Anybody at all, tell me you saw this coming:
Angels officials have had preliminary talks about moving the Major League Baseball franchise from Anaheim to Industry, according to a source with close ties to Industry City Hall…
While officials at Majestic Realty Co. are still working hard to bring a National Football League team to Industry, they are open to building a baseball stadium instead, according to the source.
This is still just off-the-record talk of the existence of talks, so file it under deep rumor for now. (Sports economist Robert Baade tells the L.A. Daily News that it should be viewed as a “negotiating chip” in talks with Anaheim about Angel Stadium, which was renovated way back in omigod, 1998.) And also keep in mind that Angels owner Arte Moreno was spotted earlier this year kicking the tires on a stadium in downtown L.A. And that neither set of talks has advanced as far as how to pay for the damn things, which is what’s held up plans for NFL stadiums on those two sites.
If nothing else, though, it’s a sign that the Industry folks are considering a Plan B to go along with their stalled Plan A. Add it the current turmoil over AEG and what it means for the future of its L.A. stadium plan, and you might want to shut the engines on the NFL moving vans: Whatever eventually happens in L.A. around stadiums, it looks like it’s going to be a while yet.
I did! Not that it’s all that likely or anything, but it makes perfect sense not only as far as the Angels trying to round up bogeymen to scare Anaheim, but for Roski to turn the tables on the NFL who practically begged AEG to bid against the Industry plan. And for the record, I’ll say that Carson eventually gets thrown out there to spook Anaheim, and may have even been the main point of the AEG meeting a few months ago, not the convention center spot that even Leiweke has publically scoffed at for baseball.
What will the new name for the team be? “Angels of Industry”?
They’ll always be the California Angels to me.
Their most recent name change is undoubtedly the silliest, most useless bit of name-changing nonsense in the history of sports
Worse than the Utah Starzz? For that matter, worse than the Utah Jazz?
Sure, why not? California is going to end up being one giant bankruptcy anyway, so hurry up and max out those credit cards while you can, right?
How about the “Jacksonville Tea Men” after their move from New England?
Neil, please make a worst relocated team names thread.
Well, I’d file this one under “less likely than the Phoenix Coyotes ever turning a profit”… But it is no surprise that Moreno is sabre rattling (or, rather, having someone else sabre rattle on his behalf).
A stadium in CoI seems questionable even if it is built for an NFL team that is used just once a week (or once every other week, assuming two teams don’t share it). If it’s baseball and requires multiple trips by fans weekly, well, I suspect that is a far less economically sound plan.
Just to throw out potential roadblocks though… Neil, any idea what MLB’s view is of the Angels v Dodgers territory? In years past, the Angels were viewed as being an Anaheim/Orange county entity. Arte, obviously, feels they are “LA’s” team…
To cut to the chase: Can the Angels simply move into Los Angeles proper ?(assuming any of the hundreds of economic hurdles can be beaten and a stadium plan being agreed). Or would they have to compensate the Dodgers for the move?
Technically speaking, they don’t currently ‘share’ a market. Anyone who disagrees should take a look at the way the Dodgers list Angels games on the out of town scoreboard…
The Dodgers’ and Angels’ contracts state that they have to share the Los Angeles market. This is from the original expansion that resulted in the Mets getting to share the NYC market with the Yankees. This is also why Selig didn’t do anything when the Angels changed their name to Los Angeles. Of course the Dodgers would have stopped it if they could (as you point out, they still refer to the Angels as Anaheim) but they have no legal recourse and they know it and Bud Selig knows it.
Yup – NYC, Chi, and LA are all shared (overlapping) markets. I believe that either team can move anywhere within the market without having to ask permission of the other, but would need to check that.
Interesting, Neil (and H. Alan).
In the case of Chicago (where both clubs have been in existence for a very long time… so long in fact that sports owners did not seem to believe they were exempt from racketeering laws…), it is understandable that the market is shared. I’m still not sure either club would take a ‘hands off’ approach should the other decide to build a new ballpark in the ‘other’s’ end of town, but whatever.
As I recall, baseball effectively required the Yankees to allow the Mets to move into Flushing. Supposing the Mets had been able to build a baseball stadium (err, again, sorry, have one built for them at public expense…) over the west side railyards, I would imagine that the Yankees would not have remained silent on the matter.
There is a big difference between having to share an island with someone and having them living in your kitchen…
Actually, it was the Yankees who wanted to build over the West Side railyards. If the Mets had anything to say about it, they remained awful quiet – though, of course, the bit in their lease that guaranteed them a stadium if the Yankees got one may have had something to do with that.
Yes, I remember that Neil (and then, of course, the Jets decided they might want to… ahh, oh, nevermind…).
It just seems more than a bit odd (in the protectionist world of professional sports at least) if what has been discussed above is actually true, that by sharing a “city” with any other franchise, a club would be powerless to stop their fellow New Yorkers (or Angelinos etc) from setting up shop right next door, for example.
It doesn’t work that way for McDonald’s franchises, or most other franchising operations for that matter. You might get a franchise in a given city. You can’t put it wherever you like. Just saying… anyone else have any thoughts on that?