• Re-signing Spiezio.  The excuse was that Speez was a World Series hero, but it was so obvious he was never, ever going to see 2002-like performance again.  At least it was only for a year.
  
• Failing to get a real first baseman. The team still is paying for this one, though hopefully Kotch comes through.
  
• Eric Owens, Shane Halter, and inattention to the bench. Both Owens and Halter were garbage, and they represented the kind of mistake Stoneman has tended to make in recent years with respect to the bench.  For that matter, you can add
  
• Esteban Yan to that list; the bullpen has lately had similar issues.
  
• A more recent problem is his tendency to overpay for declining veterans. Steve Finley, Esteban Yan, and Hector Carrasco all come to mind, though you could certainly add Garret Anderson to that list as well.

I haven't worked my way through it yet, but there's a contrarian argument to be made that the Edmonds-Kennedy trade was one of his better ones, even though Jimbo made his HOF run as soon as he switched out of the wings.

The Edmonds-era Angels suffered through three September collapses, and two injury-marred stinkers. Right or wrong, everybody in the organization (from Tavares to Bavasi to Collins to Lachemann to DiSar) pointed to the certain flaky/whiny character of certain players (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), while (wrongly) the media & others portrayed having four talented outfielders (including one who could play Gold Glove 1B) as a "problem."

Meanwhile, the team was still on a mid-market budget, and hadn't had the same full-time 2Bman start consecutive seasons since Luis Sojo in '91-92 (featuring such stinkers in the meantime as Justin Baughman, Torey Lovullo, Harold Reynolds, and the Rod Carewified Damion Easley).

Stoneman & Scioscia take over in 2000, and want to change the profile of the team from a bunch of flaky underachieving chokers with bad dye-jobs.. So they let the second-best pitcher in team history walk, and trade Edmonds for Kennedy, providing stability and pretty good play from a position that had been a crapshoot for a decade, and saving $34 million in the process ($40 million-plus, after you count 2006). The extra $6.2 million a year paid for such useful spare parts as Spiezio and Fullmer, with plenty left over.

And voila! Instead of a bunch of chokers, Scioscia/Stoneman develop a crew of ruthless killers, who seal the deal down the stretches of '02, '04 and '05.

Yes, that might be a bit facile around the edges, but it's striking how no one questions the team's character anymore, while everyone was doing so in the late 1990s. Can this all be chalked up to having the dice roll the right way instead of the wrong way in three Septembers? Maybe.... But trading Edmonds (and then the evil blob Vaughn) allowed Stoneman/Scioscia to shape the culture of the organization, which has been one of their great accomplishments so far.