Not to defend the name (it’s ridiculous); I did a quick driving directions thingy, and I found that the Pistons play in Auburn Hills, 31 miles from downtown Detroit. Anaheim is 25 miles from downtown LA. So it’s not outside of the norm in that respect. Maybe they should be the O.C. Angels.
C) Last year Anaheim drew 3,375,677 fans - second in the league, and about 92% of the stadium’s capacity. The year before that they drew over 3 million. Truth is, they don’t have that many more tickets to sell than they already are.
A) Do you think it’s a stupid name?
Ohhh yeah. reminds me of a comedy bit that had a line something like, “it was April the 11th of August…”
B) Do you think it’ll stand up?
Sure… Bud Selig is totally useless.
C) Do you think it will acheive it’s objective?
It will only sell extra merch to those idiots that have to have every single variation of every jersey ever.
B) Yes…get real, has Selig ever said “no” to anything when someone mentions the word “money”? Ha. Of course he’ll allow it. No matter how stupid the name is.
C) No. It isn’t like the people of the city of Los Angeles are thinking “Anaheim? That’s so, so far away. I may as well go to Coors Field as go to Anaheim.” No more money - no less either, it’ll be a wash for everyone but the people who are paid to design the new logo(s).
I don’t think selling more tickets is the point. If it were, this is an incredibly stupid way to go about it.
I think the idea is to sell more merchandise. And this is an incredibly stupid way to go about it.
There was much discussion about this over at fanhome.com. One moro…I mean poster, said that the name of “Los Angeles” was what would boost sales. After all, look at all the stuff the “New York” Yankees were selling. It’s the name “New York”. Everybody knows “New York”. Gotta be, right?
I asked him how much stuff the Los Angeles Clippers were selling. The name of the city wasn’t doing them much good, while the Los Angeles Lakers were selling gobs of stuff. He couldn’t seem to grasp that it was the tradition of winning, not the city name, that sold merchandise. That, and the coolness of your merchandise, that is.
A) It’s just dumb, and frankly, I’m getting sick of this team and its constant antics. Cheerleaders in the aisles, periwinkle cartoon uniforms, and now this, just when the Angels started gaining respectability. I have a love-hate relationship with this team.
B) Of course it will. When has Selig ever said no to an owner? It’s just the city getting screwed over, so he doesn’t care. He needs his precious consensus, and not caving in to whatever an owner wants to do is counter to that goal.
C) No. Winning and marketable stars bring revenue increases. That’s it. The Angels cracked 3 million each of the two seasons since winning the World Series. Their ratings are apparently close to the Dodgers the past two seasons as well. Just dumb.
And it’s not even bad compared to the mlb.com team boards. My God, my God, what a black hole.
If the New York Yankees were an expansion team starting play in 2004 with those uniforms everyone would think they were the Lamest. Uniforms. Ever. On the other hand, L.A. Lakers gear is wildly popular despite the fact that it’s so ugly it hurts my feelings. Whoever thought purple and yellow was a good color combination must have been color blind. Coolness goes hand in hand with winning. Angels win, Angels cool.
It saddens me, though. The Angels were doing everything right. They nutured the homegrown stars, they had a good PR campaign and got the city behind them, they come out of nowhere and win a WS, they stay competitive and attract some big name stars, the new owner cuts ticket prices and beer prices…and then he pulls this crap. Which I believe will negate all the good steps the Angels have made.
It is a stupid name, but you have to remember where the “Anaheim” came from in the first place. It was all Disney trying to promote Anaheim as a destination in and of itself rather than as merely a suburb of Los Angeles. When Moreno bought the Angels, he no doubt would have preferred not to be saddled with the “Anaheim” name, but there are probably contractural reasons why he probably can’t get rid of it entirely.
I am an Angels fan in South Carolina. I didn’t jump on the bandwagon either. I liked them since I was a kid in the early 80s. I had a Bobby Grich jersey. I even got the DirecTV baseball package so I can watch the Angels games.
I picked the Angels because everyone I knew was a Braves fan and I didn’t know one person who liked the Angels. I am still the only Angels fan I know.
As far as the name, I really don’t care. Heck, I still call them the California Angels.
No matter the name, they are still in the largest market in the country. As long as they field a competitive team, they will sell merchandise and fill seats.
I do wish they would move the Big A from the parking lot to behind the left field wall.
But the team places in Anaheim. That’s the thing. Anaheim isn’t a suburb of Los Angeles. It’s a good sized city in it’s own right and has it’s own identity. Moreno would be smart, IMHO, to distance himself from Los Angeles and focus on Orange County. It’s still a huge market and fans from LA will still come to see the games.
You see, you’re WRONG about that. It may be unfair, given that it’s grown populous, but Anaheim in most peoples’ minds means Disney Land, and that’s something to do when you visit Los Angeles. No one says they’re going to Anaheim on vacation…even if the only thing they’re doing is Disney Land.
Disney, by buying sports teams (the expansion franchise which they named the Mighty Ducks and the existing California Angels) and naming them “Anaheim” was actively trying to build a separate identity for Anaheim. They were clearly trying to establish some sort of “brand equity” for the name “Anaheim,” making it people’s idea of a vacation destination on its own.
Anaheim, for all that it is a good-sized city, does not have its own identity, at least not to outsiders and/or tourists. That’s the reason Moreno wants to link it with L.A. in people’s minds. Unfortunately for Moreno, it makes for a very stupid-sounding team name.
It was starting to GET that identity among baseball fans, though. I admit as an outsider that I didn’t realize Anaheim wasn’t a suburb of L.A. until they started calling sports teams “Anaheim.” When I visited Anaheim and saw an Angels game last year, I thought of myself as visiting Anaheim, not LA (I even flew in to John Wayne, not LAX) primarily because the existence of a baseball team named that makes me think of it as a true city.
And in any case, I still don’t see how this will help the Angels.
Of course, I have trouble shaking the feeling that the years 1981 and 1994 were shorter than 365 days. You know why.
I agree that this whole fiasco is pretty stupid, and it’ll probably screw up all the goodwill that Moreno had built up. However, I do want to offer up an opinion from another outsider.
I’ve never been to SoCal. I’m not exceedingly familiar with the lay of the land. The presense of the Aneheim Angels and the Aneheim Mighty Ducks have successfully established in my mind the existence of Anehiem as a distinct entity from LA. This may or may not cause me or other to spend money to travel to Aneheim, so the inherent value of that is debatable, but if the goal was to give them identity it worked. I’m inclined to think that given 25 years, you could make a pretty strong case for Disney’s plan paying economic dividends for Aneheim.
As for the benefit to the Angels being affiliated with LA…tough to say. Maybe after a couple decades they could develop a solid affiliation with LA and reap some rewards from that. But I’m more likely to think that by marrying themselves to Aneheim, they’d develop a more solid loyal fan base than by a vague general affiliation with the larger metropolis.
In the end, the damage has already been done. Whether they stay the Aneheim angels, or the LA Angels, the team is going to have a pretty big black eye.
Well said. And probably one of the reasons that the city of Anaheim is taking the Angels to court over it.
And as **Omniscient ** said, I don’t see how this will ever work in the Angel’s favor. The city of Anaheim doesn’t want it. The city of Los Angeles could give a shit. The Los Angeles Dodgers have come out in saying that the Angels are NOT LA’s team…Nobody outside the LA/OC area is really going to care other than to think it’s a stupid name for a team and they ain’t gonna use it.
