Last week, the Angels dipped into the world’s richest farm system – the Cuban National baseball team – and recalled Kendry Morales, a player distinctly not a product of their own farm system, which is to say that he has the greatest chance of succeeding immediately.

Fidel Castro must be fuming right now, and it’s not because he just realized that his cell phone has also been bugged for the past five years. Nearly two years to the day after Morales finally succeeded in defecting to Florida, with a pit stop in the Dominican Republic so he could auction himself off as a free agent, Morales reached the major leagues on a team struggling to let go of its aging veterans and instead completely trust its youth program.

The analysis is appropriate for these Angels, a team trapped between something it wants to be but isn’t quite certain how to become: a team with young talent, yet one that steadfastly refuses to completely shed its nostalgic roots. A team willing to get older for the sake of clubhouse chemistry, which values players who enforce Manager Mike Scioscia’s no-panic policy, yet is unwilling to get younger by gambling and sticking with young talent. The team that deplored long-term contracts for All-Star quality players in the neighborhood of 30 years old, yet stuck with Garret Anderson, Darin Erstad and Tim Salmon, all now well past their primes, is now searching for solutions.

For years, the Angels have said that they design their organization around the model of the Atlanta Braves. Any player development plan in baseball can best be called a five-year plan, but the Angels – in terms of position players – have not yet succeeded. This is not to say they won’t eventually, but the early returns haven’t been promising.

Dallas McPherson is a mistake hitter with a long swing and little discipline. Casey Kotchman, bothered by illness this season, hasn’t yet shown that he can maintain a consistent hitting approach, teetering between the temptation to use the whole field one month and pulling everything in sight the next. Jeff Mathis is capable of catching-and-throwing at the elite level, but didn’t hit.

Pitching is a different story. The Angels covet tall, hard-throwing right-handers, but seem weary to place their faith in finesse left-handers who might get outs with off-speed pitches, leading to a lack of depth and differentiation, an imbalance that continually plagues their major league pitching staff.

The result is an assembly line, players whose individuality has been stripped for the sake of conformity. A stream of players with identically open stances, as taught in the minor leagues, weaned on aggressive hitting, which when trying to learn to recognize the difference between a triple-A and a big league slider, is difficult to maintain. It leads to hacking. Hacking leads to frustration. Frustration leads back to the Pacific Coast League.

Here’s the greatest reason why Morales has the best chance for any Angel prospect to succeed.

He’s not bound by the expectations of an organization, but by the faithful of a nation. This makes Morales the ideal candidate for an Angel farm system that so desperately needs a player to succeed, not only as a matter of production, but of public relations. The Angels draw three million fans per season and have relentlessly publicized their youngsters, but their customers have a right to expect impact players from this farm system, not role players.

The Angels are simply the team that won the bidding for Morales, with their team of scouts – Clay Daniel and Eddie Bane – putting the personal touch on what amounted to a high stakes recruiting game. As far back as 2003, the Yankees coveted Morales, whose ability was considered so prestigious in his homeland that last year he said his defection was not an option, but a requirement.

"You cannot say anything, not even to your Mom,” Morales said last year. “Nobody knows when you're going to do it. You cannot tell anybody what you're going to do. You gotta hide everything."

The expectations of an organization are little compared to the desire to succeed. Morales, after all, said he needed at least 10 tries to defect. He said he spent time in Cuban prisons. He kept his life a secret. Want to talk about pressure? The Angels finally promoted the one hitter who won’t feel a thing.