Shohei Ohtani, All-Star as pitcher and hitter, Los Angeles Angels wasting great players, Mike Trout, baseball

There’s a tweet that goes around baseball Twitter every so often.

It’s funny – but it also sums up one of the great teambuilding disasters in modern sport.

It’s about the Los Angeles Angels; a team with two of the greatest players in modern baseball history.

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The first is Mike Trout, who’s just plain incredible. A sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer, a three-time MVP (and he should’ve won more) and arguably the greatest player in modern history, Trout has been incredible at basically everything for over a decade.

We say basically everything because he’s not literally good at everything. Shohei Ohtani is, though.

The Japanese sensation came across to MLB for 2018 with big expectations, after dominating in his home nation as both a hitter and a pitcher – the equivalent of a cricket all-rounder, except it’s way, way less common in baseball.

After a strong rookie season, Ohtani suffered two injury cruelled seasons; and then came 2021, one of the most incredible years by any player in baseball history.

A superstar both hitting and pitching, Ohtani hit 46 home-runs and held a 3.18 earned run average in 23 pitching starts. Those are fantastic players for a player on one side of the ball – to do it on both is almost unheard of.

The only comparison is the legendary Babe Ruth, who revolutionised baseball in the 10s, 20s and 30s as a home-run hitter after starting his career as a superstar pitcher.

And for the second straight year, Ohtani is doing things that no player should be able to do in the modern era of baseball, where the skills for hitting and pitching have become so specialised.

This week he was once again named in the All-Star Game as both a pitcher and a batter, after becoming the first player to earn that right last year – when he both started the game as a pitcher, and led off the American League’s line-up as a designated hitter.

Both Trout and Ohtani are having fantastic years; and in pretty much any other sport, a team would find a way to build around them to have success. Heck, in the NBA, having two future legends in their prime would equate to title contention. (Especially in Los Angeles! Right?)

But we go back to that tweet.

“every time I see an Angels highlight it’s like ‘Mike Trout hit three homes runs and raised his average to .528 while Shohei Ohtani did something that hasn’t been done since ‘Tungsten Arm’ O’Doyle of the 1921 Akron Groomsmen, as the Tigers defeated the Angels 8-3’,” @matttomic said in May last year.

And this is the problem: because despite having both Trout and Ohtani, the Angels stink.

Since Trout debuted in 2011, the Angels have made the playoffs just once, and never won a playoff game – their lone appearance in 2014, off the back of a division-winning season, saw them swept 3-0 by long-time strugglers Kansas City.

Not only have they not made the playoffs since 2015, but they haven’t even had a winning season. In that period, they’ve had the league MVP playing for them three times; their best record in those years was 77-85.

It is a remarkable run of futility, wasting two modern greats, and making it even worse it comes at a time when MLB continues to expand the playoffs.

In 2012, the playoffs were expanded from four teams in each 15-team league to five teams. The Angels qualified once, in 2014.

In 2020, due to the pandemic, the playoffs were expanded to eight teams in each 15-team league. The Angels did not qualify.

Then for 2022, the playoffs were expanded to six teams in each 15-team league. The Angels, sitting 38-49, have just a 5 per cent chance of making it according to Fangraphs.

Maybe this would all make sense if the Angels were a smaller team that didn’t have the ability to spend money. After all, this year’s MLB payrolls from Opening Day ranged from $US234 million (Los Angeles Dodgers) to $US24 million (Baltimore Orioles)

The Angels typically rank in the bottom half of the top 10 for payrolls, ranking as fourth back in 2012. This year their Opening Day payroll was $US141 million, the highest in their division and ninth overall.

So it’s not like they’re not paying for players. It’s just that they seem completely unable to pay for quality players who can create a winning team around Trout and Ohtani.

And so two of the sport’s biggest names and best players look bound for yet another year in the wilderness, failing to appear in the playoffs – which is where most of the United States starts to actually care about baseball after its 162-game regular season.

This past weekend the Angels were swept by Baltimore – the aforementioned team with an embarrassingly low payroll – which saw even leading ESPN journo Jeff Passan bring up that Tungsten Arm O’Doyle tweet.

It’s a funny tweet.

But in a sporting sense, it’s a shame.