Angels up to their old tricks again in latest trade that shouldn't scare Mariners

When the Seattle Mariners clinched the AL West title in September, they became the fourth team to win the division since 2015. The lone holdout has been the Los Angeles Angels, who thus badly need to make up for lost time. But instead, they don't seem to even know what year it is.

Seriously, folks, this is getting comical. The Angels were already inviting "Dig up, stupid!" jokes when they opened their offseason with a trade for Grayson Rodriguez and a free-agent deal with Alek Manoah. Then they doubled down on the second day of the Winter Meetings on Tuesday, announcing in the afternoon that they had acquired Vaughn Grissom from the Boston Red Sox.

Angels up to their old tricks again in latest trade that shouldn't scare Mariners

The name might not even ring a bell in the year 2025. You have to go back to 2022 to find the last time Grissom looked like he was going to be A Guy in the majors, and even then there wasn't much to go off of. He hit .291 in 41 games with the Atlanta Braves, but he was a bench jockey by the time the playoffs came around.

Since then, the most interesting thing to happen to Grissom happened on December 23, 2023, when the Braves shipped him up to Boston in the trade that sent Chris Sale to Atlanta. He was the only player the Red Sox got back in the deal, and they got -0.2 rWAR from him in a 31-game sample in 2024. Sale won the NL Cy Young Award that year.

Granted, Grissom is only 24 years old and he was once a borderline top-10 prospect in Atlanta's system. But at this point, selling him as an effective starter at second base is a bit like selling an old Ford Pinto as a "lightly used classic" after seven or right trips to the body shop.

It's no easier to sell Rodriguez or Manoah. Rodriguez was likewise a top prospect once, but he has a 97 ERA+ as a major leaguer and he missed all of 2025 after having elbow surgery. Manoah was an All-Star and AL Cy Young finalist back in 2022, but he posted -1.5 rWAR across 2023 and 2024 before having Tommy John surgery. He didn't pitch in the majors this year.

Granted, sometimes it works to take chances on other teams' former prospects. That was the Athletics' whole thing back in the early 2010s, when they turned Josh Donaldson into an MVP contender and Brandon Moss into a 30-homer slugger. Yet those guys weren't broken, and the A's strategy at least felt novel at the time. The Angels replicating it now feels desperate.

Not that the Mariners are complaining, of course. The Angels were a consistent source of wins for them this year, with the M's taking the season series 9-4. The Angels' moves since then — i.e., in with Rodriguez, Manoah and Grissom and out with Taylor Ward — amount to a net negative, to a point where they project for the second-lowest total WAR of any team in the American League.

The Mariners project for the fourth-most WAR of any team in all of MLB, and they're probably not even done fortifying their roster with impact talent. The Angels shouldn't be a problem for Seattle in 2026, and that says as much about them as it does about the Mariners.