Leverage, thy name is Stan.
Shakespeare, who once wrote “Frailty, thy name is woman,” probably would’ve loved baseball, a game that has comedy and tragedy and, depending on what you think of protective cups, codpieces. And while it would have been a tougher sell, the sometimes sexist old bard might’ve even rooted for the Angels’ version of baseball, as grim as that’s become.
So, maybe, if he were around today, the S-man might appreciate our faux line about leverage and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke.
Mostly because it’s true.
If Kroenke follows through on the plan made public Tuesday, in which he’ll buy the Los Angeles Angels from their current owner/undertaker, Arte Moreno, and take control of the franchise early next year, he’ll be the first Angels owner who could credibly threaten to take his team somewhere other than Anaheim.
Not that he will do that. Not that we think he even wants to do that.
But he could.
Kroenke has land (the undeveloped parts of 300-acre Hollywood Park) and building expertise (he made his first fortune building stuff near Walmarts) and an is-it-or-isn’t-it-CGI football palace, (SoFi Stadium), in Inglewood. All of it could become an even bigger cash machine if it had a baseball team and stadium bringing in fans and monster truck shows and who knows what else for 100 or more nights and days a year.
Those Kroenke-nomic factoids present a new wrinkle in the seemingly endless opera of keeping Major League Baseball (or, short of that, the Angels) in Anaheim.
Until now, threats about an Angels relocation have been what Shakespeare might’ve termed “sound and fury,” or you might call “pure bologna.”
Consider:
The Angels’ OG owner, Gene Autry, couldn’t credibly threaten to move the team (and never did) mostly because he’d already sunk some of his reputation and lots of Anaheim’s (tax) money into building the multi-purpose hellscape that was the early version of Angel Stadium.
Plus, any Angels move at that time might’ve required Autry to ask the Walter O’Malley family (either Walter himself or, later, his heirs) if he could, again, be a renter in Dodger Stadium, however temporarily. In the early 1960s, when the two teams temporarily shared Dodger Stadium (which the Angels insisted on calling “Chavez Ravine”), Autry and O’Malley wound up bickering over who would pay for toilet paper. Really.
The Angels’ second owner, Disney Corp., couldn’t bust a move either. The corporate octopus that took partial ownership of the Angels in 1996, and controlling ownership in 1999, had a crazy little thing called Disneyland down the street from the Big A. Moving the team to San Antonio or wherever would’ve sent a less-than-upbeat message about their confidence in the community.
So, after spending dozens of millions of dollars to remodel the stadium, and then stubbing its toe on the inane idea of regional sports television – and, not for nothing, winning a World Series – Disney sold out, in 2003, to Angels owner No. 3.
And that guy, Moreno, has probably inspired the most “move the team” talk.
For a time, Riverside was a thought; a hot, distant, financially tenuous thought, but one with some mojo. So was Long Beach, a city with a local baseball market of 500,000 stadium-close humans and whatever fish still swim in the port. Other potential new homes – Portland, Las Vegas, Irvine – also have been floated.
Yet all have been found less-than when stacked up against Orange County’s own city of romance, Anaheim.
Why?
First, in at least some of those relocation scenarios, Moreno would have had to build a stadium with his own money. He’s reportedly worth about $5 billion pre-sale, and a modern stadium would cost about $1.5 billion to $2 billion. Reverse-inflation those numbers for any year that Moreno has owned the Angels and you still get the basic idea: Building a stadium might eat up a big chunk of his net worth.
Second, for whoever owns the team and controls the land near Anaheim Stadium, the package could be nothing less than an all-you-can-eat money buffet.
Over on their side of the 57 Freeway, the owners of the Anaheim Ducks, Henry and Susan Samueli, are building OCVibe – a mashup that includes retail, food and entertainment – to surround the hockey team. Moreno, and Anaheim officials, have long wanted something similar at the Big A.
Now, that item will be on Kroenke’s menu. Or could be.
Arguments in favor of him keeping the Angels local include the nightmare fight he might become embroiled in with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Major League Baseball over what is and isn’t a “local” market. We don’t know the answer to that (and neither do you) and, more important, neither do the hundreds of lawyers who might be put to work by both teams if Kroenke tries to move the Angels to Inglewood.
Also, there’s the prospect of the profit cocktail he could mix for himself near the Big A. While Moreno is a bill-boarder, Kroenke is a builder. We noted earlier that Kroenke generated his “first” fortune as a developer near Walmarts. His second (he’s worth about $25 billion, give or take, so he’s made a few) has come in a business that financial press types call “sports-anchored” real estate.
Kroenke moved the Rams from St. Louis back to Los Angeles specifically to create his Inglewood fiefdom. And his basketball team, the Denver Nuggets, plays in an arena that is the centerpiece of a huge, multi-themed construction project (think of it as a higher altitude OCVibe).
And while Kroenke has yet to build anything near his soccer club, the Premier League giant Arsenal, reports surfaced last month that he’d like to, starting with a renovation of the team’s 20-year-old north London stadium.
In most of these places, Kroenke has been smart about optics.
When he moved the Rams back to Los Angeles, he appeared to shed a tear as he described the “football history” of the Rams in Los Angeles. Whether he believed that or not isn’t relevant (the team, which we love, also had “football history” in Anaheim, and Cleveland, and St. Louis). What is relevant is this: Since then, Kroenke has had the good sense to stay quiet about all of his local fan bases.
Moreno hasn’t.
When he hasn’t been considering moving the team – operating with a lease that gives the Angels, whoever owns them, an option to leave as soon as 2032 – Moreno has done stuff that suggests he’s less than in love with Anaheim.
He’s gone to court to keep the name “Anaheim” out of his team name, something that became complete in 2016. He’s let the stadium slip into less-than-excellent physical shape. He was connected – fairly or not – to the 2022 political crisis that sent former Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu to prison for two months. Even the team’s iconic Big A sign, which we stood beneath earlier this month, needs paint.
Then there was this: Earlier this year, Moreno said his team’s internal research had found that “winning” wasn’t among the five most important things for Angels fans.
Fact: Orange County produces more big league ballplayers than any community outside the Dominican Republic. The notion that fans in our little baseball hotbed don’t know the difference between good and bad baseball, or don’t care about it, is dumb.
It’s so dumb, in fact, that Shakespeare might’ve cut Moreno a break.
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t?”
Or not.
If Kroenke completes the deal, questions about Moreno won’t matter anymore.