Limping my way back to full efficacy here, but I don’t want too much news to pile up, so let’s give this a shot. One of the bigger items to drop in the last week was that Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno, would-be stadium land grifter and serial Mike Trout squanderer, is looking into selling the team that he bought for $180 million in 2003:
“It has been a great honor and privilege to own the Angels for 20 seasons,” Moreno said in a release. “Although this difficult decision was entirely our choice and deserved a great deal of thoughtful consideration, my family and I have ultimately come to the conclusion that now is the time.”
For Angels fans, this may come not a moment too soon; for everyone else, it’s more of a puzzle that a rich guy who tethered his ego to his ownership of an MLB franchise would abruptly throw in the towel. Several questions suggest themselves:
- Is this because the stadium deal fell apart? Sports team owners typically know that that the collapse of one stadium deal isn’t anything to lose sleep over, because there’s always the potential for another one around the corner. But the collapse of Moreno’s campaign to get Angel Stadium land at a cut-rate price imploded especially dramatically: FBI investigations, the resignation of the mayor, charges of illegal helicopter registration. Add in that this was already Moreno’s second go-round — he had another land deal in hand with the city of Anaheim a decade earlier before then-mayor Tom Tait scuttled it — and maybe he figured he’d let somebody else beat their head against this particular white whale.
- Is Moreno just old? Arte Moreno just turned 76, and if none of his kids are interested in inheriting the Angels, he may have just figured it’s a good time to get out. The latest Forbes-estimated value for the Angels is $2.2 billion, which would provide a nice return on investment for 20 years of mismanagement, which Moreno could use to go buy himself an election or something.
- Did he realize he’s not very good at this? It can’t have escaped Moreno’s notice that the last time the Angels won a World Series was the year before he bought the team, and they’ve only made the playoffs once in the last 12 years despite the presence of one of the best players in the history of baseball (two, if you count Shohei Ohtani in recent seasons). This seems unlikely since Moreno has never seemed to learn any lessons from terrible moves like signing Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton to long-term deals just as they started to suck, but there’s a first time for everything.
- Will the team name change again? Moreno famously changed the Anaheim Angels name to “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim,” in hopes of grabbing a bigger share of the Los Angeles market from fans who didn’t own maps. This has been roundly unpopular in Anaheim — countless hours of hearings on the stadium deal were wasted on complaining about the team name — so it’s possible a new owner could switch back, but it all depends on who that is.
Then there’s the future of the stadium, which Moreno holds a lease on through 2029, meaning there’s plenty of time for him to pass off any decisions to the next owner. This suggests one last possibility, actually: Moreno may have decided that his association with Mayor Harry Sidhu’s bribery scandal was too much to overcome, and he’d be better off leaving the pursuit of a sweetheart stadium land development deal to some other rich dude without so much baggage. Or, sure, in a perfect world maybe a new buyer will give up on increasing the value of his new asset by extracting some public subsidies, but you don’t get to be rich enough to own a pro sports team by leaving money like that on the table.
Or maybe, as Marc Normandin summed it up, it really is just that Moreno is a real weirdo. Sports team owners sometimes do things for dumb reasons just like the rest of us.