Who are the best Dodgers and Angels of the first

This is the golden age of baseball in Southern California. The Angels heralded its daybreak.

In 2002, the Angels gained the World Series, the first of six postseason appearances within eight years. The Dodgers had performed fairly good ball for more than a century, but they never had completed that.

Angel Stadium was the place to be. The rally monkey was all the rage. The crew nurtured a wave of younger expertise to encompass Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero. In 2009, the ultimate 12 months of that run, the Angels drafted future Hall of Famer Mike Trout. In 2011, for the first and only time, the Angels offered more tickets than the Dodgers.

Neither the Angels nor the Dodgers made the playoffs in 2010, 2011, or 2012. Since then, the Dodgers have made 13 consecutive postseason appearances, with three World Series championships to show for it. The Angels have made one, and they didn’t win a recreation.

Never — and this contains the Dodgers’ time in chapter court — have the fates of the two Los Angeles franchises been so disparate. In 2026, the Dodgers might win their third consecutive World Series championship, and the Angels might end in last place for the third consecutive 12 months.

In a story on the Major League Baseball web site, two writers ranked the 30 groups on the foundation of how doubtless each crew could be to win this 12 months’s World Series. The Dodgers ranked as most doubtless. The Angels ranked as least doubtless.

At a time major league house owners would really like you to consider market dimension equals future, the crew with baseball’s longest postseason drought performs in the second-largest market in North America.

Today, however, we come not to bemoan the dangerous occasions but rejoice the good occasions, for the Angels and Dodgers.

The century is a quarter previous. So right here are our quarter-century groups for both the Angels and Dodgers, based solely on performances for those groups. In a few locations, we included a deserving participant at a secondary place, if his main place was absolutely stocked. Let us know where we received it proper, and where we didn’t.

And, while you’re there, you’ll see the story of our golden age in a nutshell. Of the 22 gamers on the Dodgers’ first and second groups, 11 have been on at least one of the World Series championship groups this decade. Of the 22 gamers on the Angels’ first and second groups, only 4 performed for the Angels this decade.

One was Shohei Ohtani, the first-team designated hitter for both groups.

*We thought-about how long somebody performed for the Dodgers or Angels during this century, as properly as how properly somebody performed, but we’re making an exception right here for two causes: one, left subject has not been a place of strength and depth for the Dodgers; and, two: Manny Ramirez’s two-month “Mannywood” run after the Dodgers traded for him in 2008 was merely astonishing: He performed 53 video games and drove in 53 runs, batting .396 with 17 home runs and a 1.232 OPS. In the playoffs, he batted .520 in eight video games, hitting 4 home runs and driving in 10 runs, with a 1.747 OPS. The two-month “Mannywood” run was good for 3.5 WAR — the same WAR Freddie Freeman delivered over the total 2025 season. (And, yes, in May of the following 12 months, Ramirez was suspended for violating baseball’s drug coverage.)