The Angels hope Lucas Giolito fortifies their rotation (and Reynaldo López relieves the bullpen) for one more postseason run before Shohei Ohtani moves on. How sound are the hopes?

The good news is just as The Athletic‘s Tim Britton exhumed: two teams in the past ten years went into the trade deadline approach as buyers and ended up winning the pennant. One was the 2015 Mets; the other, last year’s Phillies.

The bad news is that this is still the Angels about whom we’re about to talk.

Maybe nobody was terribly surprised when the Angels let it be known Wednesday that they weren’t going to move unicorn Shohei Ohtani this deadline, either. But while baseball world wrapped around that, general manager Perry Minasian heeded owner Arte Moreno’s mandate and went in for a continuing potential postseason run.

The best available starting pitcher on the market who wasn’t named Ohtani is now an Angel. So is a relief pitcher who could provide a little breathing room for a bullpen not necessarily one of the American League’s most reliable.

White Sox teammates Lucas Giolito (RHP) and Reynaldo López (RHP) came west in exchange for the top two prospects in a farm system that isn’t overloaded with highly-attractive prospects otherwise. Giolito gives the Angels a reliable rotation workhorse to augment Ohtani. What López gives them out of the bullpen depends almost entirely on him.

That was last year: López was one of the stingiest relievers in the business, with a 1.93 fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP) showing his 2.76 ERA indicated a bit of hard luck. This has been this year: His 11.1 strikeout-to-walk ratio is undercut by walking over twice as many this year (4.7 per nine) as last (1.5), but . . . in his final five White Sox gigs before the trade, López struck eleven out in six innings while walking only three.

If that indicates returning to his 2022 form, the Angels will take it.

Giolito, of course, is a mid-rotation man at best, his 2020 no-hitter—the only no-no in White Sox history in which a pitcher struck ten or more batters out (he struck thirteen out)—notwithstanding. He does have a 3.12 strikeout-to-walk ratio this season, but he’s striking out shy of ten per nine but walking a shade over three per nine, almost exactly his career rates.

Pulling catcher Edgar Quero and projected reliever Ky Bush (LHP) in exchange is a plus for the White Sox, who’ve re-entered rebuilding after their last re-set didn’t quite get them where they wanted to go. They’re also hoisting pitchers Lance Lynn and Joe Kelly on the market hoping for another couple of reasonable prospects.

But did the Angels really do themselves such a big favour? Can they really iron up for one more postseason push while their unicorn (Ohtani) and their soon-to-be-returning veteran future Hall of Famer (Mike Trout) remain together? The smudge on the Angels has long enough been that they lacked what was needed behind those two to make their two greatest generational players, ever, postseason champions.

The deal for Giolito and López can prove to be either the jumpstart or the sugar in the fuel tank. Ask Britton, and his lack of optimism might prove alarming:

On the eve of the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, the Baron de Bassompierre summed up the feelings of his fellow Belgians: “If we are to be crushed,” he said, “let us be crushed gloriously.”

That’s the animating principle behind the Angels’ decisions on Wednesday night. Backed into a corner best described somewhere between “suboptimal” and “downright impossible” by a years-long inability to win with two transcendent stars, the Halos have decided to make one last stand with Ohtani.

His Athletic colleague Andy McCullough isn’t all terribly optimistic, either:

The phrase “moral hazard” comes to mind when considering the Angels emptying an already threadbare farm system on this quixotic quest for a wild-card spot this autumn. But you know what two other words come to mind? “Shohei” and “Ohtani.” Which leads to a different phrase: “moral obligation.” At least until October, the Angels plan to employ Ohtani, and Moreno has decided to maximize his franchise’s postseason chances, however remote. So the window is right here, right now, consequences be damned.

And so it is that the Angels shipped out two of their best prospects — an admittedly low bar — for Giolito, a mid-rotation starter who looks bound for some regression, and López, a reliever with a 4.29 ERA. As Britton mentioned, Giolito was the best pure rental starter on the market. He may benefit from leaving the White Sox, where little has gone well during the past two seasons. Even so, Giolito’s peripheral markers — all the knobs on Baseball Savant that were red in 2021 but blue in 2023 — are alarming. The Angels might have bought the dip. But, hey, when you’re a buyer, you buy what you can. López’s strikeout numbers have jumped in 2023 but so has his walk rate. He’s a reliever. Who knows if it’ll work out.

But, look, they decided to go for it. This is what going for it looks like. It’s going to be a heck of a ride.

Well, they said the California bullet train was going to be a heck of a ride, too. Until it wasn’t. We may yet end up trying to decide which was the bigger California boondoggle: the bullet train, or this and the past few years of Angels baseball.

That seems like a harsh thing to say about a team that’s won seven of their last nine games and now sits seven games out of first in the AL West, and four out of the final AL wild card slot, with the Red Sox and the Yankees just ahead of them there. But Minasian says of the Giolito-López acquisition that the Angels are “going to roll the dice and see what happens.”

They’re hoping to roll boxcars on two pitching rentals, while refusing yet again to let their extremely marketable unicorn bring back the prospects they need badly to begin re-seeding a farm whose drought won’t be saved by weeks of rain storms. And all three become free agents at season’s end.

Most of the Angels’ existence under the Moreno regime has equaled shooting craps. And, more often than not, crapping out.