The Angels used to have exactly one thing going for them that kept them out of the conversation with baseball’s true disaster franchises: they had never lost 100 games in a season, not once, through every bad era this organization has produced. That streak is dead. The Angels finished 2026 at 62-100, officially the worst record in franchise history, and the number does something a decade of bad vibes never quite managed. 62-100 turns “the Angels are mismanaged” from a fan grievance into a permanent line in the record book.
Timing here could not be cleaner if a studio had scripted it. Stan Kroenke’s group agreed on September 1 to buy the team from Moreno, ending his 25 years as owner, and the sale is still working its way toward an early-2027 close. A quarter-century of decisions landed here: the Pujols contract, the Hamilton contract, the parade of general managers fired before their rebuilds ever finished. All of it cashed out in a 62-100 season right as Moreno’s name was coming off the deed, exactly what this franchise’s recent team coverage has been forecasting for years. Baseball doesn’t usually hand you closure this tidy.
Mike Trout did not deserve any of this. He’s a finalist for Comeback Player of the Year, which is its own small tragedy — a 34-year-old future Hall of Famer finally healthy again, finally performing, with absolutely nothing around him to show for it. Fans have been saying the quiet part out loud all year.
Mike Trout: “Hey guys I’m putting up MVP seasons over here I could use some help”
His manager to the Angels front office: https://t.co/WjX9tn4iDH pic.twitter.com/HvmEUxwya4
— AT (@BaseballWRLD_) October 13, 2026
Zach Neto gave the organization its one real building block, a 5.2-win season with 27 homers and 24 stolen bases, and it still added up to triple-digit losses. That’s not a roster with one hole. That’s a roster with a load-bearing wall missing.
Kurt Suzuki ran that roster into the ground, and nobody in the organization seemed interested in stopping him. Around the team, the accountability gap wasn’t a secret this year. Analyst accounts that cover the Angels closely spent September connecting the dots between Suzuki’s hands-off approach and the collapse.
I’m sure Angels players loved playing for Kurt Suzuki— he never spoke poorly about them publicly, let them have more late report times and established a low standard from day 1.
But 100 losses and new ownership necessitate a new manager who can establish & demand accountability.
— BTH (@BeyondTheHalo) September 27, 2026
Twenty-five years of bad drafting and worse free-agent spending did more damage than one manager’s late report times ever could, and that’s not the whole explanation: it’s the detail that makes the 100 losses feel earned rather than unlucky. A team already built wrong needed somebody demanding more from it anyway. Instead it got a manager who let the losing season happen quietly.
None of this is new, exactly. Twelve consecutive seasons without the playoffs mark the longest active drought in the sport, and this year’s number is just the ugliest data point in a streak that was already an embarrassment. What’s new is that the number finally forced the issue. A 72-90 team can still tell itself a story about one bad bounce or one bad bullpen. A 100-loss team can’t.
Kroenke isn’t walking into Anaheim as a savior, and nobody should pretend otherwise. His ownership record elsewhere is mixed at best, heavy on cost discipline and light on guaranteed results, and the sale hasn’t even closed yet. What he’s walking into is simpler than a rescue mission: a dugout with no settled leadership plan, a farm system that produced exactly one Neto in a decade, and a fan base that’s done grading on a curve. The rest of baseball’s offseason will move on at its normal pace this winter. Anaheim doesn’t get that luxury.
The bar is low. For the first time in years, it’s visible.
