Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno announced yesterday that he is selling the team to Los Angeles Rams/Denver Nuggets/Colorado Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke, and most of the news coverage has — rightly — focused on Moreno not letting the door hit him in the butt on the way out. Moreno, a billionaire billboard baron, bought the Angels in 2003 from Disney for $180 million, and since then has: angered locals by changing the name of the team from the Anaheim Angels to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim to try to appeal to more fans from the populous city to the north; squandered the presence of the best player of his generation by surrounding him with every overpriced, washed-up free agent he could find; tried to obtain $500 million worth of city land around his stadium for only $150 million, and almost getting away with it until the whole thing blew up in an FBI bribery investigation; and declaring that fans don’t care about winning after conducting a survey that didn’t include “winning” as one of the choices, among other lowlights. By this season, fans were openly chanting “Sell the team!” at home games, and it was apparently enough for Moreno to cash in his chips and sell to the Walmart-heir-by-marriage up the road at a huge profit.
Even as fans exulted in Moreno’s departure, some expressed concern about what a new owner — one who already broke the Rams’ lease in St. Louis so he could move them back to L.A. (The Athletic terms this a “proven track record” in stadium development, which is certainly one way of looking at it) — might mean for the Angels’ future. The team’s lease expires in 2032, though ownership has a series of one-year options that could extend it to 2038. And that juicy stadium parking lot land is still sitting there, though complicated by the fact that the state’s Surplus Land Act requires public property to be considered first for affordable housing before it can be devoted to other uses, something the city of Anaheim already paid a $96 million fine for ignoring once.
In addition, just last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the Home Run for Anaheim Act, which requires the team to revert to being called the Anaheim Angels in any future lease negotiation or land sale agreement (CORRECTION: Only if the team first gets an exemption from the Surplus Land Act), which may or may not matter depending on whether Kroenke shares Moreno’s obsession with the L.A. name. The 79-year-old Kroenke inherits a stadium situation that is ripe for either opportunity or extortion, depending on how you look at it, and his track record for playing hardball in such matters should encourage Anaheim officials to sleep with one eye open, at least.
The other potential fallout from the sale involves the price tag: We don’t know how big a stake the “controlling interest” is that Kroenke is buying from Moreno, but we do know that it values the entire franchise at a new-MLB-record $4 billion. Coming on the heels of the San Diego Padres‘ sale for a $3.9 billion valuation, this is a sign that there are still plenty of billionaires willing to shell out top dollar for MLB franchises. That’s likely to whet league owners’ appetite for cashing in by creating two expansion teams; even if the available open markets are underwhelming and adding teams would just dilute existing owners’ shares of national TV contracts, it’s got to be tough to pass up a cut of what could be a pair of $4 billion or more checks. With the Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations now seemingly settled — though we’ve said that before — the next step may be setting up a bidding war among the Portlands and Nashvilles and Salt Lake Citys of the world, to see if any wants to pay enough toward a new stadium to help an expansion owner afford that multibillion-dollar expansion fee. All the kids are doing it!
