What Angels Fans Want

Last week, after Angels owner Arte Moreno finished his annual state of the team discussion with reporters, Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register and Rhett Bollinger of MLB.com published several quotes from the conversation. Between settling with Tyler Skaggs’ family over the wrongful death suit, not having a television partner for the upcoming season, and cutting payroll after eight straight losing seasons, there was a lot to cover. Several of Moreno’s quotes raised eyebrows, but the one that caught the most headlines concerned his description of a fan survey. He was simply trying to explain that he is focused on making sure the fan experience is a good one, but it came out very wrong.

“The number one thing fans want is affordability,” Moreno said. “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% 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. The purists, you know, it’s just straight winning.”

It wasn’t exactly inspiring to hear the owner of a baseball team come dangerously close to accusing fans of zealotry for just wanting their team to finish above .500 for the first time since 2015. After avoiding local media for years, Moreno started giving these spring training state of the team appearances in 2023. His answers are not always well received, and time tends not to do them any favors. In 2023, Moreno said, “You can’t start losing $50 to $100 million a year and keep the business,” then two years later, he said the team was doing just that, claiming it would “probably lose $50 million to $60 million, minimum.” In 2023, he said, “I always look at the fans. What are we doing to make sure the fans have a great experience and the fans are proud of the team that we put on the field?” Now he says winning is not even a top-five priority for the fans.

This isn’t the first time Moreno has cited survey results to bolster an argument. It’s a perilous exercise, because two can play at that game. In recent years, The Athletic has conducted its own surveys of Angels fans. In 2023, fans were asked to grade Moreno’s performance as owner, and 87.4% rated it either poor or below average. Out of 1,956 respondents, one solitary person rated the owner as excellent. Moreno must have done something right, though, because the next year, that number tripled. Those Athletic surveys have never asked fans how much they care about winning, because why would they? Isn’t that the unstated assumption of fandom?

You could postulate all day long about why winning isn’t in the top five. Maybe it’s because, as one fan told The Athletic’s Sam Blum, the survey “did not have winning as a category we could pick.” That’s one way to get the answer you want! Or maybe it’s simple survivorship bias; if you care at all about the performance of the team, the Angels probably drove you away long ago. It’s a little like surveying the diners at Olive Garden. Of course, affordability is their top priority. That’s why they’re at Olive Garden instead of the fancy Italian place down the street. But it doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t like for the food at Olive Garden to be better. What Moreno illustrated more than anything else is just how easy the owners have it. He bought into a business that pays him handsomely and increases in value year after year despite consistently failing at its putative purpose. In fact, he can summon reporters and boast that his customers don’t actually care whether the business fulfills that purpose.

As much as Moreno’s comments may rub you the wrong way, he’s not totally wrong. Baseball games are wildly expensive. It’s not surprising that affordability tops the list, and it’s truly refreshing to hear an owner acknowledge that. I know I personally would go to a lot more games if they were more reasonably priced. According to just about every study out there, the Angels provide one of the more affordable ballpark experiences around, from ticket prices to concessions.

However, using all this as an excuse to justify not making an effort to improve the team in free agency is another matter. Moreno more or less said the $2.75 billion franchise he owns is just for parents who need something to do with their kids, and he’s not completely wrong. My wife grew up in the area, and that’s absolutely what Angels games were for her family. Although she doesn’t care about baseball, she enjoyed sitting in the cheap seats and eating ballpark food. It’s fair to wonder, though, whether she might have taken more of an interest in the either the team or the sport had the baseball there been more compelling. The Angels never made the playoffs in the first 14 years of her life, and they finished better than third in the division only three times.

My sister lives not too far from Anaheim now. Years ago, she and her husband waged an all-out war about whether they’d raise their kids to root for her hometown team, the Nationals, or his, the Cubs. He had the upper hand when the Cubs won it all in 2016, but the kids were really young then. They went crazy when the Nationals won the 2019 World Series. My sister had won. They were Nats fans. I made my niece Taylor’s ninth birthday cake according to her specifications. She requested a surfing cake, with a cookie version of her on one side and a cookie version of Max Scherzer on the other side. Then the Nats collapsed and got rid of all the players she loved. When they sent Juan Soto to the nearby Padres, he took her allegiance with him.

All of this is to say that my sister is the mom that Moreno is talking about here. She takes her family of five to have a good time seeing the Angels. They’re not going to spend a million dollars and fight sellout crowds to see the Dodgers or the Padres, and they don’t care much who wins. But unspoken here is the obvious truth that had the Angels been the kind of team that inspires devotion, she might have raised three passionate Angels fans. If the Angels were the kind of team that had sellout crowds (and got to charge an arm and a leg for the tickets), they might have turned my sister and her family into fans who care whether the team wins or loses. Affordability would have climbed down their list of priorities. So when Moreno says his fans don’t care about winning, he’s partly right, but it’s because he’s getting the fans he’s earned.

Still, his comments beg an obvious question. Where does winning actually rank for Angels fans? Maybe they really do care about security and about “entertainment stuff or whatever” more than they care about having a decent team. But if not winning, what rounds out the top five?

I have some good news for you. We’ve got the answers. Here at FanGraphs, we’re more than just number crunchers. We’re journalists. Some of us even studied journalism in school (not me personally, but some of us). We’ve got industry sources (again, not me). Using our keen investigative tools, we have tracked down the actual survey responses, which are real and not made up. Below you’ll find the actual top 10 priorities of Angels fans, which are, and I can’t stress this enough, not completely fabricated for the purpose of entertainment.

1. Affordability
As discussed, the Angels are the Olive Garden of Major League Baseball, but without the unlimited breadsticks.

2. Safety
Once again, Moreno is right on the money. Getting stabbed at the ballpark is a real bummer. Sometimes my buddy Steve will text me to ask if I want to take in a ballgame. I always answer that question with another question: “How likely am I to get stabbed?” If he says the odds are anywhere above 15%, I stay home.

I really appreciate that the stadiums hung protective netting all around the infield. Sometimes it obstructs your view of the game a little bit, but it’s well worth it to know that there’s a physical barrier keeping the players from climbing up into the stands to stab you. I would rather watch my team lose than watch them win while getting stabbed, and I’m not afraid to say it. If that makes me a fair weather fan, so be it.

3. Entertainment Stuff or Whatever
It may have seemed like Moreno was being flippant or unspecific here, but this is a direct quote from several survey respondents. Angels fans really do like entertainment, or stuff, or whatever. They’re not picky. Is it entertainment? Is it stuff? Is it a third, unspecified thing? They’re fine either way.

According to the surveys, a surprisingly high percentage of attendees at Angels games actually intended to go to Disneyland, which is less than a mile away, but just rolled with it once they realized they’d taken the wrong exit. A smaller but still statistically significant subset of attendees seemed to be under the impression that they actually were in Disneyland and that a professional baseball game just happened to have broken out in the middle of Frontierland.

4. Food in Helmets
It’s hard to argue with Angels fans on this one. Whether it’s nachos or soft serve ice cream, food just tastes better when you eat it out of a novelty helmet. If you told me I could go to either a game where my team won, or a game where my team lost 36-1 but I got to eat nachos out of a helmet, I wouldn’t even stop to ask you whether I was going to get stabbed.

The survey respondents were so enthusiastic about helmet-based concessions that the Angels are holding discussions about adding a third food option in a novelty helmet with a diameter of 16 inches, large enough to fit an adult river hippopotamus. This is part of the reason the team has been so passive in free agency; a lot of the salary budget is getting plowed into hippo helmet R&D. The actual food that will go in the helmet is still to be determined, but the leading contender is a nine-pound serving of spaghetti and meatballs.

5. Jumbotron Fun Facts
You know what’s better than winning? Knowledge. The surveys indicated that a sizable portion of season ticket holders are only at the games because they possess a lifelong love of learning.

6. Clap, Clap, Clap-Clap-Clap
Clap, clap, clap-clap! Other fans turn up to Angels Stadium mainly because they really love the opening of the John Fogerty classic “Centerfield.” They don’t care who wins or loses. As long as they get to clap, they’ll keep shelling out for season tickets.

7. Convenient Parking
Look, one day you’ll get to the age when nothing on this Earth brings you as much satisfaction as finding the perfect parking spot. That time comes for everyone, and apparently plenty of Anaheim fans are fine watching their team waste Mike Trout as long as they get to avail themselves of the ballpark’s excellent parking situation. These fans will be giddy to know that Moreno had the lots repaved this winter.

8. Unspecified
This category just beat out winning, and I should clarify that it’s not a catch-all. It’s not miscellaneous. It’s unspecified, which is to say that when asked why they came to the ballpark, several fans couldn’t really come up with a reason. They just sort of ended up there. The survey results indicated that several fans responded with a long sigh, then looked around balefully and whispered, “What the hell am I doing here?”

9. Winning
OK, well it made the top 10. That’s pretty good, right?

10. Fireworks
Bang. Zoom. Fun at the ballpark. It’s almost as good as winning (unless you’re a dog).