As the home of the Dodgers, Dodger Stadium is great. As the home of the Angels, not so much.
The Los Angeles Angels moved into Dodger Stadium in 1962, their second season, after playing their inaugural season in a since-demolished minor league ballpark near the Coliseum.
The Dodgers billed the Angels for cleaning windows of offices that had no windows. The Dodgers charged the Angels half the cost of toilet paper even though the Dodgers attracted far more than half the fans.
The Dodgers called it enforcing the stadium lease. The Angels called it petty, and they searched for a home they could call their own.
They first looked to Long Beach, and the city said it would welcome the team under one condition: The team would be called the Long Beach Angels.
Gene Autry, the owner, said no. He turned to Anaheim, where city officials invited him to come on down and call his team whatever he wanted.
In 1966, the California Angels made their debut at the brand-new Anaheim Stadium.
In 2026, the Los Angeles Angels play at Angel Stadium: same team, same ballpark, different names for both.
Amid the euphoria over this week’s announcement that Rams owner Stan Kroenke would buy the last-place Angels — “Christmas in September,” Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken told me — elected officials reiterated their fervent desire that the team revert to the Anaheim Angels name.
“For 60 years, our community has filled Angel Stadium, raised a World Series banner as the Anaheim Angels, and shown up through every season,” Assemblyman Avelino Valencia (D-Anaheim) said.
For 60 years, the city of Anaheim has failed its taxpayers.
Angel Stadium is surrounded by 130 acres of parking lots. The city owns the stadium and the lots. Every winter, and every other week during the summer, the lots sit empty.
The last time a team owner pitched a development plan for those parking lots — current owner Arte Moreno, in 2019 — the city estimated all the shops and restaurants and hotel rooms and offices and homes would generate $10 million per year in tax revenue. As part of that plan, the Angels would commit to stay in Anaheim through 2050.
More parks. More libraries. More police officers. More firefighters.
Over the years, Anaheim had considered a variety of opportunities for the site: An NFL stadium, but the NFL wasn’t interested. A Disney-run retail and entertainment center, but Disney wasn’t interested. The indoor surf and snowboard park could have been wild, but who wants to surf and snowboard inside a giant refrigerator when Huntington Beach and Mt. Baldy are a short drive away?
From this perspective, Kroenke could be a godsend for the city.
What Anaheim needs is what Kroenke already does: Anchor a new sports facility within a new community: in Inglewood, around Sofi Stadium; in Woodland Hills, around the Rams’ practice facility; in San Diego, around a planned arena.
With the Angels, Plan A for Kroenke is almost certainly building a new ballpark and community on the Angel Stadium site, the kind of large urban parcel that is rarely available, and better yet close to freeways and public transit.
That does not mean Kroenke would not consider a Plan B. On Wednesday, an industry official familiar with franchise sales, texting on condition of anonymity, said Kroenke had put himself in a “brilliant” spot: “Option to do small intimate ballpark at Sofi is really huge leverage.”
The Angels’ sale won’t be finalized until early next year, and Kroenke and his people aren’t likely to talk until then.
In Anaheim, however, the priorities set out in that proposed deal with Moreno should be the same today: Get the city out of the stadium business; anchor the Angels in town for decades to come; get the team to pay for a new ballpark; generate taxes from development on the stadium parking lots.
The Angels’ stadium lease — that would be Kroenke’s lease now — expires in six years. This might be Anaheim’s last, best chance at satisfying those objectives.
That would mean selling the site to Kroenke at a fair price — and with a publicly released assessment showing the market rate, rather than appearing to fit a predetermined sale price. And, thanks to a bill signed into law last week by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the city can help Kroenke make more money from the development, if he is willing to call the team the Anaheim Angels.
But what if he says no, just as Autry said no to Long Beach all those years ago?
If Kroenke is looking for immediate goodwill in Anaheim, pulling on an Anaheim Angels cap and announcing the return of that team name would do it. (Actually, please don’t pull on that cap. It was hideous.)
In the long term, perhaps Kroenke prefers the Los Angeles name the Angels have worn for 27 seasons, rather than the Anaheim name they wore for eight seasons.
The Rams played at Anaheim Stadium as the Los Angeles Rams. They now play in Inglewood under a Los Angeles name, just as the Chargers and Clippers do.
The Angel Stadium lease that Kroenke inherits requires the team name to “include the name Anaheim therein.” Under Moreno, the city bristled, the “of Anaheim” part of “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim” had disappeared. The city could make that an issue anew. Or the city could sell the entire stadium site to the highest bidder, with no requirement that the winner keep a ballpark on the property.
Over the next year, we’ll see the directions Kroenke and Anaheim take in negotiations. For the city, the Anaheim Angels are Plan A. But Kroenke will have a Plan B, and Anaheim should, too.
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