For the first and maybe only time, John Mozeliak will run the Angels’ draft and trade deadline this summer. The longtime Cardinals baseball operations leader signed on as interim GM with the Halos. He’s only signed through the end of 2026 and was brought in to oversee the club’s search for a new general manager.
Mozeliak temporarily takes over the front office at a key time. The MLB draft is this weekend and there’s less than a month until the August 3 trade deadline. The Angels are riding a six-game losing streak that currently has them as the worst team in the game at 36-55. They’re clearly going to be sellers; the question is how aggressive they’ll be
While it seems the plans are still being ironed out, Mozeliak has shed some light on the process in recent interviews with Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic and Bill Shakin of The Los Angeles Times. Last week, the interim GM told Rosenthal that he did not believe the Angels needed a complete rebuild. “I don’t think in this market you need to do that. I think what you need to do is understand what those arbitrages look like. You need to understand what the future free agent market looks like,” he told The Athletic on Tuesday. “This team has resources. Now it’s just making sure we deploy them correctly.”
Mozeliak struck a similar tone in his conversation with Shaikin. “The one thing you have to realize about the Los Angeles Angels is they do have resources,” he said. “From (owner Arte Moreno) to the market size, this is a place that could be a very, very special place. … There are many franchises in the game of baseball that cannot do that. They have tradeoffs. They have to make a decision: If I’m going to give you $20MM for your infrastructure, that’s $20MM less for your payroll. This place is different.”
Moreno’s spending history doesn’t exactly support that point. The Angels famously made significant scouting cuts during the pandemic in 2020. They have generally run higher than average player payrolls, though Moreno has stopped short of paying the competitive balance tax since 2004. (They were willing to go into luxury tax territory in 2023 until falling out of the playoff picture, in fairness.) Moreno has pulled back spending following the collapse of the team’s local broadcast contract. MLBTR’s payroll tracker — available to Front Office subscribers courtesy of contributor Ethan Hullihen — has the Angels 16th in MLB with an approximate $186MM payroll and $202MM luxury tax number.
The issues clearly extend beyond the mid-tier spending. Most of the free agent investments the Angels did make under former GM Perry Minasian busted. They made a habit of drafting lower-ceiling college players whom they could quickly jump to the majors to address roster deficiencies. That only really panned out with shortstop Zach Neto, though Reid Detmers has settled in as a mid-rotation starter after early-career inconsistency.
Speaking with Shaikin, Mozeliak mostly downplayed the notion that anyone was untouchable. The exception, as expected, was Mike Trout. “That’s not happening,” he replied when asked about the possibility of a Trout trade. There was never any reason to think it would, at least not this summer.
Trout has full no-trade rights and hasn’t publicly expressed any interest in going elsewhere. Moreno has seemingly never wanted to entertain the possibility and it wouldn’t make sense to turn that decision to an interim GM even if it were on the table for ownership. That’s before considering the complication of Trout’s injury history and the nearly $142MM on his contract between 2027-30.
The bigger question is whether the Angels would entertain moving any of their productive arbitration-eligible trade chips. Given the organizational history, they’ll probably take Neto more or less off the table when he’s controllable for another three seasons. Detmers and José Soriano have two and a half seasons of team control and a higher injury risk as pitchers. They probably should be available, yet Bob Nightengale of USA Today wrote last month that Moreno didn’t want to move either of those starters or right fielder Jo Adell (controllable through ’27).
If the Angels again shy away from moving controllable pieces, they wouldn’t have much to offer. Their impending free agents are Jorge Soler, Travis d’Arnaud, Kirby Yates, Yoán Moncada, Adam Frazier and Brent Suter. Yates has pitched well lately and could probably land a mid-level prospect. He’ll still be a second or third-tier bullpen target for a lot of contenders as a 39-year-old working with the lowest velocity of his career. No one else from that group seems likely to get more than cursory interest.
Mozeliak did suggest the Angels could take a different approach to the draft than they have in recent years. “I’m not wedded to a high school player or a college player. I want the best player,” he told Shaikin. Essentially every team espouses the “best player available” approach, so perhaps that’s just a truism, but the Angels haven’t selected a high schooler in the first round since taking Jordyn Adams in 2018. Their most recent second-round selection out of high school was Kyren Paris one year later.
That’s not to say that drafting high school players in the top round or two is necessarily a better strategy. Though it’s broadly true that high school signees tend to have wider ranges of outcomes than players selected out of college, that obviously varies on a case by case basis. The Angels clearly have had one of the most extreme college-heavy bents of any team in recent seasons, though, so it’d be notable if they’re truly open to the entire board. They’ll pick 12th and 45th overall, then have the sixth selection of Rounds 3-20.
