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The Angels’ Bullpen Is Tied for the Most Blown Leads in Baseball, and It’s Exactly What You’d Expect After Cutting $90 Million

By Anthony Conte • August 31, 2026 • 3 min read

At 11 blown leads in the ninth inning or later, the Angels are tied with the Giants for the most in baseball this season. Accident, slump, bad matchups: cross them off the list. A front office ripped $90 million out of the payroll and called the resulting hole “flexibility.” This is what that looks like.

Blown Saves and Budget Math

Eleven blown leads in the final frame is a brutal number for late August, and the Angels own every bit of it. Go back and check the payroll before you look for excuses. Per SI.com’s payroll tracking, the Angels ran a $230 million cash payroll in 2025. In 2026, that number is $138 million. Ninety million dollars gone in one offseason, and the bullpen is exactly where you’d expect a $90 million cut to show up first.

You don’t trim that much money without giving something up, and the Angels gave up their closer.

What $90 Million of Damage Looks Like in the 9th Inning

August 29 in Philadelphia was the clearest version of this — Edmundo Sosa turned a two-out, ninth-inning at-bat into a go-ahead grand slam and handed the Phillies a 5-3 win. The Angels had a lead. Then they didn’t. That’s the whole season in one at-bat.

Angels beat writer Jeff Fletcher summed up the pattern after a similar collapse a few days earlier:

Starting pitching good enough, offense nowhere, bullpen nowhere. It’s not a bad take. A 2.57 ERA out of the rotation in August — first in baseball — is what the Angels are getting, while their .600 team OPS ranks 30th. One number is a strength built on the roster they kept. Offense and bullpen, the other two, are the cost of the roster they didn’t pay for.

Shuffling, not solving, has been the front office’s answer to the bullpen problem. Mitch Farris and Blake Weiman got called up from the minors. Down went Trevor Martin. George Klassen landed on the 15-day injured list with a back issue. That’s three roster moves in a week trying to patch a hole that a $90 million cut created in the first place.

Zoom out to the full season, and the split gets even starker:

Best rotation ERA in the sport and a bottom-of-the-league bullpen, on a roster that got cheaper by nine figures. Those two facts live in the same sentence because they’re the same decision.

Kenley Jansen Was the Visible Cost of Invisible Cuts

Kenley Jansen signed with Detroit instead of staying in Anaheim, and Angels fans have spent the season checking his Tigers stat line for validation. It’s mixed at best:

Four walk-off home runs allowed, more than any pitcher on that staff. If the plan was “let him walk and feel good about it later,” that plan isn’t working the way anyone hoped.

But that’s the wrong scoreboard to watch. Jansen struggling in Detroit doesn’t mean the Angels won the breakup. It means the Angels have nothing at closer, and the guy they wouldn’t pay is still racking up save chances for a team trying to win in September. The Angels saved the money. Now they’re paying for it every time the bullpen door swings open in the ninth.

This is the same front office that fired its pitching coach and two others a week ago instead of admitting the roster was built to blow leads. Mike Maddux got the pink slip for a decision he never made: cutting $90 million from the payroll.

Eleven blown leads isn’t misfortune. It’s an invoice, and somebody in Anaheim wrote the check that made this bullpen possible.

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