MLB Trade Rumors

The Angels have been without manager Ron Washington since late June after he went on medical leave away from the team, and he revealed to reporters last month that he was recovering from quadruple bypass surgery. Even in spite of that recovery from major surgery, however, the 73-year-old still hopes to manage the Angels in 2026. Washington reaffirmed that desire in a conversation with Sam Blum of The Athletic, who reports to today that Washington has not yet spoken to Halos owner Arte Moreno about his future but hopes to do so in the next few days.

“I just want to sit down and talk baseball with him,” Washington told Blum of Moreno. “I’ll let them decide if I’m the guy to lead the club.”

Washington added that he also hasn’t spoken to club GM Perry Minasian about his future with the club. The Halos hold a club option on Washington’s services for the 2026 season, while Blum notes Minasian himself has one year left on his contract with Anaheim. According to Blum, much of the club’s leadership is facing uncertainty headed into the final days of the regular season, as interim manager Ray Montgomery has also expressed uncertainty about his future in the organization but remains in the mix to manage the team in 2026.

There’s a number of factors at play that could be weighing on Moreno’s mind as he decides what direction to take the club moving forward. The most obvious, perhaps, is the team’s lengthy playoff drought and disappointing results in recent years. The Angels have 88 losses with two games left to go in the 2025 season, and that performance comes on the heels of last year’s 99-loss campaign and back-to-back 89-loss seasons in 2022 and ’23. For years, the Angels have hung their hopes on the idea that a healthy season for Mike Trout could help them get back to October, but Trout has played in 128 games this year and turned in results that are less than stellar by his lofty standards even as he remains an above average bat overall.

Perhaps Trout can build on this year and turn in a season more like his vintage, MVP-caliber performances of a decade ago in 2026. Failing that, however, the Angels will need to change at least somewhat if they’re going to get back to the playoffs for the first time since 2014. It’s hardly unthinkable that Moreno could look see the uncertain contract situations of Washington, Montgomery, and Minasian over the next year as an opportunity to shake up the organization and bring in new voices. With that being said, there are some factors at play that create an argument for sticking with the status quo.

Notably, the team was doing better than this record would suggest when Washington was actually at the helm of the club. He took medical leave when the club had a 40-40 record and sat just one game back of an AL Wild Card spot. It’s difficult to argue that the team’s poor record this year lies at Washington’s feet when he was away from the organization for their 25-39 stumble after the All-Star break. What’s more, Blum suggests that Moreno may not be interested in bringing in new leaders for the organization on multi-year agreements with a likely lockout on the horizon following the 2026 season.

That could be due to financial reasons, as a lockout that bleeds into the season would result in cancelled games and lost revenue, but another factor could be the uncertainty surrounding the landscape of the game when the dust settles on the next round of collective bargaining. If a salary cap is put into place, as whispers around baseball have indicated MLB is hoping to accomplish, that would surely have significant repercussions about how teams all around the league conduct their business. Knowing what sort of financial system MLB will be operating under for the foreseeable future would surely be helpful when deciding who is best suited to lead the organization for what could wind up being the rest of the decade or longer.

Another factor, Blum writes, figures to be Washington’s health. Washington is already the oldest manager in the majors by a few years. 70-year-old Rangers skipper Bruce Bochy is the only other septuagenarian leading a dugout at the moment, though Brian Snitker of Atlanta will celebrate his 70th birthday in October and has not yet made a decision about his future beyond the 2025 campaign. Between Washington’s age and him coming off major heart surgery, there’s risk for both him and the club in bringing him back into the dugout next year and hanging him a stressful job with a difficult schedule and plenty of responsibility like that of a big league manager.

Despite those possible concerns, Blum notes that Washington has no interest in moving into a front office role at this point. He called himself a “hands-on guy” who prefers to work directly with the players in conversation with Blum, and noted that he was confident he would be working for one of the league’s organizations next year in that sort of role, whether that’s a managerial job or a different role. Outside of his stints managing the Rangers and Angels, Washington spent seven years as third base coach of the Braves and won a World Series with the organization in 2021.