A little over a year ago, the Angels signed starting pitcher Joe Blanton to a two-year, $15 million. That move was greeted by a collective groan. The reasoning was that Blanton wasn’t very good and certainly didn’t deserve a two-year contract.
Those critics had no idea how very right they were. In fact, one could argue that their criticism wasn’t hard enough.
Blanton was an utter disaster for the Halos in 2013, making 20 terrible starts before being banished to the bullpen for the remainder of the season and ultimately finished with a 6.04 ERA and allowing 1.97 homers per nine innings. He was literally the worst pitcher in baseball last year and one of the worst of the last few decades. There was no way that the Angels could possibly bring him back in 2014.
The only problem was that they unwisely gave Blanton that second year. Well, the Angels solved that today by giving Blanton his unconditional release. In so doing, they clear a lousy pitcher off their roster but eat $8.5 million to do so. Oh, and they still have almost no rotation depth, so they really must’ve wanted to just make Blanton go away.
Of course, the Angels are no stranger to paying lots of money to players they no longer want. They had a similar situation in 2012 when they paid Bobby Abreu $9 million to take a hike and then again in 2013 they paid Vernon Wells $9.5 million to play for the Yankees. Oh, and they are paying Wells again this year as he is on the books for $18.6 million. So, for those of you keeping score at home, the Angels will be paying $27.1 million to players no longer on their team in 2014. That’s a million more than the Astros paid their entire team all of last season.
Clearly things are going exactly according to plan in Anaheim.
