Mind-boggling Anthony Rendon stat shows how bad of a signing it was for the Angels
By John Buhler
It is an art form, really. Not since Sam Bradford's floppy sleeves played mediocre to halfway decent quarterback for various NFL teams have we seen a player get paid more to do less than Anthony Rendon does for the Los Angeles Angels. To be fair, he was an absolute stud in college at Rice and was one of the most fun players to watch when he was starring with the Washington Nationals before.
After winning the 2019 World Series with Washington, Rendon left the nation's capital to sign a seven-year, $245 million contract to play for the Halos. In the nearly five years since he switched MLB teams, Rendon has played in a grand total of 236 games for the Angels, including only 36 nearly midway through August of this year. He is robbing the Angels blind. It is absolutely unbelievable.
Through roughly 4.75 years into his Angels contract, the guy is making nearly $700,000 per game to play for the Halos. If he plays in a game, the margin goes down. If he misses another one, the number only goes up. I didn't think we would ever see an MLB player get essentially NFL game checks to play baseball, but here we are. If he plays in two games, he makes more than Brock Purdy does in a year.
Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register pointed out that since Rendon left Washington that the Nationals have used 19 different players over at third base. As for the Angels, it has been 28 players.
To make matters worse, since Rendon signed with the Angels, no other team in baseball has used more third basemen since the 2020 COVID season than Los Angeles. Houston has used only 11...
Nobody on Earth will pay a premium for a bad product than Angels owner Arte Moreno ever could.
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Anthony Rendon makes NFL game checks to occasionally play baseball
For the life of me, I do not understand how prolifically the Angels can sustain this never-ending culture of suck. Mike Trout, who might be broken now, has only played in the postseason once, and that was a decade ago. The Angels had Shohei Ohtani for nearly a decade. Now in his first season playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, he will finally get to play in his first-ever postseason game.
This has kind of been the course ever since Moreno bought the team from the Walt Disney Company two decades ago. The 2002 Angels were a fun and plucky team, one that used all the power a Rally Monkey could ever provide to win its lone Fall Classic ever. In the years since, it has been a lot of Hall of Famers, but not a lot of winning. It just shows baseball is a game you need to win as a team...
The shame in it all was Rendon was kind of on a Hall of Fame trajectory when he came over to the Angels. Unfortunately, he turned 30 and he turned into a pumpkin. We are roughly the same age, but he gets paid more to sleep in a given day than some of our peers make in a calendar year. The road to hell was paved with good intentions. Death, taxes and Scott Boras clients being so incredibly greedy...
We can only hope that Rendon has invested his money wisely because no one wants him to go broke.