{"id":237666,"date":"2026-03-26T15:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T15:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/237666\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T15:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T15:30:15","slug":"who-are-the-best-dodgers-and-angels-of-the-first-quarter-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/237666\/","title":{"rendered":"Who are the best Dodgers and Angels of the first quarter century?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is the golden age of baseball in Southern California. The Angels<\/a> heralded its dawn.<\/p>\n

In 2002, the Angels won the World Series<\/a>, the first of six postseason appearances within eight years. The Dodgers<\/a> had played pretty good ball for more than a century, but they never had done that.<\/p>\n

Angel Stadium was the place to be. The rally monkey<\/a> was all the rage. The team nurtured a wave of young talent to surround Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero<\/a>. In 2009, the final year of that run, the Angels drafted future Hall of Famer Mike Trout<\/a>. In 2011, for the first and only time, the Angels sold more tickets than the Dodgers.<\/p>\n

Neither the Angels nor the Dodgers made the playoffs in 2010, 2011, or 2012. Since then, the Dodgers have made 13 consecutive postseason appearances, with three World Series<\/a> championships to show for it. The Angels have made one, and they did not win a game.<\/p>\n

Never \u2014 and this includes the Dodgers\u2019 time in bankruptcy court \u2014 have the fates of the two Los Angeles franchises been so disparate. In 2026, the Dodgers could win their third consecutive<\/a> World Series championship, and the Angels could finish in last place for the third consecutive year.<\/p>\n

In a story on the Major League Baseball website, two writers ranked the 30 teams on the basis of how likely each team would be to win this year\u2019s World Series<\/a>. The Dodgers ranked as most likely. The Angels ranked as least likely.<\/p>\n

At a time major league owners would like you to believe market size equals destiny, the team with baseball\u2019s longest postseason drought plays in the second-largest market in North America.<\/p>\n

Today, however, we come not to bemoan the bad times but celebrate the good times, for the Angels and Dodgers.<\/p>\n

The century is a quarter old. So here are our quarter-century teams for both the Angels and Dodgers, based solely on performances for those teams. In a few places, we included a deserving player at a secondary position, if his primary position was fully stocked. Let us know where we got it right, and where we didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

And, while you\u2019re there, you\u2019ll see the story of our golden age in a nutshell. Of the 22 players on the Dodgers\u2019 first and second teams, 11 were on at least one of the World Series championship teams this decade. Of the 22 players on the Angels\u2019 first and second teams, only four played for the Angels this decade.<\/p>\n

One was Shohei Ohtani<\/a>, the first-team designated hitter for both teams. <\/p>\n

*We considered how long someone played for the Dodgers or Angels during this century, as well as how well someone played, but we\u2019re making an exception here for two reasons: one, left field has not been a position of strength and depth for the Dodgers; and, two: Manny Ramirez\u2019s two-month \u201cMannywood\u201d run after the Dodgers traded for him in 2008 was simply astonishing: He played 53 games and drove in 53 runs, batting .396 with 17 home runs and a 1.232 OPS. In the playoffs, he batted .520 in eight games, hitting four home runs and driving in 10 runs, with a 1.747 OPS. The two-month \u201cMannywood\u201d run was good for 3.5 WAR \u2014 the same WAR Freddie Freeman delivered over the entire 2025 season. (And, yes, in May of the following year, Ramirez was suspended for violating baseball\u2019s drug policy.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is the golden age of baseball in Southern California. The Angels heralded its dawn. In 2002, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237667,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1426,2135,22368,78948,423,107225,24771,48,52,51,47,50,49,107227,13433,107228,107226,2668,315,4470,72],"class_list":["post-237666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-angels","tag-baseball","tag-century","tag-deserving-player","tag-game","tag-good-dodgers","tag-hall","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mannywood","tag-op","tag-primary-position","tag-quarter-century-team","tag-run","tag-time","tag-world-series","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}