The Angels will play in Anaheim through the 2019 season, but after that, the team could make plans to leave its longtime home.
Angels officials have notified the city they are exercising an option to cancel their lease, which included an opt-out clause that expired Tuesday, Oct. 16, team spokeswoman Marie Garvey said.
The move doesn’t mean the Angels will definitely leave. Team officials will meet with the new mayor and City Council after the Nov. 6 election to discuss the future, Garvey said.
The city owns the 45,000-seat stadium, where the Angels have played for more than 50 years. If the opt-out deadline had passed, the team would have been locked into staying through late 2029, Garvey said.
“As we look to the future, we need the ability to continue to deliver a high-quality fan experience beyond what the original lease allows,” club president John Carpino said in a written statement. “It is important that we look at all our options and how we can best serve our fans now and in the future.”
“We do have options” for where the team could play long-term, Garvey said, but would not elaborate on where executives might be looking.
Anaheim spokesman Mike Lyster said in a statement that city leaders “don’t believe there is a better place for the team” than Anaheim.
“As fun as baseball is in Anaheim, this is a reminder that this is still a business. And we understand that the Angels need to preserve all options available,” Lyster said.
“We welcome talking with the team about the future of baseball in Anaheim.”
What it would take to keep the team in town has been the subject of discussion for several years.
In 2013, Angels and city officials attempted to negotiate a new lease. When the two sides couldn’t reach agreement, the team continued exploring a move to the former Marine base in Tustin, but later determined it would cost too much to build a new stadium there.
By 2016, the Angels were talking with Anaheim again, but those efforts also made little progress.
The two sides have haggled over allowing the team to drop “Anaheim” from its name – they’ve been the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim since 2005 – and whether owner Arte Moreno’s firm should get a $1-a-year lease to develop the land around the stadium. They’ve also debated whether the team or the city should pay for major renovations to the stadium, which opened in 1966.
Since Moreno bought the team in 2003, the Angels have put more than $50 million into upgrades, but the stadium is expected to need more than $150 million in improvements over the next 20 years, including repairs to plumbing, concrete, elevators and escalators, according to city information.
This spring, the team debuted new scoreboards with millions of LED lights; the one in right field is billed as the third largest in the major leagues.
But that wasn’t enough to appease some fans. In August, Popular Mechanics magazine ranked all 30 MLB facilities and put Angel Stadium in 27th place, and a 2016 USA Today best-to-worst list landed it at No. 26 with one comment: “Meh.”
“I think that it has the reputation of being adequate and no more,” Ballpark Digest publisher Kevin Reichard said.
Newer and recently renovated parks have added high-end, private gathering areas for the corporate crowd, and standing-room social spaces with beer and plenty of outlets where millennial fans can plug in a smartphone, Reichard said.
It’s unknown what Angels executive will bargain for when they sit down with Anaheim again, but some city leaders are ready to listen.
Councilwoman Lucille Kring, who has two years left in her term, said it’s “extremely important” to keep the team and its 3 million tickets sold annually.
“It’s an economic engine over there and it draws people to the city,” she said. “I’d be willing to open up and see what they want.”
If the team does look for greener pastures, it’s unlikely they’d go far. Garvey said the Angels’ contract with Major League Baseball gives them rights to play in Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties, but they couldn’t simply move out of state.
Reichard said teams rarely relocate, even within their own market. The last major shift – when the former Expos moved from Montreal to become the Nationals in Washington, D.C. – was in 2005, he said.
As the news spread, some fans speculated on social media that Anaheim’s recent battles with Disney and some city leaders’ opposition to tax incentives for business had set the table for the Angels’ lease announcement.
Mayor Tom Tait, who has voted against tax subsidies and is termed out this year, said he’s not convinced the Angels would leave the city and believes the latest news is an attempt to sway votes toward council candidates who may offer the team a sweet deal at taxpayers’ expense.
“I’ll take Arte Moreno’s word (from) a couple years ago, when they said they were committed to staying in Anaheim,” Tait said.
Speaking to reporters in 2017, Moreno said it would be unrealistic for the team to leave Angel Stadium before 2029.
Garvey said the opt-out announcement is unconnected to the election and pointed again to the deadline.
“This is contractual,” she said. “It wasn’t political.”
