To sum up the quarter-century of Los Angeles Angels baseball under owner Arte Moreno requires someone who knows him and them better than we do, so let’s go to Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken, who responded to Moreno’s abrupt decision to sell the team on Tuesday thusly:
“I feel like it’s my birthday.”
And there’s your Angels postgame show for today. Our final score again: Yankees 7, Angels 3. We’ll see you tomorrow, and please drive home safely.
You don’t normally get postmortems that gleeful. “Should’ve happened sooner,” sure. “What took him so long,” maybe. “He sucked,” absolutely. But the mayor stopping just short of having the city council carpool over to the Disneyland Hotel for a pool party is the Arte Moreno difference.
Aitken’s unconcealed glee at Moreno’s departure is due largely to the city’s contentious relationship with the Angels over their stadium and the land surrounding it, none of which you need care about unless you live in Orange County, or more precisely in the Aitken household. But it still stands as the most fitting epitaph for the 24 years, which is what it will be when the deal is scheduled to be approved, of the Moreno era. He began his reign amid the good feelings associated with a World Series win the previous year, reduced the asking prices for ballpark beer, and still managed to end his time unloved by fans and surrounded by a cloud of his own failure. He is now cashing that in for $4 billion from Stan Kroenke, himself a barrel of mirthlessness, amid the mocking laughter of the audience Moreno sought and ultimately repelled. Kroenke also owns teams in the NBA, NFL, NHL, EPL (men’s and women’s), and MLS, but the mayor of the city in which the Angels play isn’t celebrating because she gets to deal with the country’s most prolific sports franchise collector. She’s celebrating because she no longer has to spend time with Arte Moreno. Or, to be more accurate, with his attorneys.
Now your ears might perk up at the notion that yet another owner has decided to quit the bank, especially so soon after the Lakers, Dodgers, and Padres up and down the road nailed up their own “For Sale” signs in recent months. Maybe the departing franchise holders sense that the sports bubble is showing signs of bursting and are getting out while the prices are still absurd. Maybe seismologists are quietly whispering about The Big One that turns Yuma into beachfront property. Or maybe the shit of economic apocalypse is finally being prepped to hit the ceiling fan.
But trends like this are typically spotted by those with a very flexible worldview and sufficiently elastic facts to fit any occasion. Each of the other sales came with different circumstances. Mark Walter is in everything-must-go mode; Jeanie Buss contemplates fratricide at every turn, and no local jury would convict. The Seidler family turned litigious after their patriarch died, and opted to focus on their personal disputes over continuing to pay Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts into the 2030s. Moreno, for his part, tried to sell his team once before but found he couldn’t get the price he wanted. He was well sick of his billion-dollar albatross well before he finally found a suck—er, willing buyer in Kroenke, who now has a franchise in seven different leagues (he also owns a NLL team).
And while Moreno was the biggest reason for the Angels’ misery, it was not unreasonable that he should have grown sick of them. Basically everyone else who ever cared about the team has as well, and the franchise has been the textbook cover for the class Introduction To Mediocrity 1-A, with “mediocrity” being an extremely generous use of the lexicography. The Angels have not been to the playoffs in 12 years, or won a postseason game in 17. You know who else has done that? Nobody. Not even the freaking Pirates, who never had the apparent advantages of employing either Mike Trout or Shohei Ohtani during that period, just to name two of the generational talents who have passed through or disappeared into The Angels Zone.
Their most remarkable accomplishment was in changing their name to deny their birthplace—twice. Moreno figured that being the Anaheim Angels brought bad juju (you know, like that World Series win the year before he bought them) so he rechristened them, first to the ludicrous Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and then just the Los Angeles Angels. Presumably this was because the cool kids live in L.A. and then have kids of their own and go to Knott’s Berry Farm. Locals love it when owners do stuff like this.
The name changes didn’t work any better than his other big swings, including signing Albert Pujols away from St. Louis in a bid to build up the team’s regional media rights, itself a sequel to an attempt to do so by signing away Vladimir Guerrero The Elder from Montreal. Other big free agents arrived on deals that seemed more or less instantly cursed, and then effectively disappeared into injury and recrimination. It all ended up as part of the familiar Angels churn—first a good but not great team, and then a dull but not quite bad one, and finally just a plain old losing team that couldn’t even figure out how be bad in a normal way. As the day dawned upon your fevered brows, the Angels are tied with the homeless West Sacramento Athletics and the gormless Colorado Rockies for the worst record in baseball; in the process they have been worse than merely bad, they have been unutterably dull. In the latter half of the Moreno dynasty, they just sort of … stopped.
And as we said, so did Moreno, first by loudly taking the team off the market and then watching Ohtani leave for the team up the road that the Angels have been trying to be since 1961. They have outdrawn the Dodgers only once in 65 years (2011), to give you a sense of how that’s gone. But Moreno wanted to be the biggest fish in a one-fish aquarium, as every owner of a second team wants, and that plan has almost never worked in any city, let alone with one with a market of 13 million people. We are creatures of habit as sports fans, and our habit with the Angels has always been to ask, “Why?” Moreno ran out of bluffs five years ago, right about the time his plan to buy the stadium from the city ran into a corruption scandal that sent former Mayor Harry Sidhu out of office and into jail. His replacement? Birthday Girl Ashleigh Aitken.
Aitken wants to restart talks with Kroenke about a land development around the stadium similar to the one he is undertaking around SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. She also wants him to change the name back to Anaheim, because as she said unconvincingly, “As a diehard Angels fan my entire life, I am so optimistic about the future of Anaheim Angels baseball.” We say “unconvincingly” without having any idea about her actual sporting proclivities, but with some confidence—there are perhaps 79 lifelong Angels fans willing to admit as much publicly, and none of those can possibly be optimistic about their future without a hell of a lot more to go on than “Hey, Arte’s gone!” The past 15 years have embedded despair, ennui, and “I guess we could always go watch Cal State Fullerton” into their collective psyches; the alternative is watching Ohtani inadvertently usher in the impending lockout with a third straight Dodgers World Series win.
And maybe that, too, helped Moreno decide to finally get out; the multi-billion dollar payday is surely nice, but let’s not ignore the value of no longer watching his team play. Or maybe Kroenke just forced himself upon Moreno with those dulcet come-on lines, “Wanna make 22 times your original investment? Wanna stop being the butt of the joke? Wanna stop being the joke nobody tells any more?” Makes you wonder why he didn’t just try to buy the Rockies at half the price and equal levels of emotional stasis.
Or maybe it really is the end of times, at least in L.A. The Lakers are in family hell, and richly so. The Dodgers either are or not in billionaire liquidation mode yet again. The Clippers are F-bombed fifty different ways. The Chargers remain tragicomically anonymous. USC football is already dealing with an attendance crisis based on surface-of-the-sun temperatures and its own scheduling boobery—drop Notre Dame? Pick up San Jose State? Hey, tickets are incredibly available—and UCLA just fired its athletic director after a long process of letting him twist windward. It it weren’t for the Rams, LAFC, and the start of the hockey season, the city’s sporting landscape would be Brawley.
But that’s not the way to bet. Kroenke comes to town with optimism about the Rams and the goodwill that can only accrue to a person for not being Arte Moreno. The first few days of being a new owner are the best, before they start doing stuff that turns discounted beer into area-wide boredom and eventually resentment. For the moment, Kroenke is the face of Southern California. For the moment, what matters most is that he is not someone else.
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