The Los Angeles Angels were very busy at the trade deadline when they acquired players such as Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, C.J. Cron, and Randal Grichuk to bolster their roster.
However, since buying at the deadline, the Halos have not won a game.
On Monday, they dropped their seventh consecutive game and fell to two games below the .500 mark.
The Angels are also 11.5 games out of first place in the AL West and eight games back in the Wild Card race.
The team made the decision to hold onto Shohei Ohtani.
However, Ken Rosenthal believes that this wasn’t even the beginning of the mistakes they made and traced everything back to last year’s trade deadline, via Foul Territory on Twitter.
"The original sin was keeping Ohtani at last year's deadline."
More from @Ken_Rosenthal on this week's Fair Territory: https://t.co/JIjMISaf4r pic.twitter.com/l3OcnNhF28
— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) August 8, 2023
At last year’s deadline, the Angels were already well out of postseason contention and had a chance to trade Ohtani while he still had a year of control left on his contract.
Rosenthal likened the situation to that of the Juan Soto trade, when the Washington Nationals scored a haul in exchange for the slugger from the San Diego Padres.
At this point, Rosenthal believes that there was good reason for the Halos to keep Ohtani, since they were, and still are in contention.
However, the Angels are slipping in the standings and slowly falling further from contention.
Rosenthal said he would be surprised if the Angels recovered from this, and pointed out that their decision not to trade Ohtani is backfiring on them.
The Angels are on a slide and are slowly falling out of contention as the month of August progresses.
NEXT: Angels Manager Comments On Team's Current Rut
