Every Baseball Team Ranked By Angels in the Outfield Helpfulness

SPOILER: Number one is still angels.

In the process of emptying my mental wastebasket last night by asking the tough questions about the 1994 family movie Angels in the Outfield, BlueSky user Dan Moroz responded to me with a related, though entirely new, prompt.

So, instead of pondering why one of the film’s messages seems to be “the answer to the problems with America’s foster care system is baseball managers,” I have spent last night and this morning applying Dan’s query to every Major League Baseball team.

Photo by Briana Tozour on Unsplash

Based on a review of some of the angel-assisted action scenes in the movie, I applied the following rules to this analysis:

• The team’s nickname manifests in a form invisible to all humans (except Joseph Gordon-Levitt)

• These apparitions may exert physical will on our world at their discretion. In other words, they can touch things but they can also allow matter to pass through them.

• The nickname spirits understand the rules of baseball and want to help their teams succeed.

• Each phantasm retains its ordinarily understood skills and limitations; Orioles, for example, can fly because they are birds, not because they are ghosts.

There are three MLB franchises to which I did not apply this structure at all. The Washington Nationals and the New York Mets are, at best, named after geographic areas. What would it even mean for a metropolitan area to appear in right field?

The third excluded team was the Atlanta Braves because, well, this is a nonsense post, and not the place where we imagine the spirits of Native American warriors helping modern-day baseball players while asking what repetitive hand motion the fans are doing in the stands.

This leaves us 27 teams to rank, which can be divided into three categories.

ACTIVELY HELPFUL

1. Angels. Honestly, the movie nails it. The combination of magic-ish powers and the moral clarity of being dispatched by the Lord makes angels the best secret boost a team could acquire.
   

2. Giants. Invisible Giants would be a huge boost to pitchers, effectively squashing home runs and turning any ball hit with height into an easy out. Sharply-hit grounders and low line drives would still present a problem. I suspect a giant could also simply heave a baserunner from third to home in the event of a rundown.
   

   It’s unclear to me how helpful giants would be assisting batters, however; the ball and bat would be impossibly tiny to them, as if you gave an adult a toothpick and tried to use it to hit a 95 mph ball bearing.
   

3. Rays. Under their original nickname, the Devil Rays would not rank nearly this highly, for reasons we’ll see when we get to the Marlins. The rebrand, however, embraces both the sea creature and the rays of our sun.
   

   This presents an interesting conundrum: How can an invisible ray of light be helpful? The answer lies not in the luminous quality of a sunbeam but in its capacity for transmitting heat. One example: a concentrated burst of solar energy could be used to superheat a ball, forcing an infielder to drop it in pain right before throwing to first.
   
   Let me be very clear: it would not be ethical for a team to harness the power of the sun to attack an opponent with radiant energy beams. It would, I am forced to admit, be fairly effective.
   

4. Phillies. This is where we hit a STEEP drop. MLB.com helpfully lists nickname origins for every franchise, and for the Phillies that ancient definition is “a player from Philadelphia.” No supernatural powers here (other than invisibility), but it would still be quite advantageous to have an entire shadow team in the field on defense. Admittedly, there’s some risk these additional Phillies would be a terrible influence, depending on which era they came from.
   

5. Athletics. Your ghostly support will be strong, fast, and agile, but it won’t necessarily have baseball-specific skill.
   

6. Astros. Astronaut training is no joke, so I don’t doubt the conditioning of these particular assistants, but I’m not sure NASA is focused on how well their astronauts can hit a curve ball or turn a double play. I could be wrong, and if you know that I am, I would love to learn more about my flawed assumptions.
   

7. Cardinals/Orioles/Blue Jays. We have humanoid ghosts left to consider on this list, but I think the possibility of an invisible bird swooshing wind into your face or squawking into your ear or even pecking at your neck while you attempt to perform any baseball action would be so distracting that it would create a meaningful competitive advantage for your opponent. It would also probably crack your psyche in half, which is not going to be helpful at the plate.

NEUTRAL/AS HELPFUL AS HARMFUL

10. Pirates/Mariners. I lack the knowledge of seafaring life to argue whether Regular Sailors would be better baseball poltergeists than Mean Sailors. Ultimately, the distinction strikes me as meaningless, as this is the territory where I don’t think the manifestations of the team nicknames consistently provide that much help, though they also don’t actively hurt the team. A baseball field just isn’t their usual turf.

    
    That said, I’ve put this pair at the top of this category because they’re used to working as a team and reacting quickly to stressful situations. I think that makes them potentially more useful than some of the others in this pack.

12. Dodgers. The nickname comes from the Brooklyn days of the franchise, when fans would have to dodge electric streetcars near the team’s home stadium. Avoiding death by trolley was surely a critical skill in the late 19th century, and it involves some athleticism. None of that seems likely to translate to the ballfield.
    

13. Rangers. Just spirits who happen to be in law enforcement.
    

14. Brewers. Just spirits who happen to be in beverage production.
    

15. Yankees. The definition of “Yankee” presents you with several distinct paths, but none of them lead you to superpowers, unless you believe your place of birth automatically gives you +4 to throwing from third to first.
    

16. Twins. Just spirits who happen to have shared a womb.
    

17. Padres. Sandals don’t strike me as great footwear for baseball. While it’s possible these men of the cloth could summon angels and catapult up the rankings, Joseph Gordon-Levitt didn’t need a priest.
    

18. Guardians. Cleveland’s relatively new nickname comes from tall Art Deco statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge. The easiest way for these statues to invisibly aid the Guardians would be on defense. Step 1: Teleport into a semicircle directly in front of the plate. Step 2: Let every pitch thrown by a Cleveland pitcher pass through them to the plate. Step 3: Take on physical form and knock down any batted ball just a few feet in front of home plate. Step 4: Easiest perfect game ever, so long as the pitcher consistently makes the throw to first base.
    

19. Rockies. I’ve thought about this very hard, and I can only come up with two use cases where a baseball team could benefit from the sudden but unseen presence of the Rocky Mountains.
    
    The first is to foul up an opposing baserunner. He thinks he’s headed from second to third, but suddenly he’s running up a mountain trail and gaining altitude without actually advancing on the basepath. The second is an outfielder trying to rob a home run; here is a little boost from an invisble mountaintop rising from the ground beneath you.
    

20. White Sox/Red Sox/Reds. Yes, the Reds are named after leg and foot coverings. At best, they could apparate into the path of a batted or thrown ball and maybe slow it down a little.
    

23. Diamondbacks. Even invisible snakes can’t pick up a ball or swing a bat. They could maybe trip a baserunner and, well, yes, there’s the biting. They can definitely do the biting.
    
    If you’re a baseball team, do you want unseen venomous snakes biting your opponent? You can only pull this trick so many times before people start to complain that you have an unmanageable snake infestation or, worse, Draculas.

    
    Probably not gonna sell a lot of tickets to baseball fans if you have Draculas. (You will sell some to Dracula fans, however.)
    

24. Marlins. Technically, the ghostly marlin shouldn’t die from oxygen deprivation, just flapping around on the infield dirt. But it’s certainly not going to help you win a baseball game.

ACTIVELY HARMFUL

25. Royals. A spectral assortment of British members of the House of Windsor will not help you win a baseball game. They likely hate that you are playing the sport at all, and any assistance they attempt assuredly ends with you in a worse position. If Queen Elizabeth II shows up attempting to help you throw out a runner at home, shoo her away.
    

26. Cubs. What do you expect an invisible baby bear to do on a baseball field? If your answer was anything other than “cry for its mother and cause general mischief,” you are not responsible enough to own a cub wraith.
    

27. Tigers. I fully expect this ranking to generate controversy, though that is not my intent.
    
    First, consider that the tiger is not physically suited to assist with most aspects of baseball play.
    
    Second, well, it remains a tiger. Over the course of 162 games, it seems impossible for it to completely restrain itself from biting and clawing one of your opponents, and that’s going to cause some problems.

    
    While Major League Baseball should have investigated the occurrences that take place in Angels in the Outfield, they were all fundamentally baseball acts. Balls were hit towering distances, catches were made with preposterous leaps, and grounders bounced and bobbled at unexpected and seemingly unfair angles. Though the circumstances were all unusual, these general actions all fell within the realm of Things You Might See At A Baseball Game.
    
    If an unseen tiger mauls the shortstop? Friend, that’s very different. The game comes to a complete stop and likely won’t count in the standings, the stadium is getting shut down for who knows how long, and your season is thrown into total chaos. (As is the season of the team with the aforementioned shortstop.)
    
    Where angels bring delight and awe, the astral tiger only offers horror and shock. This is a path to losing a lawsuit, not winning the pennant.