The Los Angeles Angels Have Reached A New Level Of Desperation By Calling Up A First Baseman From Double-A That They Just Drafted Last Month
I know very little about Nolan Schanuel. I’m happy for him. It’s so hard to make it to the big leagues, and to get there at 21 years old is pretty incredible. He's mashed in the Major Leagues, and I hope that he has a long successful career. But even if he does end up working out, this move reeks of desperation. The Los Angeles Angels are becoming the Colorado Rockies. It’s not that they’re void of good players. It’s that they have no idea what they’re doing.
Several weeks ago, the story was that the Angels were going all in. They were trying to seize the opportunity. Fuck trading Shohei Ohtani, they were going to build around him. Yeah, about that. It took a grand total of two weeks, but the Angels playoff hopes are dead. What’s the next course of action? Calling of a 21-year-old from AA.
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Look, this may work. Maybe Nolan Schanuel ends up becoming a generational bat for the Angels. In the short term, perhaps he can provide them with a spark. Even if it works, I would still argue that this is reckless. It’s a sign of an organization with no real plan. Several weeks ago, they gutter some of the best pieces of their farm system because they believed a playoff window was open. Perhaps they believe that Nolan is the last piece of the puzzle that can get them over the top. If that’s the case, I wonder why they didn’t call him up earlier. The Angels are very much behind the eight-ball right now.
Again, I don’t have any personal distaste towards the player. I hope he gets called up and rakes. The guy is living the dream, but it’s the principle of this that bothers me.The Los Angeles Angels have a god-awful player development system. If you want to give them credit for Trout, fine. I would argue Trout would’ve turned out to be a generational player regardless of the team that drafted them. I’m not going to give them credit for developing Ohtani. They signed him. He was a finished product and ready to go when he arrived in the States. Other than that, who else has this organization developed that they can hang their hat on? We’re still waiting on Joe Adell.
The worst thing you can be as a professional organization is completely void of a plan. There are bad teams in Major League Baseball, my Tigers being one of them, but I know there’s some kind of roadmap for the future. They’ve outlined the caliber of player they want to acquire and the kind of team they want to have. The Los Angeles Angels are the baseball equivalent of pouring ten jigsaw puzzles on the floor and trying to put them all together in an hour. They are as Helter skelter as it gets.
Going from AA to big leagues is a very difficult task. The only player in recent history who could do it successfully was Juan Soto. Juan Soto is also a one in a million hitter. I’ve also seen organizations put way too much pressure on prospects to succeed. The Angels will deny it, but they’re calling on this kid to save their season and provide some kind of spark. Nine times out of 10, regardless of how talented that player is, that ends up backfiring. Knowing how things have gone for the Angels over the last several weeks, I feel like it’s inevitable that this will backfire as well.