It has been five days since Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno made the claim that his team's fans view winning baseball as a low priority, and the reaction has been, well, fairly low priority. It could hardly be any other way, because "low priority" is the Angels in a nutshell.
It's hard to make a compelling case for a team whose de facto slogan has been "Meh With A Side Of Fries" for the decades it's spent under Moreno's thumb, but the real truth here is that the Angels don't really make a compelling case for anything. That Moreno claims this institutional ennui as a virtue is the boldest marketing strategy the team has displayed since he first bought the team in 2003 and immediately made himself a local hero by lowering beer prices. That is also the last time he has been a local hero, because the Angels in his time have had one of the faintest pulses in baseball since, and that includes the 12 years in which they employed the game's best player, whether it be Mike Trout or Shohei Ohtani or both.
But, as your own eyelids lower, consider that Moreno may actually be correct that the synergy between his team's lack of interest in on-field success and that of its fan base is in lockstep. Sure, there are about half a million people per year who no longer attend Angels games compared to their last postseason win in 2009, but the real takeaway here is that the Angels don't want to bother anyone's purchasing choices by being interesting. If the people that are still going to Angels games don't care what happens in those games, there's no reason to bother them.
Besides, the real story is that Moreno said it, and that nobody seems that troubled with him saying it. Even the original story, by the Orange County Register's longtime Angels writer Jeff Fletcher, had the money quote in the 29th paragraph of a 34-paragraph piece centered on the team's local TV contract and its impact on payroll. It is a measure of Fletcher's diligence that anything with Angels in the description could get a reader to hang in there that long, but also this is the moment at which the outrage should have kicked in.
“The number one thing fans want is affordability,” Moreno was quoted as saying, citing a fan survey that the team claims to have taken. “They want affordability. They want safety, and they want a good experience when they come to the ballpark. Believe it or not, winning is not in their top five. The moms want to be able to afford to bring the kids. Moms make about 80 percent of the decisions. They want to be able to bring their kids and be affordable and they want safety and they want to have a good experience, so they get all the entertainment stuff or whatever. [For] the purists, you know, it’s just straight winning.”
Don't you hate those annoying purists?
Moreno is trying to make a compelling case for being the owner of the people, as opposed to obnoxious elite media nags like Ken Rosenthal or Jeff Passan, but surely said purists would have risen from their thrones of condescension to shriek invective at Moreno for blowing the gaff and admitting the thing most owners reflexively lie about, which is that winning is what they care about most. Instead, all there have been are knowing nods, all in agreement that the Angels' abject record in the past 15 years is an accurate reflection not just of Moreno's First Postulate but also the will of his misbegotten team's fans. Indeed, when Fletcher asked Moreno what his top priority is, he said, “For me, I’ve always wanted to win. It’s just, what’s the cost of winning right now?”
This can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, to be sure, and a popular one in Miami, Pittsburgh and West Sacramento—if you don't mind not winning, neither do I—but the Angels under Moreno have routinely been among the top third in annual player payroll rankings, so he can claim to care about winning by pointing to that number. It wouldn't even be false, although how that money has been spent, and Moreno's too-large role in it all, has much more to do with the team's abject state than any cheapness. But now that the payroll has finally dipped under the median, and is approximately $70 million below last year's number according to Spotrac, Moreno must explain those lowered commitments. In citing his team's TV deal struggles, he does manage to explain the raw math involved, which is fine as far as it goes. It's the "fans don't care that much whether we win" bit that snaps your head back.
Or at least it would if Arte Moreno were Mark Walter with the Dodgers, or Mark Attanasio with the Brewers, or even Bruce Sherman with the Marlins. Owners have always had a devotion to the myth of victory, as though their desperation to give the town a parade is foremost in his or her thoughts at any given moment. Moreno neatly dismissed that notion, but because he owns the game's most invisible franchise, the reaction has been equally ethereal.
"Yeah, winning isn't that big a deal for the Angels" tracks with their complete inability to cast a shadow. The fact that they never reached the postseason with Trout and Ohtani in the everyday lineup may seem offensive to your goddamned purists and impossible to even the most casual fans, but since the franchise's actual goal is the illusory $3 hot dog, that perverse Trout-Ohtani stat doesn't resonate nearly so much. In fact, because nothing really resonates all that much with the Angels, Moreno could have said that he maintains his youthful appearance through a steady diet of live puppies and gotten a similar reaction, to wit: "Yeah, eating small living pets to stay alive isn't great, but what do you expect? It's the Angels."
And if, as Moreno claims, the team's payroll will rise back to its normal $200M-plus levels once the TV thing is sorted out, it seems safe to say that won't resonate much either. The problem isn't the payroll, or the inability to develop or attract pitching, or the sad slow end of the Trout era, or the dearth of memories in Moreno's tenure. This is a branding problem, nothing more. The Angels as a baseball operation have somehow managed not to matter since their one World Series victory—seven months before Moreno bought the team from Disney—and Moreno saying as much is the antithesis of traditional marketing theory, which is to lead with the bullshit. One wonders if he would be willing to run his baseball franchise without the drain of actual baseball, and stand on the notion that $4 soft-serve ice cream is the real national pastime. Maybe in a more perfect union, the Los Angeles Angels could rebrand as Moreno's MegaCreamery. The nation might be slightly better off for the transformation.
Then again, maybe Moreno's actual gift is not affordability at all, but invisibility. Maybe he's a Marvel superhero only now revealing himself as such; he does look a bit like a superannuated Tony Stark. Either way, credit where due: in his rude and oafish way, he is attacking the myth that winning is ownership's main goal. Whether that is a cheap excuse for what the Angels have become or a reorientation of business goals to prioritize customer service over performance, it is indisputably a bold move. An owner admitting such a thing would be appreciated as such, provided that owner didn't own the Angels.
