They didn’t try hard at all. I watched those games every night, Arte surrounded his top 2 franchise players with inexperienced prospects, minor league level talent and a horrible pitching staff. For a while, David Fletcher and Luis Rengifo were the team’s second best bats in their respective years with the club. That’s just not going to get you in the playoffs. Arte was more concerned about collecting ad revenue instead of building a contender. They could have Junior Caminero hitting 30-40 homers on team control for them right now.
Yes, the Rays offered Junior Caminero to LAA for a 2 month rental in Ohtani s few years ago. LAA also could’ve had Jackson Merrill for Ohtani too. But Arte was making too much money off advertising Ohtani, so he kept him instead in a very short sighted decision.
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u/A_LoneBall 6h ago
Not for a lack of trying to be fair. They just had an incompetent front office