The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Business Is Not For Sale
Now that Arte Moreno has decided not to sell his Major League Baseball Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim franchise, what is next for the business? It could be that Moreno is back to the drawing board in his hunt for a new stadium. When we last left Moreno, prior to the announcement that he was putting his baseball business up for sale, he had struck out in his attempt to take over the Anaheim stadium and the land surrounding it. Moreno wanted to build a stadium village. Moreno has an extremely valuable baseball property. The Angels business signed a 20-year local cable TV deal with FOX Sports in 2011 that brings in $150 million annually. Between 2003 and 2019, the team averaged more than three million customers per year and despite having a bad team in 2022, Moreno’s Angels business still drew nearly two and a half million people to games in Anaheim. But the stadium, despite all of the renovations that have taken place since it opened in 1966, is not the state-of-the art facility that Moreno wants.
In the past Moreno has looked at sites in Los Angeles, Carson, Irvine and Tustin as a possible replacement for the Anaheim stadium In March 2022, Long Beach, California officials claimed they were ready to provide Moreno with a stadium site. Long Beach, which is about 23 miles from Anaheim, had offered Moreno a chance to look at the city’s waterfront area for a stadium in 2019 when Moreno was exploring various areas to relocate his business. There was no concrete proposal for a Long Beach stadium, there was no money plan, just a notion that Moreno could be in a position to develop the waterfront property with the ballpark as the centerpiece. Moreno then had a deal with Anaheim which fell through. Moreno is back in the stadium game.
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