Cody Stavenhagen of The Athletic<\/a> served up an intriguing list ranking the ten worst contracts in MLB.<\/p>\nAdvertisement<\/p>\n
Rendon isn\u2019t the only Angels player to turn up on the list. He ranked second behind DH Kris Bryant of the Colorado Rockies, and Angels outfielder Mike Trout checked in at #3.<\/p>\n
Stavenhagen raised some salient points about both Angels players in his comments. With regard to Rendon, only four players will make more non-deferred money in 2026, with the names including Mets outfielder Juan Soto, pitcher Zack Wheeler, and outfielders Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Aaron Judge. The difference between Rendon and these other players, of course, is that Rendon won\u2019t play a single game this year.<\/p>\n
Rendon\u2019s final numbers are appropriately horrifying. He\u2019s played just 257 games for the Angels since the 2020 season with just 22 runs and an accumulated 3.7 fWAR, and his deal was for seven years for $245 million.<\/p>\n
The Angels still have to negotiate the buyout with Rendon\u2019s agent, Scott Boras, and the hope is that Boras won\u2019t be as prickly as usual in these negotiations. The buyout might actually free up some money for the Angels to use on a player who actually plays, especially now that LA has holes at third base, second base and left field.<\/p>\n
Advertisement<\/p>\n
The Trout contract hasn\u2019t been as bad, and it\u2019s easier to defend him since he actually wants to play and believes he has a lot left in the tank. That\u2019s an open question at this point given his ongoing knee issues, but he did hit 25 home runs to go with a .353 OBP. He also played in 130 games, which was the most since 2019.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s making $37 million, though, and Stavenhagen pointed out some unavoidable facts. There are only six players in MLB who are making more than Trout, plus his days in center field are over. He still has five years left on his deal, so writers like Stavenhagen will probably be including him on their lists whenever the next update rolls around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bad contracts are mostly a simple fact of life in baseball. Sometimes deals go sideways for any number…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[15931,163,165,164,1426,33144,3673,26465,44637,47,44639,5128,1334,44635,44636,17203,15937,44638],"class_list":["post-77581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-aaron-judge","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-angels","tag-anthony-rendon","tag-colorado-rockies","tag-juan-soto","tag-kris-bryant","tag-los-angeles","tag-mets","tag-mike-trout","tag-mlb","tag-scott-boras","tag-stavenhagen","tag-the-angels","tag-vladimir-guerrero-jr","tag-zack-wheeler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77581","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=77581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}