ESPN Insider Doesn't Hold Back on Angels' Struggles Under Arte Moreno

Angels owner Arte Moreno is acknowledged by the fans before a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Tempe Diablo Stadium on March 3. | Rick Scuteri-Imagn Images

Among Angels fans, a consensus formed long ago around who was the primary culprit in the Angels' failure to clinch a postseason berth since 2014, the longest such drought in Major League Baseball. Any criticism of owner Arte Moreno now amounts to a drop in the bucket.

It's easy to hurl insults on social media, or speak into a screen from your couch. It's harder to account for all the many ways in which the Angels have fallen behind their peers in MLB.

More news: Angels Players Donate More Than $16,000 to Rio Foster GoFundMe After Car Accident

In his most recent appearance on the Baseball Tonight podcast, national reporter Jeff Passan spoke at length about one of the reasons Moreno is falling behind the times.

"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. "And it's almost as if the Angels in some ways are the team that acts like the sabermetric revolution never happened.

"I'm not saying that they're behind other teams or have been as bad as they have essentially since Mike Trout arrived because they don't use analytics, or don't use them to the extent other do, but it's part of it," Passan continued. "It's part of the stew of discontent that has taken over there."

More news: Angels' Jo Adell Reflects on 'Wake-Up Call' That Led to 2025 Breakout

The 2025 season has shone a light on exactly where the Angels have fallen short.

Trout is on track to play 120 games for the first time in six years. The Angels' starting rotation has been the healthiest in baseball, the only unit to use exactly five starters prior to the All-Star break. The Kenley Jansen signing worked out incredibly well; for the cost of a one-year, $10 million contract, he's 27-for-28 in save opportunities.

Meanwhile, six regular position players — Trout, Jo Adell, Zach Neto, Nolan Schanuel, Taylor Ward and Yoan Moncada — have an OPS+ above 100. Five of them are homegrown first-round draft picks.

Many things that could have gone wrong this year went right for the Angels. Yet they're still on pace for a 76-86 season. Why?

Absent practically any other excuse, the Angels' persistent inability to develop players who can push struggling regulars for playing time, or at least fill in on short notice, has thwarted their most promising season in years.

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, as many of their homegrown prospects (Reid Detmers, Chase Silseth, Neto, Schanuel, Christian Moore, et.al) have skipped through the minor leagues. But to succeed at baseball's highest level, a team needs to hit on more than one of its draft picks every year.

Teams that have harnessed applied analytics to maintain an edge in player development — all of baseball's most successful teams in 2025, that is — can usually find someone to play second base, make a spot start or two, or hold a lead for one inning out of the bullpen when injuries arise. The Angels' farm system rarely provides this depth.

Nowhere has this been more evident than the pitching staff. The Angels have a 4.79 ERA as a group, 27th in MLB. That marks the continuation of a disturbing trend line that's seen the Angels go from ninth in MLB in ERA in 2022, to 23rd in 2023, to 26th in 2024.

Finding pitching depth is arguably the most universal challenge in professional baseball. The sudden rise in the Angels' staff ERA has coincided with an increase in the number of pitcher IL placements around the league. More depth is needed now than ever in baseball history, and the Angels simply don't have it.

To Passan's point, it's a bad time to be stuck in the past. The same strategies for team-building that worked in 2002 don't work now, for reasons that have been obvious for years.

The court of public opinion has settled on Moreno as the primary scapegoat for the "stew of discontent" in Anaheim. Perhaps the jury is still out within the hallways of Angel Stadium, but Passan's latest dispatch at least confirms the discontent isn't limited to fans.

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