The first post-Shohei Ohtani season of Angels baseball was a difficult one for fans, as the Halos finished dead last in a weak AL West division with a 63-99 record that just barely kept them from posting the first 100-loss season in franchise history.
With Ohtani no longer in the fold and the team just having finished up its worst season yet, speculation regarding a potential rebuild as swirled around the team but owner Arte Moreno put any such rumors to bed during a phone interview with reporters (including Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register) earlier today. During the interview, Moreno made clear that the goal he’s laying out for the organization is to contend for a playoff spot in 2025. It’s a lofty goal considering the fact that only the lowly White Sox finished with fewer wins than Anaheim this season, but Moreno added that payroll is “going to go up” to accommodate his dreams of contention next year.
With that being said, it doesn’t appear a major increase in payroll is expected. After payroll dropped significant from 2023 to 2024, Moreno now suggests that the club’s budget for 2025 figures to fall somewhere in between the (per RosterResource) $176MM the team put forward this year and the $215MM the club spent during Ohtani’s final season with the organization. It’s not exactly clear where Moreno’s target payroll lands in between those two figures, but the Angels should have some room to maneuver this winter regardless. After all, the club’s 2025 books have just over $109MM in guaranteed contracts for 2025. That doesn’t include salaries for the Halos’ rather large arbitration class, but even if each player is tendered a contract in line with the projections by MLBTR Contributor Matt Swartz they’d still be sitting at a tidy $147MM for 2025, or nearly $30MM below last year’s payroll.
That could leave the club with as much as $50MM in payroll flexibility, should Moreno cap the club’s payroll just below $200MM. What’s more, Moreno also suggested that this offseason’s payroll increase should be sustainable for the club, though he cautioned that if payroll were to creep back to 2023 levels in the future it would have to face similar cuts to what it did last winter, with Moreno indicating that the budget for 2023 wasn’t sustainable.
“It’s just an automatic loss,” Moreno said of the club’s $215MM payroll in 2023, as relayed by Fletcher. “If I start piling up (financial) losses, then the next year…
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