It’s probably for the best that nobody is filming a documentary of the 2026 Los Angeles Angels.
As discussed on the latest episode of “Baseball Bar-B-Cast,” the Los Angeles Dodgers, now 29-18, visited Anaheim over the weekend and swept the Angels, who are now 16-31.
“This was not close at any point,” Jake Mintz said on the podcast.
The Dodgers outscored the Angels 31-3 across the series, with a shutout in Game 1, a 5-RBI night from Shohei Ohtani in Game 2 and Roki Sasaki’s best outing of the season in Game 3.
Notably, as Mintz pointed out, the Angels beat the Dodgers all six times they played last year, but that will not be the case this season.
“I think it is a reminder that the Angels are definitively worse than they have been, and it tells me more about them than it does about the Dodgers,” he said.
And this is nothing new, as the Angels have been a disappointing operation for years.
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“I think when you have organization rot and a losing culture, a lack of depth, a lack of expectations and a lack of cohesion in terms of a plan, a vision, a proof of concept that they can win baseball games, these results are going to pile up,” Jordan Shusterman said.
To Shusterman, the Angels’ losses captured the discrepancies between the two teams. In Game 1, the Dodgers patched together a shutout using largely anonymous bullpen arms — and an organizational plan to help them succeed. Meanwhile, the Angels of late have signed players with more name recognition but haven’t been able to help those players take steps forward. And at this point, there isn’t much reason to believe that they ever would.
“When you are this bad at so much else below the minor leagues, below the major-league level and just how all of it functions on the field and you put up this much losing over the past decade, why would any of us believe that this is going to work?” Shusterman said.
Quoting the movie “Miracle,” Mintz summarized it like this: “You don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone.”
“That is true about the Angels,” he said. “Frankly, it is true about most baseball teams. It’s not just about how good your players are. It’s about how you deploy them. It’s about your planning, your strategy. It’s about the players who aren’t on your team yet and the organization’s track record of filling those holes.”
Given all of these problems and an organizational inability to fix them, the outlook for the Angels across the rest of the 2026 season is not good.
“The Angels are not just bad — they are worse than they have ever been,” Mintz said. “… And it’s a damn shame that this is the year that Mike Trout has turned the clock back.”
For more on the Angels and Major League Baseball, listen to “Baseball Bar-B-Cast” wherever you get your podcasts.