Anthony Rendon signed with the Angels in December 2019 for seven years and $245 million. Since then, he’s played in 257 of a possible 1,032 games, missed the entirety of 2025 recovering from hip surgery, and hasn’t put on the uniform in a real game since 2024. Last December, the team and Rendon’s camp at Boras Corp. agreed to restructure what was left of the deal. Progress, the Angels are calling it. A payment plan is more like it.
Here’s the number that matters: 443. That’s how many games Rendon missed between 2020 and 2024, out of 648 possible — not the inflated figure that’s been floating around, but the one ESPN actually verified. Stretch it across his full tenure and it’s 775 missed out of 1,032. He hit .242 with a .348 on-base percentage in the games he did play, which is fine production for a part-time player nobody’s paying $35 million a year for.
The Restructure Doesn’t Fix the Mistake
A $38 million payout in 2026 was supposed to close out the deal’s final year. Instead, MLB Trade Rumors reported the Angels will pay it out at $7.6 million a year through 2030. Payroll flexibility this season gets a $30.4 million boost from that move, which is real and useful. Keeping checks flowing to a player who hasn’t taken a competitive at-bat for them since before the last two Angels GMs got hired and fired is the tradeoff. Those checks will outlast the current lease on half the roster.
News of the restructure broke in December, and beat writers reacted less like it was a health update and more like a farewell:
NEWS: Anthony Rendon and the Angels have agreed to a restructuring of his contract, a source tells @TheAthletic.
He will not join the team in 2026. His tenure with the Angels is over.
Read: https://t.co/uhDraHCix0 pic.twitter.com/iQ0eH8Sup5
— Sam Blum (@SamBlum3) December 30, 2025
Nobody’s pretending this is a comeback story. Rendon is rehabbing from his home in Houston, not with the team. He’s 35, with a hip that’s already required surgery. There’s no version of this where he suits up again, and the front office knows it. Retirement hasn’t happened, but he also hasn’t played baseball in almost two years, which functionally amounts to the same thing with better health insurance.
This Is the Pattern with the Angels
Angels fans have spent the winter doing the math nobody at the ballpark wants to do out loud. Xander Bogaerts has produced roughly three times Rendon’s fWAR in San Diego over the same stretch, at a lower average annual value. It’s the exact shape of every Angels contract disaster going back to Josh Hamilton and Albert Pujols, two more max-money bets on health that never paid off. Rendon just happens to be the version with the biggest number attached and the longest tail.
Deferring $38 million to 2030 is the Angels admitting the Rendon deal is a sunk cost, choosing to absorb it in smaller bites instead of one gut punch — the same instinct that’s defined the real problem under Arte Moreno for years now: find the version of the decision that hurts less today, worry about the accounting later.
Rendon earned more than $228 million from this franchise before the restructure even kicked in, for 257 games of work. Baseball doesn’t have a mechanism to claw that back, and it shouldn’t. But the next time an Angels front office tells you a big free-agent swing is the move that finally fixes things, remember that this is what fixing things looks like five years later: a ghost on the books until 2030.
