If you’re tired of the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays being the only baseball teams you read about on this site, you’ll be happy to learn there’s a new rumor in town: The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Shaikin wrote this weekend that the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim could be interested in moving to a new stadium in L.A. in a few years:
Moreno, the Angels’ owner, and Angels Chairman Dennis Kuhl met this month with AEG President Tim Leiweke, a meeting first reported by the Daily News.
Neither AEG nor the Angels would discuss the meeting. Moreno was traveling and unavailable to discuss his stadium plans, Angels spokesman Tim Mead said.
However, the Angels can exercise an escape clause in their stadium lease in 2016. If they do not, they must remain in Anaheim until 2029.
That’s a lot of speculation just to base on a single meeting, especially when AEG, after all, is in the business of running stadiums and arenas, not just building them. Still, that 2016 lease opt-out date is worth keeping in mind, especially since Moreno has to know that even if he doesn’t intend to move, having the right to makes for great leverage if he wants to, say, demand even more upgrades to the not-that-long-ago upgraded Big A.
Shaikin, meanwhile, doesn’t leave out the Dodgers, noting that while the team’s new owners have sworn they don’t want to leave 50-year-old Dodger Stadium, “[co-owner Stan] Kasten, the point man for new ballparks in Atlanta and Washington, could discover additional needs and wants, to the point where a new ballpark might not be much more expensive.” Though he then goes on to note that a new stadium could cost “$800 million and up,” which “the new owners might blanch at” after spending $2.15 billion to buy the team.
Still, it’s nice that L.A. baseball now has its own rumors of baseball stadiums that may or may not ever be built, to go along with its collection of vaportecture football stadiums.
Neil,
We’ve discussed this already, but a lot of these mid-90’s baseball stadiums are already obsolete because of those walls of luxury boxes behind home plate that take up all of the good seating areas. Cleveland has already floated the idea of a new stadium, and we could see others from that era try something as well. Angels stadium has as few good seats as any stadium I’ve been to, save Cleveland, so if I were the Angels owner I’d want to get something done as well.
The Angels stadium in LA thing is just a red herring. The Angels would not abandon their market (Orange County) to become a second rate team in Los Angeles right as the Dodgers are transitioning back to the ascendent team in the LA market. On top of that AEG has already publicly stated on prior occasions that they have no interest in building a ballpark. If anything this “move” is nothing more than an attempt by both AEG and the Angels to spur on their respective partners (the NFL and Anaheim respectively) to hurry up and give them some financial support respectively.
As long as they’re paying, no problem!
Re: Angels. It won’t happen, but if they don’t have the meeting the Angels would only be doing themselves a disservice. They’ll just ask for renovation money in a few years instead.
Re: Cleveland. I thought they were rumored to be asking for renovation money. Not a new ballpark…
Joe,
Good point. I should have avoided linking Cleveland and Anaheim so closely together. Also, my suspicion is that a Cleveland renovation would attempt to solve the seating problem. After thinking and reading about it, the Angels threat seems to be more about AEG squeezing the NFL and/or the Angels looking to locate in a better baseball market.
“…and/or the Angels looking to locate in a better baseball market.”
I don’t think there’s any way they’d be able to move to Boston or New York.
A new ballpark in Cleveland??? People should be doing jail time.