Here's a solution: trade Dipoto/Scioscia for Anthopoulous/Gibbons. a meaningless trade to cover bad karma. No one wants to admit to the simple bad luck element to team building in the short term.

zero?

Worth pursuing? The manager also is attached intimately to his assistant coaches. With that in mind, how many Angel pitching castoffs over the past four years (same time out of playoffs) have gone on to produce somewhere else? How many castoffs from other teams or free agents have excelled as Angels? Something is wrong here and it sure seems to point to something that the Angels are doing wrong with its pitchers.

Your overall point is excellent, but it's not reasonable to say that Shuck has been "significantly better" than Hamilton. I think that they've been pretty even, but if forced to choose, I'd rather have Hamilton's 2013 than Shuck's.

The Angels didn't HAVE to chase guys like Blanton & Hanson. They could have instead held onto guys like Haren and Santana. Granted, Haren isn't what he was and has had some brutal stretches in DC, but Santana has been pretty darn good. In any case, I'd take Haren and Santana over Blanton and Hanson any day, and I said that before the season started. But the point is they didn't have to chase after two starters when they already had two starters under contract for the year. DiPoto opted to downgrade his rotation, and the Angels are paying for it.

"He has had his OBP and home run totals drop in five consecutive years; do you know how many players have done that in major league history? Good, put the answer in the comments."

Don't know, but Dave Stapleton's OBP dropped seven years in a row, which is pretty impressive.

Bad luck?

The (potentially rapid) declines of both Pujols and Hamilton were foreseeable. In fact, as I recall, several writers on this very site raised that very possibility when those two were on the free agent market.

The problem is not bad luck or timing, not back loaded contracts and not failure to produce in 2013, the problem was in the thought process that poured $365 million into two players who were guaranteed to decline, the only question being how fast. Add in Pujols' injury history and Hamilton's atypical career curve and the results shouldn't be that surprising.

Yes, Pujols and Hamilton could have had great seasons and made those deals look pretty good, at least this year. But who gambles $365 million and the fortunes of your franchise for the next five years on anything but a dead-solid lock? Instead of bitching how you were screwed over by chance, it would do well to recall the finite possibility of throwing snake eyes before betting every dollar you have, and then some, on a roll of the dice. This is the ugly downside of failing to heed the doctrine of diversification.

I understand we are working the benefit of hindsight and even dead-solid locks are anything but. Honestly though, that doesn't matter. Results are what count, not excuses. These signings failed spectacularly, the damage to the franchise is potentially breathtaking in scope and the persons responsible for this train wreck shouldn't be waiting for a deserved axe to fall. They ought to be tendering their resignations.

your balanced equation is very sexy, Sam

HR & ONB dropping in consecutive years: (year ended)

SIX YEARS:
Ray Fosse (1975)
Fred Schulte (1937)

FIVE YEARS:
Garrett Atkins (2010)
Tito Francona (1963)
Harmon Killebrew (1973)
Ron LeFlore (1981)
Minnie Minoso (1962)
Jose Pagan (1973)
Jim Presley (1989)
Aurelio Rodriguez (1974)
Roy Sievers (1964)
Sammy Sosa (2005)
Frank Thomas (1966)

Going into 2013 the following players were at four consecutive years:

Albert Pujols (2013 ended with injuries)
Hideki Matsui (retired)
Ryan Raburn (homers went up in 2013)
Jason Bartlett (zero 2012 homers, couldn't go lower)
Brian Roberts (zero 2012 homers, couldn't go lower)

They should fire Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton

Part of DiPoto's job is to collect information from his scouting department about the available pitchers, and make moves based on his interpretation of that data. Clearly the results were bad.

Was the data bad? Given that Moreno has slashed their scouting department, maybe it was. Quoting:

Since his first full year as owner of the Angels in 2004, Moreno has fired close to 40 members of the front office, baseball operations department and scouting and medical staffs.

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/writer/scott-miller/23286878/broken-angels-tense-atmosphere-nearly-included-pujols-hunter-fight-in-2012

Even if you put Pujols and Hamilton on Moreno, DiPoto oversaw a lot of the other problems. Maybe it's not his fault, maybe nobody could have succeeded, but I think it's fair to say someone else should get a chance.

I keep seeing people say that if they hadn't signed Hamilton, they could have signed Greinke. Greinke signed BEFORE Hamilton, and the press generally reported at the time that the Hamilton signing was, at least in part, a reaction to losing Greinke to the Dodgers.

They could have also kept Torii Hunter....

This is a frustratingly wrongheaded argument.

As much fun as Sam Miller clearly had taking the contrarian viewpoint, his logic falls apart in "Myth #1". As the writer acknowledges at the beginning (and then seems to forget in the rest of the piece), the potential firings are not solely because of a bad 2013. It's because Dipoto right now lives at the intersection of Lousy Present and Worse Future that this is happening. Or to borrow a rhetorical device:

Bad 2013 + Horrible Outlook = Firings
Bad 2013 + Great Outlook = No Firings

If there was substantive hope that the team was going to rebound in 2014 or 2015 and not waste Trout's remaining years of very cheap team control, then it's likely that we wouldn't be having a conversation about firing Dipoto.

Just indicating that Dipoto is ALSO getting fired because 2013 was bad does not mean that the long-term argument for his firing constitutes a "myth". At the very worst it's an incomplete explanation, albeit one set up straw-man style by Sam Miller himself.

Also, while judging GMs based on outcomes can occasionally lead to faulty conclusions, there's no risk of that here, because Dipoto's process was also lousy. The Hamilton and Pujols deals were structured so that even in the best case scenario, the Angels would merely break even in terms of value. It is true that they failed more catastrophically than predicted. That does not make them remotely wise decisions, or supply a reason for Dipoto to keep his job.

As for Scioscia, firing the manager is rearranging deck chairs, but his not being responsible for all 20 wins of the Angels' underperformance is hardly a strong argument for keeping him on.

TL;DR:
It's not hard to come up with a reason to fire the GM: he and his staff mortgaged a whole lot of future to win this year, and they didn't even succeed at that. What often happens when you screw up that badly at your job is that you lose it.

Many fingers are being pointed at Pujols and Hamilton and rightfully so, but they aren't the only players to underachieve on this team. There was a piece on this very site a few months ago comparing the hitters expected vs. actual production, and only Mike Trout and two others exceeded expectations. When it's only one guy, you can say it's a guy, but when you see this many things go this badly wrong after an owner writes a blank check, a full housecleaning is in order.

If the names changed this could be an article about the Blue Jays even if the contracts taken on in Toronto are less awful, if only by comparison (Mark Buerhle anyone?), as the Jays mortgaged the farm team in the Marlins and Mets deals as opposed to overspending in free agency like the LAA. As a Jays fan, I feel a biazarre mix of schadenfreude and the need to commiserate...

2012 Stats for Angels:
4th in runs scored (3rd in AL)
16th in runs allowed

That would lead an amateur like me to think they needed to address pitching more than hitting. Would I prefer Hamilton to Hunter or Wells? On paper, of course. However, keeping Wells cost nothing more since he was under contract and was a sunk cost. Hunter was certainly available for a couple more seasons and the goodwill in keeping him would have helped keep the faithful happy. However, Hunter was not looking for a short term deal from the Angels and seemed to want more than the market would bear. I thought an outfield of Wells, Trout and Bourjos would have been credible given their other hitters in house. It would have allowed them to focus on pitching improvement and maybe keeping Santana or Haren. It seems like Moreno is intent on keeping up with the Dodgers and that's hard to do based on their resources. It is time for the Angels to focus on building from within once again. I did read that Moreno has cut staff a lot and tends to pinch pennies on the little things while throwing good money after bad with free agents. Maybe he will let his baseball people run the shop and keep his eye on bringing in the revenue. Of course, winning more will bring up revenues too.

I'd think the equation is more:

Bad 2013 + Expectation of Winning in 2013 = Firings

or

Bad 2013 + Kinda All-In in 2013 And Boy Did We Spend A Lot To Win Now Plus We're Sorta Triple-All-In If That's Even A Thing For The Next Four Years Because We Wanted So Bad To Win This Year = OMG Heads Will Roll

Remember when the dumbest thing in LA was Scioscia's sociopathic preference of Jeff Mathis over Mike Napoli triggering a trade of Napoli and Juan Rivera for Vernon Wells and all the Vernon Wells money? Much simpler times in the history of Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim transactional futility.