility is that they have had a couple of great players, but haven't surrounded them with enough merely good players. It's not like they haven't tried. During that time, their player payroll has always been above average, ranging from 7th to 13th highest of the 30 MLB teams.

However, having a high payroll does not guarantee a winning season. Last season, there was virtually no correlation between how much teams spent on players and how many games they won. The three teams with the highest payrolls, the Mets, Yankees, and Padres won, respectively, 75, 82, and 82 games (out of 162), while the two teams with the lowest payrolls, Baltimore and Tampa Bay, won 101 and 99 games, respectively. I've done the same exercise for each of the last six seasons, and the correlation is usually better than that, but it's not great.

 

One reason is that good players get injured, but they still get paid. Consider the Angels' case. In Trout's first eight seasons, 2012-2019, he never finished below fourth in MVP voting. Since 2020, he's never played in more than 75% of the Angels' games in a season. Ohtani never played in more 75% of the Angels' games until 2021 (nor did he pitch more than a few games in a season until 2021), so despite being on the same team for six seasons, Trout and Ohtani never had a season where both were healthy for the full season the same year.

Another reason is that the players that command the highest salaries are frequently past the best years of their careers. The Angels have a history of winning the battle by signing the prized free agent to a long-term contract in December, only to lose the war for the next several seasons when that player fails to perform. 

* Albert Pujols won the MVP award three times for the St. Louis Cardinals between 2005 and 2009. After 11 seasons with the Cardinals, he signed a 10-year contract with the Angels, starting in 2012. His best season with the Angels was not as good as his worst season with the Cardinals, by any of several statistical metrics. Ironically, after the end of the 10 years, Pujols spent one last season with the Cardinals in 2022, and while he didn’t play regularly, his numbers, pro-rated for the number of games he played, were better than any of his Angels seasons.

* Josh Hamilton was suspended from the minor leagues for three years because of serious substance abuse problems, but once he got clean, he was spectacular. After a few great seasons, including an MVP, he signed a five-year contract with the Angels, starting in 2013. He was ineffective, and played only two years with them.

* Anthony Rendon was probably the second best player on the Washington Nationals team that won the World Series in 2019, then signed a seven-year contract with the Angels. His first year, the COVID-shortened 2020 season, he played at the level he’d been playing. In the last three seasons, he averaged less than 50 game per year because of injuries.

One thing Pujols, Hamilton, and Rendon had in common was that they were each 30 years old or older when they started with the Angels. Sometimes signing an aging free agent can pay off, but it's a gamble.

The other thing is that there's an element of chance in baseball, and maybe the Angels are just an unlucky franchise. They've been around since 1961, but they've only won the World Series once, in 2002, and have only won one other post-season series, a first-round series in 2014. They played a total of six games in the 1980s (when there was only one playoff round before the World Series) where a win would have put them in the Series, but lost every one of those games, two of them after having leads late in the game..

* In 1982, they won the first two games of a best-of-five series against the Milwaukee Brewers, lost the next two games, but then built a 3-2 in the final game. They gave up two runs in the 7th inning and lost 4-3.

* In 1986, they led the Boston Red Sox three games to one in a best-of-seven series, and led 5-2 going into the 9th inning of Game 5. They were still ahead 5-4 with two outs and two strikes on the hitter when relief pitcher Donnie Moore gave up a two-run homer to Dave Henderson. Amazingly, the Angels tied the game in the bottom of the 9th, but lost in extra innings, and the next two games weren't close. 

Gene Mauch, a manager I rooted for throughout his 27-year career, was managing both of those Angels teams, and never did make it to the World Series. 

Then there's the Padres

Unlike the Angels, the Padres have traditional had fairly low payrolls. From 2016 through 2019, they never ranked higher than 24th in payroll, and never won more than 74  games. As we've seen, some teams with low payrolls are very successful, but it's not a sure thing.

Then, before the 2019 season, they signed the prized free agent of the year, Manny Machado, to an 11-year contract. Unlike many of the Angels' unsuccessful free-agent signings, Machado was not that old, only 26 at the time. 

In 2019, Fernando Tatis Jr., a player that they had drafted as an amateur, appeared in the majors for the first time at age 19, and quickly showed that he was a special talent. He was outstanding in the COVID-shortened 2020 season, so in February of 2021, shortly after his 22nd birthday, the Padres signed him to a lucrative 14-year contract. Most players peak sometime in their mid-20s, so the Padres were definitely not making the mistake of paying big dollars to a player past his prime.

In the middle of the 2022 season, the Padres were in the hunt for the playoffs, so they traded for one of the most attractive young players in the majors, 22-year-old Juan Soto, who was in his 4th season in the majors, and had been the best hitter on the 2019 World Series champion Washington Nationals (remember Anthony Rendon, 10 years his senior, who signed with the Angels after that season?).

Before the 2023 season, the Padres signed Xander Bogaerts to an 11-year contract. Bogaerts had been a very good (though not at the level of Tatis, Soto, or Machado, much less Trout or Ohtani) shortstop with Boston, winning the Silver Slugger award as the American League's best hitting shortstop six times, and was a key part of the team that won the 2017 World Series, but he was 30 years old at the time they signed him.

And just to complete the story, the Padres somehow managed to trade for Blake Snell, who had won the Cy Young Award as the American League's best pitcher in 2018 as a 26-year-old. 

By 2023, this team was loaded.

And won 82 games, and missed the playoffs.

So what happened?

Machado had some very good seasons with the Padres, finishing 2nd in voting for the league's MVP in 2020 and 3rd in 2022, but his 2023 season, when he turned 30, was good but not great, and so far this year, he hasn't been nearly as good as in 2023.

Tatis was spectacular in 2021, the first year of his long contract, leading the league in home runs. But he missed the first half of 2022 with an injury. Rumor was that it was the result of a motorcycle accident suffered in the off-season. When a reporter asked when the accident happened, Tatis replied, "Which one?" As Tatis was ready to return from the injury, he tested positive for steroids, and was suspended for 80 games, which took up the rest of the season, plus the start of 2023. His offensive performance for 2023 was far short of what it had been in the 2019-2021 seasons, although he did win a Gold Glove award for his fielding. So far, his hitting in 2024 is about where it was in 2023.

Bogaerts offensive performance in 2023 wasn't quite as his average year earlier in his career, and he wasn't even that good for the first part of this season, before getting hurt. 

Soto was spectacular in the last half of 2022 and the full 2023 season, but the Padres couldn't work out a long-term deal with him, and he'll be a free agent after this season. Rather than gambling everything on 2024, and potentially ending up with nothing, the Padres traded him to the Yankees. The Yankees are having their best season in years so far, and Soto is a huge part of that. He had two home runs (including the one in the 9th inning Sunday that decided the game) and a triple in the two games we saw them play against the Giants this past weekend. We'll see whether the Yankees can sign him, but I suspect they will.

Snell was mediocre in 2021, a little better in 2022, and was clearly the National League's best pitcher in 2023, after which he signed a big free-agent contract with the San Francisco Giants, and has generally been getting shelled, although he pitched well against the Yankees Sunday before leaving the game with an injury (this does not bode well for the Giants).

The net result was that the Padres made the playoffs in 2020, but got beat in the first round, then stumbled to a losing season in 2021. In 2022, they were very good, won 89 games and won two rounds in the playoffs (including a three games to one rout of their archrivals, the Dodgers), before losing to the Braves in the round before the World Series. It's hard not to wonder what they would have done if Tatis had been available that year, rather than missing it all because of self-inflicted problems. In 2023, their payroll had risen to the 3rd highest in baseball (it was 3rd lowest in 2017), but they barely won more than they lost, then traded Soto and saw Snell go free agent.

What did they do wrong? It's not as obvious as the Angels signing players past their prime, although Bogaerts and Machado now look that way. But I guess that just as there are multiple ways to succeed, there are multiple ways to fail, and, like the Angels, maybe a part of it is just chance. 

Will Tatis return to his 2020-2021 form? Are the declines of Machado and Bogaerts only aberrations of a little more than a season? The Padres certainly have to hope so.

And their payroll is back down to 15th highest in the majors.

The venue:

Angel Stadium is the 4th oldest stadium in MLB. It has a waterfall feature in centerfield, and you can see the mountains in the distance, both of which are beautiful. But in between, there's a freeway and billboards. I just don't know how to feel about it.

 The game: 

The Padres had a starting pitcher, Adam Mazur, making his major league debut. In many ways, it was a spectacular first start. He pitched six innings and allowed only one run and two hits. But he walked four batters, and there were some hard-hit balls. I'll be fascinated to see what his next start is like.

The game was tied 1-1 going into the seventh (the Angels' Patrick Sandoval, who has been struggling, also pitched very well), but then the Padres changed pitchers, and the first three Angel hitters reached base on reliever Yuki Matsui, and all three eventually scored. The Padres rallied in the 8th and scored one run, but got no closer.

And of the players I talked about earlier, Trout, Rendon, and Bogaerts were all on the injured list, but Tatis and Machado, neither of whom has been hitting well this year, had a total of five of the Padres' seven hits.