OC Register: Alexander: With Moreno ready to sell Angels, what comes next?

[AngelsWin.com]

I could visualize it as soon as I saw the announcement that Arte Moreno would explore a sale of the Angels: A race to apply for a City of Anaheim parade permit.

That’s how toxic the relationship between Angels fans and the team’s owner has become, as evidenced by the volume of responses I received several weeks ago when I invited the fans to weigh in on Moreno’s tenure.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to believe that new ownership might mean new hope for the supporters of a franchise that has two of the game’s greatest players yet will have reached the postseason once in 13 seasons by the end of 2022, hasn’t won a postseason game since 2009 and hasn’t had a winning season since 2015.

But let’s hold off on that march down Katella Ave., because this one should go in the “careful what you wish for” file. It’s more complicated than you might think.

For one thing, one or both of those two all-time greats, the only reasons to actually go out and watch an Angels game, could be collateral damage in a sale of the team. The circumstances surrounding Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani in Anaheim aren’t that dissimilar from those surrounding Juan Soto in Washington, and the fact that Soto’s generational talent now resides in San Diego should provide pause to any Angel fan.

It’s not totally parallel, but consider: Soto was still 2½ years away from free agency when the Nationals offered what seemed like a monster 15-year, $440 million contract but was actually well below market value for a 23-year-old superstar ($29.3 million average annual value) and backloaded to boot, as the Nats tend to do. Soto and agent Scott Boras declined.

So the Nats immediately began soliciting trade offers, the explanation being that they didn’t want to saddle a new owner with the responsibility of this negotiation. That’s how Soto and Josh Bell wound up in San Diego for a major haul of prospects.

Trout’s 12-year, $426.5 million contract ($35.5 million AAV) still has eight years to run after this year, so he would seem to be a safe bet to stay. But Ohtani can be a free agent after the 2023 season, and there seems to be little consensus regarding what baseball’s preeminent two-way player might be worth on the open market.

Do you leave a decision on Ohtani up to the new buyer? Or do you do what Nationals controlling owner Mark Lerner did with Soto and direct your general manager to relieve prospective suitors of that responsibility?

Consider, too, that what happens with the Angels’ stars might not even be the biggest X factor surrounding the prospective sale of the club.

How about, say, the mere presence of the team?

The deal to sell the Angel Stadium property to Moreno’s management company, which would have renovated the ballpark and developed the surrounding land, ran aground in May after the investigation of alleged corruption in Anaheim city government and the resignation of Mayor Harry Sidhu. When the city council voted to halt the deal, the view here was that it was a temporary pause to allow things to cool down and that the city and Moreno ultimately would return to the bargaining table.

This news means that deal is officially dead. So what now?

It might depend on the identity of the new owner. The current lease runs through 2029, a unilateral move by the city to extend the commitment while negotiations continued. But Long Beach, Tustin, Irvine – and maybe Riverside? Corona? Pomona? – will all be revising or devising plans, blueprints and wish lists if it is determined the Angels are again in play.

If Henry and Susan Samueli, the owners of the Ducks, are interested in adding the team across the freeway to their holdings, it would be safe to assume that the team would stay in their current location. There’s no indication yet that they are.

A prospective owner from out of town, with no sentimental ties to Orange County or even Southern California? If that’s the case, anything could happen, even if the idea of abandoning the nation’s second-largest media market is mind-boggling. I can guarantee you that the news of a potential Angels sale has touched off speculation in Portland, Nashville, Montréal and plenty of other cities without teams. Las Vegas, too, although it’s waiting on the A’s pursuit of a waterfront stadium project in Oakland.

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The overriding point: We are entering into an utterly unpredictable process. The Angels could be purchased by a known quantity such as the Clippers’ Steve Ballmer, a quirkier billionaire, a media company looking for programming … there are plenty of possibilities, and not all are promising.

Remember, Frank McCourt was once approved as a team owner. You’d like to think MLB has learned its lesson, but …

Remember, when Arte purchased the team in 2003 from the Walt Disney Co., he was hailed at the time as the people’s choice. He was a fan, he was by all accounts unpretentious, and one of his first moves was to lower beer prices.

One of his next moves was to sign Vladimir Guerrero as a free agent. That one worked out spectacularly. A lot of the Angels’ free agent signings since haven’t, especially recently, and one aspect on which the majority of fans who flood my inbox agree is that the owner has tended to get in the way of his baseball people, especially with no director of baseball operations to act as a buffer.

So keep this in mind: Moreno’s successor could be much better, but also could be worse. Is that a scary enough thought for you?

jalexander@scng.com

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[T.G.]

6 minutes ago, AngelsWin.com said:

The circumstances surrounding Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani in Anaheim aren’t that dissimilar from those surrounding Juan Soto

We're going to see this over and over and over and over and over...

And in Trout's case it is dissimilar because he's under contract for a long time.

[T.G.]

6 minutes ago, AngelsWin.com said:

Remember, Frank McCourt was once approved as a team owner. You’d like to think MLB has learned its lesson, but …

This is the equivalent of every prospect that doesn't pan out is Brandon Wood.