Angels shock the baseball world with sensible free agent behavior

Bob Dylan can’t get relief, but the Los Angeles Angels don’t have that problem. They just signed two veteran pitchers, Drew Pomeranz And Jordan Romanoto one-year deals worth $4 million and $2 million, respectively.

I’m starting to worry about the Angels becoming orthodox. For most of this decade, there have been two teams – the Angels and the Rockies – that you could expect to be truly iconoclastic. The other 28 clubs differed mainly because of the nature of ownership: how many resources their boss was willing to devote to the cause, and what time pressure, if any, was placed on executives to win. (It probably looks more like 27 other teams now, with the Buster Posey There’s an era going on in San Francisco, but that’s another story.)

But for the most part, the way you run a baseball team is you hire a business school guy, give him a budget and a list of goals, and let him do the cooking. Then he goes out and hires as many experts in quantum mechanics and biomechanics as he can, and lets the chips fall where they may.

The Rockies are aware of their strangeness; they have their own way of doing things. They are literally a City on a Hill, but if you look at the past seven seasons in the NL West standings, they have figuratively been more of a City in a Pit.

It appears the Angels were driven here because their owner is willing to spend money on free agents, but not on infrastructure. In 2023, a former pitcher told ESPN’s Alden González that the Angels’ approach was like “buy a McLaren and take it to Jiffy Lube.” It’s an astute comparison and perhaps the most poorly camouflaged anonymous quote in the history of journalism. The Angels are so completely adrift that anyone they encounter on the high seas can be claimed as a legitimate rescue.

Earlier this season, Orange County’s Major League team provided more laughs by trading for Vaughn Grissom and signing Immetryacquiring two of the hottest young Major League players of 2022. Never mind that Grissom and Manoah combined for -1.6 WAR as of 2023, and no Major League games were played in 2025.

But I’m afraid the Angels are turning into just another bad gardening team. Their payrolls stagnated – fell in real terms – during the 1920s Mike Trout And Anthony Rendon have yielded less and less. And no new, eyebrow-raising contracts have emerged; Trout and Yusei Kikuchi are the only angels with guaranteed contracts after 2026.

So what do they want with Pomeranz and Romano?

The Romano deal is pretty simple. In 2023, he recorded a second consecutive 36-save season for his hometown Blue Jays, using a two-pitch mix of a 90s four-seam with good rise and a small cut action, with an 80s vertical slider. Romano already threw hard, but because he was 6-foot-4 and had the arms of spider crabs, he was able to get almost eight feet of extension, increasing his plus speed increased even further.

In 2024, Romano was limited to fifteen appearances due to elbow problems, and he wasn’t very good when he pitched. The Blue Jays cut him loose the following winter and the Phillies picked him up. Under Dave Dombrowski in the early days, the Phillies liked to build their bullpen around firefighter-style stoppers and had a veteran closer in almost an emeritus role for rescue situations.

The most successful maybe-this-man-isn’t-washed closer of the bunch was Craig Kimbrel in 2023, which speaks volumes about how little the Phillies got out of it Corey Knebel, Jeurys Familiaand most recently Romano.

Romano’s Phillies tenure resembled a laboratory experiment to see how quickly a city can deploy the baseball team’s defensemen. He blew a save on Opening Day. It took him six appearances to record a flawless inning. His ERA reached double digits by the second week of May, and it wasn’t until May 11 that his save number surpassed his failed save number.

Even at his peak, Romano was never a great contact suppressor, and when he showed up in 2025 without a hint of fastball velocity, he turned into a home run machine: He allowed 10 in just 42 2/3 innings. Opponents hit .600 off his fastball, which would have ranked among the 10 highest marks of any baseball pitch had he faced enough hitters to qualify for Baseball Savant’s rankings.

Romano also posted a 49.0% beach percentage, the lowest in the past decade for a pitcher with at least 40 innings pitched. And since we’re talking about Romano as a historical outlier, here’s a fun fact: he finished the season with an ERA of 8.23, but an xERA of just 3.99. That seems like a huge spread; league-wide, ERA and xERA were within a few hundredths of each other. In the Statcast era (since 2015), there have been 4,091 individual pitcher seasons of at least 40 innings. In 2025, Romano had the only of those seasons with an ERA-xERA deficit of more than four runs. There had been only seven previous seasons with an ERA-xERA deficit of three runs or more.

I think Romano might be cooked, but maybe he was just really unlucky. It’ll only cost the Angels $2 million to find out, and he’s been more awesome than Manoah or Grissom recently, so who cares?

Pomeranz, on the other hand, was great in 2025. After a three-year layoff from the Majors due to elbow injuries, he went to the Cubs and picked up where he left off: a 2.17 ERA in 49 2/3 innings. He held left-handed batters to a downright poor .176/.238/.203 batting line; righties hit .234/.320/.374 from him, which isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s more than acceptable for a lefty specialist in this three-batter minimum world.

The former No. 5 overall pick is still throwing fastball-curveball — a bit Romano-esque, but slower, in a mirror and with less extension — but with less velo than before the elbow injuries. That’s fine, because pitchers tend to throw less hard at age 37 than at age 27. He is a good left-handed reliever with average leverage.

It’s clear why the Angels would want Pomeranz. Why Pomeranz would want the Angels, less so. This guy made six appearances in the playoffs a few months ago and allowed just one of the 19 batters he faced. (That one man on base was a home run in the deciding game of the NLDS, but the Cubs got that run back in the top of the next inning. No one is perfect.)

The going rate for mid-leverage relievers this offseason is between $9.5 million (Kyle Finnegan) and $12.33 million (Tyler Rogers) per year. Okay, Pomeranz is so old that his Major League debut was postponed by the Biblical locust plague. And if you count the postseason, he’s logged fewer Major League innings in the 2020s than Yoshinobu Yamamoto has pitched since the All-Star break this year. I understand why he doesn’t get two years with a double-digit AAV.

But $4 million isn’t a lot for someone who can give a team meaningful innings in the playoffs. Compare him to other lefties such as Gregory Sotowho received $7.75 million from the Pirates. Pomeranz’s salary is in line with what Caleb Thielbar And Hobby Milner got from the Cubs, but the Cubs are good and the Angels are not.

“Put some money aside so you can die somewhere warm,” Robert Redford tells Brad Pitt Spy game. I’m reminded of another aging former Cub, Kyle Hendrikswho fit that bill last year, ending his career with a forgettable one-year stint with the Angels. I think that might not look so bad for Pomeranz. And if he’s good, he could easily be traded at the deadline.

That’s what I would have said about Pomeranz if he had signed with a regular player like the Marlins. It’s an extremely low-stakes signing, but an undeniably good one for the Angels. What happened to these guys, man? They used to be fun.