Arte Moreno Is Done Pretending To Care

It has been five days since Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno made the claim that his team's fans view winning baseball as a low priority, and the reaction has been, well, fairly low priority. It could hardly be any other way, because "low priority" is the Angels in a nutshell.

It's hard to make a compelling case for a team whose de facto slogan has been "Meh With A Side Of Fries" for the decades it's spent under Moreno's thumb, but the real truth here is that the Angels don't really make a compelling case for anything. That Moreno claims this institutional ennui as a virtue is the boldest marketing strategy the team has displayed since he first bought the team in 2003 and immediately made himself a local hero by lowering beer prices. That is also the last time he has been a local hero, because the Angels in his time have had one of the faintest pulses in baseball since, and that includes the 12 years in which they employed the game's best player, whether it be Mike Trout or Shohei Ohtani or both.

But, as your own eyelids lower, consider that Moreno may actually be correct that the synergy between his team's lack of interest in on-field success and that of its fan base is in lockstep. Sure, there are about half a million people per year who no longer attend Angels games compared to their last postseason win in 2009, but the real takeaway here is that the Angels don't want to bother anyone's purchasing choices by being interesting. If the people that are still going to Angels games don't care what happens in those games, there's no reason to bother them.