Angels May Be MLB's Worst Team Over the Last Decade

Angels owner Arte Moreno (left) with wife Carole Moreno against the Cleveland Indians during a Spring Training game at Tempe Diablo Stadium on March 16, 2021. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

The numbers don't lie. The Angels haven't merely extended baseball's longest postseason drought to 11 seasons in 2025; they have done so while managing to stay uncompetitive into late September for the 10th straight season as well.

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Judging by postseason appearances, the Angels' recent elimination allowed them to clinch the notorious title of MLB's worst team over the last decade. Every other team has been to the postseason at least once since October 2014, when the Kansas City Royals swept the Angels in an American League Wild Card series.

But there's more to it than that. As noted by Andrew Wagner of the Southern California News Group:

• The Angels own the longest active streak of sub-.500 finishes in MLB

• The 10-year streak is the longest in the franchise’s six-plus decades

• It has been 16 seasons since the Angels reached an AL Championship Series

• The Angels last played in the World Series in 2002, when they won their only championship.

In the meantime, more than one-third of MLB teams (the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, Texas Rangers, Philadelphia Phillies, Houston Astros, Tampa Bay Rays, Boston Red Sox, Kansas City Royals, San Francisco Giants, St. Louis Cardinals, and Detroit Tigers) have participated in multiple World Series since the Angels made their first, last, and only appearance in the Fall Classic.

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ESPN's Jeff Passan recently accused Angels owner Arte Moreno of being stuck in the past to the detriment of the franchise.

"The love that [Moreno] has for that championship team and really for the late '90s/early 2000s Angels — the Darin Erstad, Troy Percival, Tim Salmon, Garrett Anderson — the Angels are where they are I think because Arte Moreno is constantly trying to recapture something from a bygone era," Passan said on the ESPN Baseball Tonight podcast. "And it's almost as if the Angels in some ways are the team that acts like the sabermetric revolution never happened."

The primary victim of Moreno's nostalgia lies in the Angels' farm system. While other teams continue to make data-driven advances in player development, ESPN recently ranked the Angels' farm system 28th in MLB. Author Kiley McDaniel noted that the Angels' farm has ranked between 25th and 30th every year since the end of the 2021 season.

It is the opposite of a formula for long-term success. The Angels have baseball's seventh-worst regular season winning percentage since 2016. They rank 26th in ERA and 22nd in runs scored during that span.

The franchise malaise is hurting the team at the gate, too. With six home games remaining this year, the Angels will fall short of the 3 million attendance mark for the sixth straight season — a threshold they passed every year from 2003-19.

Even in a season where many things went right, the Angels are failing to give fans a compelling reason to tune in.

For more Angels news, head over to Angels on SI.