Mike Trout was practically beaming. He dropped the phrase “fresh start” four times in an interview that barely lasted five minutes.
The burden of the Angels’ failures has been disproportionately his to bear. He has insisted that his path to Cooperstown would run through Anaheim and only Anaheim. He has played 16 seasons for an owner that blessed him with half a billion dollars, treated his family like royalty and stranded him in position to conclude a star-spangled career without ever winning a postseason game.
On Tuesday, Trout learned that the Angels would have a new owner: Stan Kroenke. Trout got off the call, looked up Kroenke and has not stopped smiling since.
“What a track record,” Trout said. “Wherever he buys, he wins.”
Rams owner Stan Kroenke has agreed to purchase a majority stake of the Angels on Tuesday. The deal is pending regulatory review and MLB approval.
(Kyusung Gong / Associated Press)
The Rams. The Colorado Avalanche. The Denver Nuggets. Arsenal.
So what if the Angels have baseball’s longest playoff drought? They now have baseball’s richest owner, with a net worth valued by Forbes at $24 billion.
Kroenke bought a controlling share of the Angels at a valuation of $4 billion, a record for a major league team, with current owner Arte Moreno retaining a small stake, a source with knowledge of the deal not authorized to discuss it publicly told The Times. The sale includes the team-owned television and radio outlets, ABTV and AM 830. The deal is subject to customary closing conditions and MLB approval.
In 2009, ESPN put Moreno on the cover of its magazine, proclaiming the Angels delivered the best value of the then-122 teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball. In this decade, the experience had been so devalued by 12 consecutive losing seasons that resale tickets for Tuesday’s game against the mighty New York Yankees were available for $5, amid a season of fans regularly chanting “Sell the Team!”
“He’s aware of the chants,” Angels president Molly Jolly said. “He knows about them. At the end of the day, this is about having the right next owner more than it is about anything else.”
Jolly wouldn’t say whether Kroenke or Moreno initiated the negotiations. She did say the sale was not conducted through a formal bidding process, but proceeded through face-to-face discussions between Kroenke and Moreno.
“He has a traditional sense about him,” Jolly said. “To be able to sit down with another gentleman and have a conversation and talk about baseball and the franchise, that resonates for how he thinks and looks at things, rather than it being a complex conversation.
“I think that’s what was the ‘Why now?’ It was the right person having the right conversation with him.”
As far as she knew, Jolly said, the conversations had not started when she assumed the team presidency in April, but the possibility of a sale had “always stayed out there” after Moreno invited bids in 2022 and then decided not to sell.
In July, after joining the Angels as interim general manager, John Mozeliak said he had spoken with Moreno for hours and the topic of whether the owner might sell the team “never came up.” On Tuesday, Mozeliak acknowledged that, when he started his position, Moreno “had mentioned that this was a possibility.”
Fans at Angel Stadium hold up signs during a game against the Yankees Tuesday marking Stan Kroenke’s agreement to purchase the Angels from Arte Moreno.
(Mark J. Terrill / Ap Photo/mark J. Terrill)
The sale is not expected to be finalized until early next year. Kroenke has not done the usual due diligence that would precede a sale — meeting with team management and touring the stadium — and has not introduced himself to officials from the city of Anaheim. The city owns the stadium and surrounding parking lots, a 150-acre site that city officials would love to see Kroenke develop.
In the meantime, it’s business as usual for the Angels. Mozeliak, who ran the St. Louis Cardinals when the Rams played in St. Louis, said he never has met Kroenke. He did recall speaking with Kevin Demoff, who oversees all of Kroenke’s teams.
Mozeliak has no idea whether Kroenke might invite him to stay, but for now the plan of rebuilding the team and reorganizing the front office remains on course, in the interest of serving fans weary and frustrated after 12 consecutive losing seasons.
“We’ve been preaching change all along,” Mozeliak said. “Now they’re going to see even more.”
And, he noted, the Padres and Angels had sold at successive record prices for MLB teams, despite the prospect of a lockout and owners’ hopes for a new collective bargaining agreement with a salary cap intended in part to raise franchise values.
“A lot of people thought teams wouldn’t sell until there was a new CBA,” Mozeliak said. “Clearly, that prediction was wrong.”
In the clubhouse, no one was talking about that. Neto was talking about the call Trout made to “some of the Rams guys” for a scouting report on Kroenke.
“I reached out to one Rams player,” Trout said, smiling. “He exaggerates a little bit.”
Still, given the national attention given last winter to the air conditioning not working properly in an Angel Stadium weight room, Neto said the evaluation from the Rams’ locker room was glowing.
“The most important thing they said is, he just wants what’s important for us,” Neto said. “That’s to make the clubhouse better, in the sense of whatever we need, we get, whether that’s amenity-wise, speakers, whatever it is, he’ll make sure we get those.”
Trout was so enthusiastic that, when a reporter asked if he was excited about what the new vision might be, he answered before the reporter could finish asking the question.
“No doubt,” Trout said. “Obviously, when you’re frustrated the last — I don’t know how many years it’s been, but to hear the news like this, I’m super excited to have this change.”
For his part, Neto sounded ready to pitch Tarik Skubal on pitching for the Angels — or, at least, pitching Kroenke on the possibility of recruiting him in free agency.
“Who doesn’t want to be in Southern California?” Neto said. “The weather is beautiful here. We have the best fans, in my opinion. We have a beautiful stadium.
“Who wouldn’t want to be here and play in this organization, in this market? It would be a no-brainer.”
Trout said the ownership change “was needed” and said there was “a good vibe around the clubhouse,” but both he and Neto expressed appreciation for Moreno.
“Arte was very supportive of us, whatever the outside noise was,” Neto said.
“I’ve seen a lot of hate, a lot of love, a lot more hate. But, as a player who has played under him, it was a lot of love. He treated us well, and that’s all you can ask for as a player.”