but how are you going to get someone with many years of control when you have such a bad farm system?
if you want to complain about the angels not winning with trout, that's something.
if you want to complain about the angels not building their farm system up, that's something else.
you want to have your cake and eat it too. i told you in the matt harvey thread and quoted myself in this one. what eppler has done is what moreno has seemingly asked of him: keep this team within striking distance of the postseason. they haven't been a playoff team under eppler but look at what he inherited: a veteran team with a bunch of departing veterans, no farm system and willie mays. he's built the farm pretty well all things considered, added simmons and tried to help out the pitching staff with the best defense he could manage.
you want pitching but i'm not sure what exactly you wanted them to do about that this offseason. developing pitching is ****ing hard, man. ask the white sox. ask the reds. ask any of the other teams across baseball that have been "rebuilding" for the better part of a ****ing decade.
This is my problem. We have obviously won no playoff games of course of the Trout era, and we still have no idea what direction to go towards in terms of building a winning team. We tried buying players, but the players we have spent money on never made any sense to begin with (Pujols, Hamilton, Cozart, notice how none of these players are pitchers despite it being our weakness). Now Eppler is trying to sell his plan as "building from within", but the team also does not want to commit to a full on rebuild, so our pool will likely never be top 10, and likely won't put us over the top. The team has no clue what it wants to do to try to win, and the ownership is too scared to fully commit to a specific direction in order to create a contender. Not to mention the lack of accountability from anyone involved (nobody ever gets fired, we were the laughing stock of the league for keeping Sosh around for so long despite being bad since 09, any other GM who's created issues like Reagins and Dipoto had to step down because we wouldn't fire them, owner never admits to any mistakes), and I am just not confident at all in our organization to build a winner. If we want to build up the farm, commit to a rebuild and shop everyone except for Trout and Ohtani. If we want to go all in on trades and free agents, go out and get players that actually fill our holes (predominantly pitchers). But this method of half assed rebuilding, trying to sell the team off as a playoff contender despite its god awful pitching, and never holding anyone in charge accountable is a recipe for perpetual mediocrity, and as a season ticket holder who is sick of seeing Trout's prime get wasted, I am becoming extremely frustrated that after 7 years, we are nowhere close to being a true World Series contender.