ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 3: Anthony Rendon #6 of the Los Angeles Angels reacts on the field after the final out of the first inning during a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Angel Stadium of Anaheim on September 3, 2024 in Anaheim, California. (Photo by Brandon Sloter/Getty Images)
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This didn’t officially qualify as a news dump, since an anonymous source was behind ESPN’s report Wednesday indicating the Angels and Anthony Rendon are negotiating a buyout of the final year of Rendon’s insanely regrettable (well, not for him) contract that will allow Rendon to retire.
But midafternoon Thanksgiving Eve — when everyone is either stuck in traffic on the highway, sitting in a plane on aa tarmac, busy running last-second errands in advance for the holiday or getting a jumpstart on the annual bar crawl — was the perfect time to bury news about the imminent end of one of the most ill-timed marriages in sports history.
Even if Rendon never gets another cent from the Angels — hint: He’s a Scott Boras client so he will get many more cents from the Angels — he’ll have made more than $204 million to hit .242 with 22 homers and 125 RBIs over 257 games over the first six seasons of the deal he signed Dec. 13, 2019.
It was a Friday, because of course it was.
And you don’t need to be an Ivy League-educated general manager trained in analytics to know that 257 games isn’t even close to two full seasons. Another way to put it: Rendon has missed a whopping 613 games during his contract due to injuries to his (deep breath here) back, wrists, hips, left groin, left hamstring, left knee and left oblique. He didn’t play at all last season following left hip surgery.
Yet another way to put it: The 52 games Rendon played during the pandemic-shortened, 60-game 2020 campaign will go down as the second-most games he played in a season for the Angels, just behind the 58 games he logged in 2021.
By any measure, this was a disaster — one that wasn’t even on the horizon of worst-case scenarios back in December 2019, when Rendon arrived in Los Angeles with a well-known reputation for being ornery and difficult but with no durability concerns after playing in all but 63 of the Nationals’ games the previous four seasons.
The Angels didn’t even have to squint all that hard to see a path by which Rendon would follow Vladimir Guerrero as an Expos/Nationals star who finished off his Hall of Fame case in Los Angeles and went into Cooperstown sporting a halo on his plaque.
Rendon turned 29 during the 2019 season, when he led the majors with a career-high 126 RBIs, set career highs with 34 homers, a .319 average and a 1.010 OPS and tied his best single-season mark with an NL-leading 44 doubles while finishing third in the MVP balloting and helping the Nationals win the World Series. He was the only player in the majors to hit .300 each year from 2017 through 2019.
Upon exiting the Nationals, he ranked 10th in franchise history with 30.3 WAR. Five of the players ahead of him are either Hall of Famers (Guerrero, Gary Carter, Tim Raines and Andre Dawson) or bound to end up there (Max Scherzer).
Rendon’s WAR through his age-29 season also compared favorably with that of Hall of Famers Adrian Beltre (35.8) and Chipper Jones (38.6) through their age-29 seasons. Rendon also led his league in a category four times (he had 111 runs in 2014 and 44 doubles in 2018) while receiving MVP votes four times. Scott Rolen, the most recent third baseman inducted into the Hall of Fame, never led the league in any statistical category and earned MVP votes four times in his 17-year career.
Rendon finished 10th in the AL MVP balloting in 2020, when his stats (.286 with nine homers, 31 RBIs and a .915 OPS) prorated out to another strong 162-game season. Had he produced four more seasons from 2021-24 like he did in his final four years in Washington, he would have entered last season with 55.4 WAR.
That wouldn’t have assured a spot on the Clark Sports Center stage sometime in the 2030s for Rendon, but he would have been far along the path to Cooperstown. For comparison’s sake, Nolan Arenado and Jose Ramirez, each of whom have a strong Hall of Fame case, ended last season at 57.8 WAR and 57.6 WAR, respectively. But now, the what-ifs and a Thanksgiving Eve news dump are all Rendon and the Angels have left.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybeach/2025/11/30/for-anthony-rendon-and-the-angels-what-ifs-are-all-they-have-left/
