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).
Davy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based musician and a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @davyandrewsdavy.bsky.social.
In the immortal words of Shoeless Joe Jackson…”Owners”
It really says a lot about this site when this comment gets upvoted and my comment immediately below it gets downvoted. They’re saying literally the same thing. Owners care about dollars. If winning = dollars then owners will actively try to win. Sports are supposed to be about winning and rooting for your home team’s players to win. The players are playing to win the game, but the owners sure as hell aren’t.
“Fans want to go to the game for the purpose of posting selfies on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook”
-Lou Brown talking about owners
Nice job quoting half the post. Oof.
Fans want to go to the game for the purpose of posting selfies on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. In Boston it doesn’t matter if the Sox are losing by 20 runs, people will make sure they stay and support the Sweet Caroline Light Show Experience (TM). They don’t care if the team wins, so why should the owners?
You’re correct. The downvotes just show people don’t like when someone’s right. Of course people on Fangraphs want teams to win – we’re diehard’s – but the general public doesn’t care. They want an experience. People in my city still flock to PNC park regardless of the team because of the stadium and it’s surrounding amenities.
I mean, I guess that’s true, in the sense that 1.5 million people went to PNC Park in 2025, when the Pirates haven’t made the playoffs in 10 years. But about a million more people went to PNC Park in 2015, when the Pirates were good: https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/PIT/attend.shtml. So to say the general public doesn’t care if the team is good seems off to me.
This is it exactly. Who answered the Angels’ survey, the people who go to the park knowing the team won’t win? Of course they don’t care if the team doesn’t win, they prove it by watching the Angels.
The people who want to watch a winning team stay away in droves, just as they do in Steeltown.
Sorry to be pedantic (obviously not really sorry) but the whole problem here is just a bunch of semantic equivocation about what it means to say that “fans want” something. Is what fans “want” an economic revealed preference that we can figure out by weighting the factors that drive ticket sales? Or is it something we learn by talking to them or observing what they seem to care about psychologically? And are some people who buy tickets not really “fans” in the sense we care about, while others, who maybe don’t buy a lot of tickets but do post a lot of comments on FanGraphs, are?
Those extra one million butts that filled seats in 2015 were also there for the experience, it’s just their bar for taking selfies at the ballpark was higher.
Here in Southern Wisconsin, even if I wasn’t a baseball fan at all, I could tell you exactly how well the Cubs are doing this season by counting the number of Cubs hats I see in public.
Real median wages have fallen, cost of living has increased, and lots of other variables have changed in the past 11 years that make this a less than useful comparison.
Their records in 2011-12 were very similar to the last 3 years but had 200,000+ additional fans. So it’s not just winning and losing that drives attendance.
Looking for evidence of the alleged income drop, I found someone claiming to be the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis posted: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/
Which shows a fairly strong inflation adjusted increase over the time since 2014-2015 or so. 2019 was a local peak with a sharp drop to 2022, but by 2024 (last year available) it was back to above the pre-covid level.
I don’t know about the local economy in Pitsburg, but nationally, there’s been no great drop in median real household income to the currently available data.
Try to read with a little nuance. The Greater Boston Area contains more than enough people who will not go to games without the “fan experience” that the Sox have no real incentive to actually make the right moves to put together an actual winner. Los Angeles is likely no different. Sure every market is going to have plenty of people who will show up when the team is good and stay away when they stink, but I don’t think this article is about small-market teams. There are very wealthy owners in enormous markets who will happily spend pennies on tertiary entertainment instead of dollars on players when the resulting butts in seats are the same.
And I actually think the Sox had a good offseason! But it was definitely a frugal one. They’re at a point on the win curve where they should be adding more star/expensive players.
ironically, true diehards would be the exact people to show up to PNC park regardless of the team. That’s what a diehard is
If it was true the crappy teams wouldn’t have half empty stadiums at best.
You ain’t a Sox fan.
Of course I’m a Sox fan. I’m a huge one. The “fan experience” at a game is an absolute dumpster fire and represents what the casual fan wants. Nobody knows a damn thing about the team or the game being played – Marcelo Mayer got a STANDING OVATION in his first big league at bat like they were expecting the next Nomar. What a clown show. Down 2-1 in the bottom of the 9th they start blasting Shipping Up To Boston, and everyone’s got their phones out having a party. Seems they missed the memo that the Sox were LOSING and Papelbon wasn’t on his way out of the bullpen to close out a tight game. Could you imagine if they started playing Enter Sandman at Yankee Stadium with the team losing in the bottom of the 9th? JFC.
I don’t put any emotional investment into sports, but in the wise words of Herm Edwards, the great thing about sports is “you play to win the game!” Clearly the owners aren’t playing to win sh*t. How can organizations worth multiple billions of dollars be so poorly run? Is it because nobody knows what they’re doing, or nobody cares what they’re doing?
The paying customer sees the product as a sideshow. Owners behave accordingly. When the paying customer can’t be taken seriously, the owners have zero incentive to take them seriously.
I’m pretty sure that these interviews never make the owner or team look better. I don’t think there is a way to answer the question “why doesn’t your team spend as much as the Dodgers” without coming off looking like a cheapskate. And that turns off fans. Fans hate it when they think the owners are pocketing their money without a plan to improve the team.
The only thing owners or the team president or GM / POBO should say in any interview is some version of “we’re focused on building a sustainable, competitive winner that can compete year in and out for championships.” They should even use that answer when they ask about the owners’ pets. No “we’re aiming for a .540 winning percentage,” no “the fans want things other than winning too,” no “Fido was a handful his first year, but now that he’s not peeing on our bed he’s a source of joy and delight.”
It’s harder to say that with a straight face when your team has been in the low 70s of wins the last few years but if you can’t say it, you shouldn’t make yourself available.
Every owner (pretty much everybody in a public facing job) should repeatedly watch the scene in Bull Durham where Crash is teaching Nuke how to handle interviews.
I think there’s a way to discuss reducing the price of tickets or improving the ballpark experience, even if baseball performance and team payroll are bad. It’s not wrong to think or talk about those things.
Obviously winning is the most important thing to readers here on FG. But there are whole other categories of fan out there.
one of the things is arte changed the name of the team to “access a bigger market”, which we all took to mean spending more to improve the baseball team… oops! on top of that Angels stadium is one of the oldest in the league and is falling apart, and Arte’s worth $5 billion. dude really has no excuse
As a fan of a team with an owner so miserly that it’s borderline inexplicable (White Sox), complaints about Moreno’s unwillingness to spend come off as lazy, vacuous, and unthinkingly recycled from other fanbases’ actually justified financial grievances.
The Angels have run top 10 opening day payrolls for 23 out of Moreno’s 24 full seasons as owner, 2026 included, and in 2019 signed Mike Trout to what was then the richest contract professional sports history, and remained the largest contract in MLB until it was surpassed by Ohtani’s deal in 2024.
Moreno is an absolutely terrible owner, but there’s more than one way to run a franchise into the ground, and the Angels don’t suck because he won’t spend money – they suck because he’s bad at spending it.
I guess they might, in some hard-to-imagine counterfactual universe where the owner of the doldrum-dwelling franchise being interviewed actually wasn’t an asshole. The problem is of course that the latter causes the former — having a meddlesome, strategically incompetent idiot in a position of absolute authority is nearly the only way I can imagine for a whole organization to get stuck in the doldrums.
John Middleton gives very good interviews most offseasons
(a situation that’s set to continue for 3 more, um, baseball seasons)
A-Rod said it before Moreno: Baseball is an entertainment business.
To be sure, revenues go up after teams start to win, but how soon and at what cost?
Exactly. Does spending twice as much on payroll mean twice the revenues? I’m not sure it does, especially since a large portion of revenue is based on things other than ticket sales. Jersey sales, for example: let’s say the average Brewers fan owns a Yelich jersey. Would that fan buy five more jerseys this year if the Brewers signed the top five free agents? Would he or she watch five times as many games? You start running into serious diminishing returns here.
To the contrary I think that when the Dodgers do these they look great. I wonder why?
Get a Brain!
Morano
This is hilarious- I LOL’ed many times.
Anyway the survey DOES show how good MLB owners have it.
Team is great? Stadium is packed, fans are engaged, etc.
Team sucks? Not as packed, but, you will still get people to come out if it’s affordable & they can have a good time at the park with all the food, entertainment, etc., esp on a beautiful spring/summer evening. The atmosphere is almost like a carnival & it can be easy to not care if they win or lose cuz you’re busy doing other stuff & barely paying attention. If you combine sucking with a low payroll,. you can still make $$.
You really have to have John Fisher level ineptitude to screw it up.
This is exactly what happens when you have a closed economy, which is exactly what MLB is, and it’s also exactly what MLB fans want.
Arte Moreno is an insufferable ass, but numbers back him up. In 2025 the Angels, despite their long history of mediocre-to-abysmal baseball, drew 2.615m fans, 32,900/game, both good for 13th in MLB, right in the company of exciting mid-market teams, the Brewers and the Mariners.
Milwaukee is the 40th-largest metro area in the U.S. Seattle is 15th. Los Angeles is 2nd. Add Milwaukee and Seattle metro areas together and they only have 2/3rds the population of the LA metro area.
So you’re comparing apples to crabapples.
True, but also irrelevant
How so? He’s only drawing the same number of fans as a good small-market team despite being in the second-largest market in America. It’s relevant to the comment I was responding to.
It’s irrelevant to Moreno. He’s drawing fans and profiting. Doesn’t matter to him that he could do so much better.
Spin it a different way and it sounds great for Moreno. Really good small-mid market teams that try super hard to win and provide a good experience are only drawing as many fans through the gate as the perpetual 70 win Angels who won’t even bother trying to do anything at this point.
That Moreno lacks the imagination or something to take advantage of his enviable market seems indisputable. My point is he’s hardly being punished at the box office for it. He can continually field dispiriting teams and still draw 2.6m fans, a total half MLB wishes it had, watch the value of his franchise increase at a rate far greater than inflation, and apparently pocket boatloads of dough along the way, precisely because his market teems with flush families looking for entertainment options unlike few others.
The Angels and Arte Moreno are the less extreme, AL version of the Rockies and Dick Monfort.
The Angels ain’t in Los Angeles.
he said “LA metro area”, not LA… he’s correct
But the LA market is shared with Dodgers. Similar to the White Sox vs Cubs; just looking at the overall metro population is a bit misleading about the situation the Angels are in.
Sharing the LA metro market with the Angels hasn’t hurt the Dodgers, just like sharing the Chicago area with the Sox hasn’t hurt the Cubs. So why is one team popular and the other is the red headed stepchild? (wondering out loud)
The Angels were good while the Dodgers were middling in the late 90s and 2000s, but their fanbase still scarcely breached the OC county line. The Dodgers and Angels might be in the same metro area but I would liken the difference in fan interest more to the Wisconsin/Illinois line than the Wrigleyville/Southside line.
In some ways Anaheim is part of the LA metro area, in some ways it’s not. In many ways Orange County is near Los Angeles more than it’s part of Los Angeles.
Not many people in the Los Angeles area will drive south to Anaheim to see a game, even if the Angels are good.
issuing correction on a previous post, regarding the terror group Arte Moreno. you do not, under any circcumstances, “gotta hand it to them”
The numbers, in fact, do the opposite of backing Arte up. Arte Moreno misunderstands fandom so poorly, his franchise is performing the same as franchises in much, much smaller markets.
a fair assessment. however, you’re comparing a losing season for a major market team (angels) to massively successful seasons form mid-low market teams (mariners, brewers). if the angels were having the success that the m’s or brewers were, this would be a very different paragraph.
I lived in LA as a non-Dodger or Angels fan and preferred to drive the extra half hour from where I lived to go to Angels games. I’d purchase a $7 ticket and walk to the front row behind third base and watch Trout and Ohtani. I’d do my best to catch a game every time my hometown team was in the area.
It was much more family friendly than dodger stadium and generally a more casual atmosphere.
Leaving the stadium was night and day different as Dodger stadium rarely had their employees directing traffic, whereas the Angels stadium had us out efficiently.
I do love a raucous environment for big games, but for a random summer night or Sunday afternoon, I honestly prefer the laid back angels games.
That said, it’s possible to improve the team without losing that atmosphere.
Dodgers Stadium is exciting I guess but it is obnoxiously loud (not the fans, the pumped in sound) and overall just not very fan friendly, and that’s before considering what it does to your CC bill.
The new sound system seems very loud and I dont like some of the new lighting stuff they did since the 2020/2021 renovations removed that old classic speaker pole beyond the CF fence and made that a kid play area.
And yet the Dodgers had the highest attendance in MLB last year, more than 1.4 MILLION fans more than the Angels. So…maybe winning does kind of matter?
I do sort of agree with Arte Moreno here. It is unaffordable and it needs to be. MLB and their teams have shown a remarkable lack of interest in making it possible for a family of four to regularly go to the ballpark. And that’s a problem because that’s what makes kids like baseball, and to grow up into baseball loving adults. Baseball at the park is magical, and if you aren’t playing to a full house every weekend you’re losing future fans. Baseball is going to completely die about 15 years after the moment where all families have been priced out.
But I only sort of agree with it because as much as he thinks he gets it, I don’t think Arte Moreno has any actual interest in making baseball affordable. Just for “fun” I clicked over to see how much a seat in the “family section” costs. It’s a terrible location, way up in the outfield super far away from the action. It’s $30.25 for a ticket. That’s over $120 for a family of four, before we start talking about the food in little plastic helmets (which is definitely a big deal for everyone), transportation to the stadium or parking, etc.
We’re probably looking at…$200? $250? The median US worker makes only about $1,000 a week before taxes, and I don’t know about you but I make way more than that and looking at $200 for an afternoon out with the family is a lot.
Unless you’re willing to do seriously discounted tickets for kids under 16, I’m not buying any line about caring about affordability.
Let us be perspective. Just published NFL average single game tickets exceed $250 per ticket, and can be played in sleet, snow, sub zero. NBA 2025 average exceed $185, and played indoors, smelly gyms. Baseball is simply the best sit back, and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air that a family of four can do for less than a single ticket admission to the major USA sports. Regarding Moreno’s Top Ten. Winning is more fun.
True, but there are roughly 10x the number of baseball games a year to NFL games, so scarcity is playing a huge role in that pricing difference.
The Angels consistently rank in the top five for least expensive tickets in MLB as far back as I can find data on the subject. There are numerous criticisms to make regarding his ownership of the team, but he has clearly made an effort to make attendance affordable.
I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s “he has clearly made an effort to make attendance affordable”, rather it’s “this is the price point the algorithm tells us we can make the most money per ticket without losing out on enough ticket sales to negate the benefit of higher costs”, and the price point is only that low because people don’t want to come to games
You could not possibly be more wrong, as the Angels also ranked amongst the least expensive tickets when they had Ohtani. They clearly could have charged more without significantly decreasing attendance. You should be able to give Moreno credit for keeping the gameday experience affordable even though he has been a terrible owner in other respects.
For me this is every major league men’s sport in the US, now.
This is why closing down all those minor league teams was a bad idea. Taking the family to minor league games is fantastic.
I think it’s how you build baseball fans.
This times infinity.
100% agreed. We have a AA affiliate here, and I can get cheap tickets behind home plate while watching some of the top prospects in the game. And there are loads of gimmicky things for the kids as well.
I wonder how many stadiums have public transportation directly to the parks. In Chicago, both Wrigley and Comiskey have L stops. You can get to both parks from almost any spot in the city for the price of a train ride. And the Northside is very walkable, so many residents walk to the park.
The two NY teams have stops by (at) their stadiums — it’s how I got to a ton of Yankee games as a kid in the 90s (I know the current Stadium is shifted a bit over from there, but the station was right next to the old one). IIRC, there’s public transit that goes to Nationals Park. The area around PNC Park in Pittsburgh is very walkable.
This is why in-city stadiums are almost always better than the remote, island-in-a-sea-of-parking-lots models of the 70s/80s.
I suggest you look at the secondary market to see what games actually cost. SeatGeek has only two games in April in which the minimum price is over $20 per seat. Some are $11 per seat. Yes, those are presumably the worst seats in the stadium, but they are by any definition “affordable.”
What do us Angel fans really want? We want Moreno to sell the team…
I don’t like how this is being characterized to dunk on Moreno when he made a legitimate and important point. I grew up going to baseball games for the bond between the team and its community. It was an enjoyable event whether you won or lost, even though everyone’s preference was obviously the former. Increasing expenses and increased toxicity within the fan base have made that experience less enjoyable over time, to the point that I now prefer minor league atmospheres over major league ones.
The comments are a little tone deaf, but I think Moreno has made it clear that he cares about winning. Up until the last year or so, the Angels have run a high payroll, and Moreno seems personally invested in the team in a way many other owners don’t.
People who think Moreno is cheap should try rooting for an actually cheap franchise like the White Sox, Guardians, Marlins, or Pirates. The guy is terrible owner, but it’s because he spends on the wrong players, not because he doesn’t spend.
I coud not agree more. I used to take my family to Durham Athletic Park (where baseball scenes for Bull Durham were filmed). It was old, had no parking, and the kids could do what they wanted.
If you’re looking for affordability and fun, minor league games are the way to go. Maybe Moreno would be happier running a minor league team (cue the snark).
As I got older, I realized how ridiculous it really is to be emotionally fragile about a team winning and losing. Arte is right, and it’s nice to hear him say that. If the game is really about winning, why don’t we have a relegation system where teams like the Rockies would be in the DSL right about now?
Everything about sports fandom is ridiculous and highly irrational. Sports as an industrial complex doesn’t exist without ridiculousness.
Of course the game is about winning. If the game wasn’t about winning, they wouldn’t keep score or have standings.
Like literally every other leisure pursuit that humans do, there are people who exist along a continuum of interest, from “I’m intensely interested in curling once every 4 years” to “I can tell you Jack Fournier’s career OPS in home games from memory”. If anyone ever has any doubt about that, all they need to do is troll Youtube for any particular subject.
What I meant was that winning is really only a secondary pursuit. The primary is a money making machine. And if winning was really the priority, people like Anthony Rendon wouldn’t play. People like Clase wouldn’t do what he did. Winning isn’t the be all end all was my principal point.
That, I’d agree with.
Opposite side of the same coin you’re referring to, as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized it’s not really worth it to dedicate my limited free time to things that don’t bring me joy. I’ve become a relatively more casual sports fan and for better or for worse a competitive team with a realistic chance at playoffs is much more fun to follow than a team that has minimal hope.
The fans that live and die by team results aren’t the ones you need to sell on showing up to games. They’re coming regardless. It’s the casuals you need to put effort into selling on the team in order to grow your fanbase, and it’s a much easier sales pitch when the team is winning.
The casuals aren’t the ones who really care about winning. They’re the ones who Moreno is speaking about regarding the fan experience. They want to have a good time and be entertained, win or lose.
I think this is oversimplified, because there’s at least two sets of casual fans. One are the bandwaggoners that just like a winner, and only tune in when the team is doing well. Another are those who like the ballpark experience, like one of my kids, who doesn’t know all the stats and the players like my other kid, and just likes to be there in the crowd, watch the game part of the time, and partake in the other ballpark activities the rest of the time.
I think most fangraphs readers are so engrossed in the game and don’t realize how many fans are really in that category that one of my kids is in. A LOT of those fans truly exist. These seem to be the ones Moreno is trying to reach.
Yes but, hot take incoming I know, baseball games are more fun when your team wins! Even if you’re not paying that close attention, the music is more upbeat, people are cheering, the player whose shirsey your aunt bought you is doing good stuff. Gosh, maybe it’d even get you to want to buy a hat and come back again sometime.
If all other conditions remain equal then of course it’s better to win, but I have been to plenty of games where the experience was negatively affected by an obnoxious crowd or substandard amenities to the point that I enjoyed a win less there than I did a loss elsewhere.
True..& if not, you need to make sure the ballpark experience is good & crank up the marketing gimmicks that get people to attend.
If you can provide that for a decent price, you’ll get people to come out, even if the team isn’t good.
Exactly.
A better way to phrase this would be that he can still make an acceptable amount of money off of the fans even if his team doesn’t win, BUT he would make much more if they won consistently because the fans would prefer that even more. The catch of course is how much do you increase payroll to make that happen. Can you become a consistent winner while maintaining a similar margin of profits compared to costs? I think so, but Moreno doesn’t really trust that he is capable enough to do so. And the same goes for many team who spend jack on their team even when they are poised to leap forward in the competitive cycle. Not all teams, but many.
I both noticed and appreciated that cookie Max Scherzer has heterochromia. Well done Davy, my cake order is incoming
Yeah, I had to zoom in to make sure he didn’t drop the ball on that. I was relieved.
What fans wants when they attend a game and what fans want from the team are different. When I am watching a game on TV I don’t care about affordability, parking or safety. I want to watch a good team. The fans that attend games regularly are the small part of the fan base, or potential fan base. Arte is tone deaf.
This is rally monkey erasure.
Nobody wants a reminder that it has been 20 years since the Angels won playoff games.
as resident miserable angels fan, i can affirm all of this. i love feeling affordable and safe!! also please do not mention the time the Angels killed one of their players due to gross negligence
I know the survey results are fabricated because fireworks are way too low. In my experience nothing brings fans out to the ballpark more than postgame fireworks.
This might be true for 29 ballparks that are more than 15 minute drive from Disneyland.
I suppose you could just root for the visiting team while enjoying the ballpark, the hat foot, and the not-getting-stabbed. That way everybody wins. Well, almost everybody.
Being a lifelong Angels fan, this made me both laugh and cry! As long as Moreno owns this team, the only way the Angels are making the playoffs is if every prospect and free agent signee were to have a career season. And that would only bring them to an 86 win season.
Fred Wilpon got lots of deserved criticism for saying his goal was for the team is to play meaningful games in September, but these comments are worse. How is it possible to be this much worse than the Wilpons were?
That was worse in context, though. Wilpon was talking about “meaningful” games in borderline contention while he was in the process of pointlessly squandering (what at the time seemed like) a top-tier core roster of young stars that really should’ve been in the playoffs every year. If Moreno’s team is mediocre it’s not because it’s underperforming expectations.
He said it in 2004 when the team was expected to be terrible.
Wow, 9 paragraphs of a serious article that then evolved into a humor piece (which was certainly better than spending more time mulling the words and priorities of Arte Moreno)
I did get a little confused whether this was satire or reportage around #4: “Whether it’s nachos or soft serve ice cream, food just tastes better when you eat it out of a novelty helmet.” Because that’s just true
we’ve gone too many comments without saying it… “NotGraphs lives!”
this is a banger!
Ticket sales are highly dependent on all these things. I’m a die hard fan, but I’ll watch on TV/MLB.tv rather than go to the park if it doesn’t have those first 8 things in the survey.
But, that’s just ticket sales. Moreno could be making a lot MORE money if people wanted to watch them on TV and he had one of those juicy media contracts. THAT comes from winning, and ONLY WINNING.
It’s not clear that juicy tv contracts even come from winning, these days. Unless we’re going to argue that the only winning that matters is a championship, or multiple championships.
*Reggie Jackson marching robotically towards the press box* I must Kill Davy Andrews.
Or, on number 8: “People will come Arte, they’ll come to Anaheim for reasons they can’t even fathom, they’ll turn up under your large A, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it”
Sure, the concerns of a lot of FanGraphs commenters may not amount to a hill of beans, but this is our hill! And these are our beans!
Uggghhh, I hate defending Moreno and the Angels but here goes. First of all, Moreno is not cheap. From 2011 (Trout’s rookie year) through 2023 (Ohtani’s departure), the Angel’s ran the 8th highest payroll on average, peaking as high as 3rd and never going lower then 11th. Pretty much every year, they were in the top third of spenders. And yes, you can argue that they are a major market team but let’s not forget they share that market with the highest spending, most successful team in the sport and the Padres are only 1.5 hours away.
Call it bad ownership and front office management if you want but you have to recognize that the Angels have been one of, if not the most, unlucky teams when it comes to free agent signings. I mean look at this list:
Albert Pujols (signed 2011 — 10 yrs / $240M+)
C.J. Wilson (signed 2011 — 5 yrs / $77.5M)
Josh Hamilton (signed 2012 — 5 yrs / $125M)
Justin Upton (signed 2017 — 5 yrs / $106M extension after FA signing)
Anthony Rendon (signed 2019 — 7 yrs / $245M)
In hindsight these signings were terrible but, at the time, I believe all of these were generally considered reasonable deals. They paid a lot but they had Mike Trout in his prime and they did attempt to build a winner around him but every major deal they signed blew up in their face in disastrous fashion. I’m not positive the Dodgers or Yankees could have fielders a consistent winner if their signings panned out similarly.
And through all of this, they kept their ticket sales inexpensive (relative to the league) despite living in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country, even when the team is losing $50-60M per year. And yes he’s a billionaire and yes the valuation of the team has continued to increase as has his net worth but I don’t see many other owners making the sacrifices that Moreno is making. Even if he may not have worded in the best way, he obviously still cares about winning. Lambasting him for choosing to make the game more affordable and enjoyable for the fans, likely at the cost of higher profits, seems unfair. For all those demanding he sell the team, there’s a decent chance the new owner is not going to spend more on payroll and will almost certainly jack up the ticket prices.
If Arte and the Angels are guilty of anything it’s for not knowing when it’s time to throw in the towel and rebuild. And it’s tough to blame them for that. You can’t rebuild when Trout is in his prime and you definitely can’t rebuild when you’ve got Trout and Ohtani. Now that Ohtani is gone and Trout is clearly in decline, yes, they should absolutely be selling everything and going into full rebuild mode. Their strategy of drafting near big league players and rushing them to the majors given their current roster is bizarre. For that, I believe criticism is warranted. And not to say Arte’s been perfect otherwise because there are plenty of nits to pick but, on the whole, I think he has spent and sacrificed profits more than just about any other GM would have in his situation.
He spent, but why did he spend? He spent not to win, but to market the team to fans. When you recognize that putting names on the field is entirely to get fans to the park, without any consideration for maintaining a healthy, winning baseball team, a lot of his decisions makes more sense. Keeping Shohei for his final contract year is a perfect example: from a baseball point of view, it was criminal mismanagement of the franchise. From a “keep the tickets/merch flowing for another year” it was a fine decision.
Don’t give him too much credit for spending, because he’s doing it for all the wrong reasons and in ways that hurts their team.
Ohtani is such a singularly transcendent phenomenon that doing anything else other than pushing in all your chips to try and make a deep playoff run and retain him, no matter how unlikely it might have been, would have been absolutely unforgiveable, and if the Angels had taken your advice and traded him for prospects instead of at least attempting one last push, people would have screamed about that too.
Some good and interesting points here, but lets not just blindly believe the owner saying the team is losing 50-60M a year. The history of ownership is pretty clear (or very murky) on how honest owners are about team finances.
one thing to note is that the last “big signing” was 7 years ago at this point. arte did keep the overall payroll relatively high, but not as high as the second biggest market in the US really should have been. in fact at the time that they had shohei freaking ohtani, the payroll stayed constant or went down.
even if you want to give him credit for free agency, it really doesnt excuse the rot thats infected every other side of the baseball operations (treating minor leaguers like shit, not investing in the front office, wont pay for a spanish broadcast, cant buy pujols a running machine, air conditioning broken?!?!).
many former players (kevin pillar the most recent) has said that arte does not care about winning, and i would argue he does not care about affordability or safety as he suggests. the ballpark is falling apart. his negligence killed a player. you really dont have to hand it to him
I was just going to post this. He makes the big $$ signing that gets media attention, but, doesn’t spend $$ on the little things or spend $$ effectively.
You could get a top notch front office staff with top scouts & top analytics all the way down the org. for a fraction of ANY of those contracts. Not to mention nutrition, treating minor leaguers fairly, etc. It doesn’t get media attention, but, it is a way to create a long-term winning org.
Any baseball team that starts winning also has attendance increase, so fans care about winning a lot. If we want to better interpret his statement as “there are things we can provide that don’t relate to winning that fans want”, then that’s accurate
Moreno is just too glad that Jerry Reinsdorf, John Fisher, Bob Nutting, and the Monforts roam the Earth, to keep him from absolutely running away with the Worst Owner in Baseball crown.
I’m a diehard Orioles fan. I go to 25-30 game per year, and watch or listen to most of the rest. I want nothing more than to experience a World Series in my lifetime. I have answered many, many team surveys about what I want from my ballpark experience. And I have never—not once—rated the outcome of a game as an important factor in whether I enjoyed my experience.
That’s not how these surveys work. They ask about the specific things I liked or how they could improve concessions or in-game entertainment to make it more fun for me and my kids. If they were to ask me before the season whether the team being good will impact my enjoyment of the season, the answer is 100% yes. Ask me after a game about the specific outcome and the answer is no. For me, this is the great thing about baseball. There is always another game tomorrow!
to be a little fair to the Angels. They aren’t extremely cheap. They’ve shelled out big money on contracts. It’s just a shame those have panned out so poorly for them so often. No excuses for being behind the curve so often on roster construction, free agent decision-making, etc.
I did venture to the big A once. Friend visited town, he was a Yankees fan, and the Baby Bombers were down in Anaheim for a series. So we made the trek from Los Angeles to the A, to see young Judge, and also to enjoy seeing Mike Trout. We had a great time! The Angels were mediocre. Trout was amazing. And I have to admit that the their rally monkey jumbotron (with goofy Game of Thrones memes) was more entertaining than the usual fare at Dodger Stadium at that time (2019). Gosh, I can’t even recall if we saw Shohei play or not… (wikipedia and my photos app suggest that he was out injured at the time, shucks!).
So: points to Moreno for easy parking and entertainment or stuff.
Geez, I even remember how good that 2002 team was. Oh how fate has been cruel to Orange County
The best fan experience I ever had at Angels Stadium? Arte, it was game six of the 2002 World Series. I have never seen the fans so into a game, and I have never felt so blessed by the outcome of a single game. Given the curse that has hung over this franchise in every other year of their existence, I still can’t believe the Angels ever won that series. I still weep every time I watch Spezio’s home run or I see that championship trophy and the surrounding memorabilia down in the main concourse. Please bring winning baseball back to Anaheim.
Hear! Hear!
1,956 people is such a small sample size. You know what’s a much larger survey that encompasses millions of subjects in a major metropole every day? Ticket sales. When my team was bad I went to one or two games a summer. Last year I went to 10. I bet if you looked at ticket sales for the Angels over the past 30 years you’d find quite a few more than 1,956 people who prioritize winning
Also, thank you Davy for being a funny guy and an exceptional writer. #bringbackNotGraphs
I live near a High-A affiliate. The stadium and the gameday experience are quite lovely. Last time I was there I browsed through the day’s media guide. I noticed on the team’s mission statement it says, and this is a direct quote, “Our purpose is not to win games.”
I understood the point — they exist to develop young players and provide the community a fun night out — but it still seemed like an awful odd thing to actually say out loud. Not excusing Moreno as a poor owner, but I think that’s basically what is happening here.
Much, much different in the minors when the rosters are constantly churning and development/fan experience are the top priorities.
Hypocritical of the Angels to talk about safety when they’re the only team to have had a player pull a gun from under third base and say “I must kill the Queen”
HEY!! IT’S ENRICO PALLAZZO!!
more like Farte Moreno
Despite being a literal dumpster fire on the field for a decade, and the tragedy of Tyler Skaggs still weighing heavy on them, the Angels are routinely in the top half of the league in attendance. Last year they were 5th in the AL, 13th in baseball, drawing 2.64 million people. Winning is great, but it appears that it’s not the most important thing to people going to Angels games.
Lots of people live near them. Lots!
Without even trying to do anything, they still bring in more fans than most teams!
Hello. It is I, John Angelsfan. I love the Los Angeles Angels Formerly Of Anaheim. I love it when they play baseball and I can go to the ballpark and observe. I enjoy paying low prices to experience an event. This event has a lower-than-even chance of a “desirable” outcome, yet this in itself is “desirable” to me. If the outcome distribution were to markedly move to more “desirable” outcomes, I would be quite dismayed, in fact. I crave the security of the outcome distribution I am most familiar with; namely, one inevitable skewed toward undesirable outcomes. I have 6 cars, and need somewhere to park them all.
Great article Davy but I have to correct you on one thing: #7 actually has nothing to do with the stadium parking situation. A sizable portion of the Angels fanbase go to the ballpark on the off chance they’ll get to hear the 3rd song off Modest Mouse’s masterpiece Lonesome Crowded West over the stadium PA. Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine came in 11th
Dave Barry would be proud of this.
It’s been a while since I’ve lived in LA, but last time I went to an Angels game, it seemed like everyone wanted to show or see cleavage and drink tons of beer. It was a while ago. I caught a Luis Polonia fly ball. Btw, Polonia might have been the single worst defensive player i ever saw play lf. That day the other team got a triple off a single hit his way. I can’t remember who they played, but it was a blowout quickly.
That’s all baseball games in Atlanta have ever been. We don’t have a great sports culture.
What was the survey prompt though? Something like “Regarding Angels in-stadium, game day experience, rank these factors from most to least important” is going to elicit different responses than “As a fan of the Angels, rank the following priorities for the team from most to least important to you:”
If the question is anything like the former, it’s pretty reasonable that fans care less about the team winning the individual game they’re at (out of 162 total) versus their ability to afford being there in the first place and the experience they have once there.
Saying fans don’t care about winning based on a survey worded like the former would be a highly disingenuous interpretation of the data.
If it’s worded like the latter, well Angels fans really don’t care about winning then!
That easily takes the record as the most LOL article I’ve ever read on FanGraphs — the list at the end in particular. I’ll never look at the protective netting at ballparks the same again! Awesome job.