The Angels are 38-57, on pace for the first 100-loss season in franchise history, and Arte Moreno reportedly does not want to trade Reid Detmers. Bob Nightengale reported in June that Moreno wanted to keep Detmers, Jose Soriano, and Jo Adell. The fan reaction was immediate, unanimous, and long past tired.
The Angels plan on keeping Reid Detmers, Jose Soriano and Jo Adell with Arte Moreno not wanting to trade them, per @BNightengale
Adell is under team control through the 2027 season, while Detmers and Soriano are under control through 2028. pic.twitter.com/aT2Ps7NzSE
— Just Baseball (@JustBB_Media) June 21, 2026
We covered this ground in June, before Perry Minasian got fired, Mozeliak got hired, and everything was briefly, cautiously supposed to be different. Mozeliak came in and said the Angels were “clearly going to be sellers.” He was asked about trading Mike Trout and said “that’s not happening” — notably the only player he took off the table, which implicitly left Detmers and Soriano very much on it. One early report suggested Moreno might give Mozeliak more latitude than his predecessors. We said the problem was never Perry Minasian. The Mozeliak hire looked, for a moment, like evidence we were wrong.
That moment lasted maybe two weeks.
Jeff Passan put the odds of the Angels trading Detmers at 20 percent, and the reason he didn’t go higher was explicit: “How much leeway owner Arte Moreno will give Mozeliak to potentially deal Detmers and others with multiple years of club control remains unclear.” That’s a polite way of saying the owner is the variable nobody can control, including the general manager whose entire job is to control variables.
Detmers is earning $2.6 million this season on a club-controlled deal that runs through 2028 — two more arbitration years after this one. His ERA is 4.39 but his FIP is 2.81 and his xERA is 2.76, which means he’s been pitching considerably better than his results, against a schedule that included the Dodgers, Astros, and Diamondbacks. Nightengale reported that if the Angels wanted to move him, they could demand a package exceeding what Detroit receives for Tarik Skubal, a back-to-back AL Cy Young winner. The Angels’ farm system is ranked in the bottom five in baseball. They have the asset that would fix that, right now, at peak value, with two years of control attached.
You know this story. In 2023, the Rays offered Junior Caminero and Carson Williams — two of Tampa Bay’s top prospects, ranked among baseball’s best by Baseball America at the time — plus additional pieces for Shohei Ohtani. The Angels were 56-51. Moreno decided against it. Four months later, Ohtani signed with the Dodgers for $700 million.
Rosenthal: In 2023 the Rays and Angels "seriously discussed" trading Shohei Ohtani for Junior Caminero, Carson Williams, and additional lesser pieces in return.
Angels owner Arte Moreno decided against the trade. pic.twitter.com/QmIiCVsmPS
— Underdog MLB (@UnderdogMLB) May 21, 2026
The Angels have not made the postseason since 2014. This is their eleventh consecutive losing season. A FanSided columnist wrote that calling them the New York Jets of Major League Baseball would be “overly insulting to the Jets,” which is both funny and correct. The question one columnist posed — “Do they truly think that Detmers and Adell are the keys to a 2027 playoff run?” — has no good answer, because no rational front office decision ends with “hold the 26-year-old lefthander with elite underlying metrics and two years of control while losing 100 games.”
Maybe Mozeliak gets the latitude this time. Maybe the early reports about Moreno loosening his grip turn out to be true. The pattern, though, is very clear about what happens when Arte Moreno is presented with a difficult trade decision involving a controllable star: he keeps the player, watches the value erode, and the player eventually leaves for somewhere else. There is no version of this that ends well for Angels fans. There is only the question of how long you want to spend arguing about it.
