Angels fans spent an entire season chanting at their owner to sell the team. It turns out he was listening.
Arte Moreno was affected by the negative chants aimed at him by Angels fans, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported this week. Rosenthal notes that the increasingly hostile atmosphere at the ballpark was part of what motivated Moreno to sell his controlling interest in the franchise.
Fan protest almost never works. This time it did.
Twenty-three years, and nothing since 2014
Moreno, 80, has owned the Angels since 2003. He sold this year at a $4 billion valuation to Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke, and he will remain involved as a minority owner.
The record speaks loudly. The Angels have the longest active postseason drought in Major League Baseball, with no playoff appearance since 2014. They own the worst record in baseball this season at 54-89. They employed Mike Trout for his entire prime and Shohei Ohtani for six years and won nothing with either of them.
That is one of the great failures in the history of American professional sports. Two of the ten best players who have ever lived, on the same roster, in the same market, and the franchise never won a single postseason game with them.
How it happened
The problems were structural and they all traced back to the top. Moreno meddled in baseball operations. He spent extravagantly on free agent contracts that aged terribly, and then refused to spend on the infrastructure that actually develops players.
The Angels farm system was a wasteland for most of the last decade. The analytics department lagged behind the industry. Front office leadership turned over constantly. None of that is bad luck. All of it is a function of an owner who wanted to be involved in the fun decisions and not the boring ones.
The chants were the last straw, not the cause
Moreno had been getting booed at Angel Stadium for years before this season. What changed in 2026 was volume and organization. “Sell the team” became a ritual, loud enough to be audible on broadcasts, and it happened every night in a half-empty ballpark.
At some point the experience of owning a baseball team stopped being enjoyable, and for an 80-year-old billionaire, that is the only metric that matters. He does not need the money or the aggravation.
What Kroenke inherits
Kroenke gets a franchise in the second-largest market in America with a terrible roster, a depleted farm system and a fan base that has been trained to expect nothing. He also gets one of the most valuable untapped assets in the sport, because Angels attendance was strong for years despite the losing.
Fix the baseball operation and that market responds immediately. Kroenke has done exactly that with the Rams, and he has the resources to do it again.
The chants are going to stop. Whether the losing does is a separate question.
Sources
- https://larrybrownsports.com/baseball/arte-moreno-affected-chants-angels-fans/769037
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5poeiRgB40
- https://larrybrownsports.com/baseball/rams-owner-stan-kroenke-purchases-angels/768367
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
