For the first and maybe only time, John Mozeliak will run the Angels\u2019 draft and trade deadline this summer. The longtime Cardinals baseball operations leader signed on as interim GM with the Halos. He\u2019s only signed through the end of 2026 and was brought in to oversee the club\u2019s search for a new general manager.<\/p>\n
Mozeliak temporarily takes over the front office at a key time. The MLB draft is this weekend and there\u2019s less than a month until the August 3 trade deadline. The Angels are riding a six-game losing streak that currently has them as the worst team in the game at 36-55. They\u2019re clearly going to be sellers; the question is how aggressive they\u2019ll be<\/p>\n
While it seems the plans are still being ironed out, Mozeliak has shed some light on the process in recent interviews with Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic<\/a> and Bill Shakin of The Los Angeles Times<\/a>. Last week, the interim GM told Rosenthal that he did not believe the Angels needed a complete rebuild. \u201cI don\u2019t think in this market you need to do that. I think what you need to do is understand what those arbitrages look like. You need to understand what the future free agent market looks like,\u201d he told The Athletic on Tuesday. \u201cThis team has resources. Now it\u2019s just making sure we deploy them correctly.\u201d<\/p>\n Mozeliak struck a similar tone in his conversation with Shaikin. \u201cThe one thing you have to realize about the Los Angeles Angels is they do have resources,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom (owner Arte Moreno) to the market size, this is a place that could be a very, very special place. \u2026 There are many franchises in the game of baseball that cannot do that. They have tradeoffs. They have to make a decision: If I\u2019m going to give you $20MM for your infrastructure, that\u2019s $20MM less for your payroll. This place is different.\u201d<\/p>\n Moreno\u2019s spending history doesn\u2019t exactly support that point. The Angels famously made significant scouting cuts during the pandemic in 2020. They have generally run higher than average player payrolls, though Moreno has stopped short of paying the competitive balance tax since 2004. (They were willing to go into luxury tax territory in 2023 until falling out of the playoff picture, in fairness.) Moreno has pulled back spending following the collapse of the team\u2019s local broadcast contract. MLBTR\u2019s payroll tracker<\/a> \u2014 available to Front Office subscribers courtesy of contributor Ethan Hullihen \u2014 has the Angels 16th in MLB with an approximate $186MM payroll and $202MM luxury tax number.<\/p>\n The issues clearly extend beyond the mid-tier spending. Most of the free agent investments the Angels did make under former GM Perry Minasian busted. They made a habit of drafting lower-ceiling college players whom they could quickly jump to the majors to address roster deficiencies. That only really panned out with shortstop\u00a0Zach Neto<\/a>, though\u00a0Reid Detmers<\/a> has settled in as a mid-rotation starter after early-career inconsistency.<\/p>\n Speaking with Shaikin, Mozeliak mostly downplayed the notion that anyone was untouchable. The exception, as expected, was\u00a0Mike Trout<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s not happening,\u201d he replied when asked about the possibility of a Trout trade. There was never any reason to think it would, at least not this summer.<\/p>\n Trout has full no-trade rights and hasn\u2019t publicly expressed any interest in going elsewhere. Moreno has seemingly never wanted to entertain the possibility and it wouldn\u2019t make sense to turn that decision to an interim GM even if it were on the table for ownership. That\u2019s before considering the complication of Trout\u2019s injury history and the nearly $142MM on his contract between 2027-30.<\/p>\n The bigger question is whether the Angels would entertain moving any of their productive arbitration-eligible trade chips. Given the organizational history, they\u2019ll probably take Neto more or less off the table when he\u2019s controllable for another three seasons. Detmers and\u00a0Jos\u00e9 Soriano<\/a> have two and a half seasons of team control and a higher injury risk as pitchers. They probably should be available, yet Bob Nightengale of USA Today<\/a> wrote last month that Moreno didn\u2019t want to move either of those starters or right fielder\u00a0Jo Adell<\/a> (controllable through \u201927).<\/p>\n If the Angels again shy away from moving controllable pieces, they wouldn\u2019t have much to offer. Their impending free agents are\u00a0Jorge Soler<\/a>,\u00a0Travis d\u2019Arnaud<\/a>,\u00a0Kirby Yates<\/a>,\u00a0Yo\u00e1n Moncada<\/a>,\u00a0Adam Frazier<\/a> and\u00a0Brent Suter<\/a>. Yates has pitched well lately and could probably land a mid-level prospect. He\u2019ll still be a second or third-tier bullpen target for a lot of contenders as a 39-year-old working with the lowest velocity of his career. No one else from that group seems likely to get more than cursory interest.<\/p>\n Mozeliak did suggest the Angels could take a different approach to the draft than they have in recent years. \u201cI\u2019m not wedded to a high school player or a college player. I want the best player,\u201d he told Shaikin. Essentially every team espouses the \u201cbest player available\u201d approach, so perhaps that\u2019s just a truism, but the Angels haven\u2019t selected a high schooler in the first round since taking\u00a0Jordyn Adams<\/a> in 2018. Their most recent second-round selection out of high school was\u00a0Kyren Paris<\/a> one year later.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say that drafting high school players in the top round or two is necessarily a better strategy. Though it\u2019s broadly true that high school signees tend to have wider ranges of outcomes than players selected out of college, that obviously varies on a case by case basis. The Angels clearly have had one of the most extreme college-heavy bents of any team in recent seasons, though, so it\u2019d be notable if they\u2019re truly open to the entire board. They\u2019ll pick 12th and 45th overall, then have the sixth selection of Rounds 3-20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first and maybe only time, John Mozeliak will run the Angels\u2019 draft and trade deadline this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":784273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,53689,293338,28796,591,251652,85],"class_list":["post-784272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-jo-adell","tag-jose-soriano","tag-mike-trout","tag-mlb","tag-reid-detmers","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/784273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}