1) I didn't say all of their scrubs developing to the civic level at the same time was a sign of stupid management. It's not. It's just happening at the same time as several of their dumbest contracts hitting peak painfulness and complicating their problems for the short term. They've got 10 guys who used to be scrubs who are entering the arbitration (= expensive) window of their career and they're never going to be able to trade enough of them to keep their payroll open for acquiring new talent. It's not myopic to recognize that they're going to be hurting financially for a while (a period of 2-3 years) and that it may knock them out of the catbird seat in the AL West until this transition ends and their next wave of scrubs arrives. It's also not myopic to observe that because they've been elite for so long, their farm system now sucks and they don't have the next wave of prospects on the way for cheap to replace the guys that have gotten expensive.
2) I also think you're completely wrong that the only dead wood on the Angels' payroll is GMJ. I think their worst mistake has been actually paying for a bullpen. They didn't used to do that. If you remember, the 2002 Angels that won the WS did it with an entire bullpen of "who's he???" pitchers who made nothing and had good years. One of those guys was Scot Shields who was good enough for long enough that now he costs WAAAYYYY too much money for a set-up man and has gotten too old and ineffective to justify his contract. THey're paying 20 million dollars for three relief pitchers. That's CRAZY stupid. Sorry...it just is. The Hunter contract you could take in the same light as Ichiro...except that Hunter isn't anywhere near as good a player as Ichiro and is aging out of the skill position (CF) making it a TERRIBLE contract going forward. And they spent entirely too much money on Scott Kazmir and Ervin Santana too...commiting beaucoup bucks to guys before they established that it would be a good idea to do so (in Kazmir's case they also traded three prospects and this happened because their starting pitching in 2009 sucked because they had no one in AAA who could replace their injured starters).
My point was not that the Angels were doomed to suffer a decade or more of futility...my point was that they are about to be forced to make some very hard choices and they're probably going to find themselves buried in the AL West until they develop more prospect internally again. Which they've shown more ability to do than Seattle historically but it remains to be seen whether Reagins is as good at that as Stoneman was and whether Zduriencik has improved the Mariner minor league effort. And they wouldn't have had to make some of these tough choices if they hadn't ridiculously overspent for center fielders two years in a row and paid 20 million dollars for their bullpen.
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