Angels
From Wiki Gonzalez
The Angels are the greatest baseball team in the history of the known universe (arguably true if your knowledge of the universe doesn't extend back before 2002 and has large gaps that obscure everything since except September 2004).
History
Taking a longer view, the Los Angeles Angels were a charter franchise in the Pacific Coast League in 1903 and remained in that league until 1957, when the Dodgers arrived in Los Angeles. In 1961, the American League moved into Southern California with the LA Angels, an expansion franchise owned by the Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry.
The expansion Angels moved into the first division quicker than any other pre-free-agency expansion team, but a decade of mediocrity in the 1970s made them deeply obscure even in their home metro area. In 1966, the club moved to Anaheim and called itself the California Angels, one of the early generic regional-marketing names. Nobody in the rest of the country knew where the Angels actually played until 1997 (Americans are notoriously bad at geography), a year after the Disney Corporation purchased a controlling interest in the team from Autry. As a condition to the sale and Disney's intent to renovate Anaheim Stadium, the City of Anaheim insisted that the team include the word "Anaheim" in the teams name. Disney complied by changing the team name to the "Anaheim Angels."
The Angels were one of the earliest teams to take advantage of the free agent boom of the late 1970s and 1980s, signing and trading for high profile names like Joe Rudi, Fred Lynn, Don Baylor, and Reggie Jackson. This resulted in occasionally good seasons, but mostly old, expensive, and disappointing teams. In 1982 and 1986 they won the AL West, but blew commanding leads in the ALCS in truly horrifying fashion.
In the 1990s the team wasn't any more successful on the field, but they made strides in developing home-grown farm system players like Jim Edmonds, Tim Salmon, Garret Anderson, Troy Percival, and Darin Erstad. Disney also managed to remodel cavernous Anaheim Stadium into a more intimate baseball-specific configuration dubbed Edison International Field.
In 2002 (http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/ANA/2002.shtml), it all came together and the Angels had a hell of a season. They won 99 games, convincingly trounced the Yankees and Twins in consecutive series, and took the World Series from the Giants in a dramatic seven-game series.
In 2003, billionaire Arte Moreno purchased the Angels from Disney, and immediately made a public splash by reducing beer prices, renaming the ballpark to "Angel Stadium" (when Edison chose not to renew its sponsorship, Arte declined to seek a new sponsor), and promising to market the team more widely in order to compete with the Dodgers.
On the field, he scored a coup by signing highly sought free agent Vladimir Guerrero, who promptly led the Angels to the AL West championship and won the 2004 AL MVP in the first year of his contract. In 2005, the team won their second consecutive AL West title.
In early 2005, Moreno changed the club's official name to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. It was unclear, however, who was realistically going to call them that. Shredder, BTF's most notorious Angels fan, approved of the name change. By the middle of 2006, the organization had beaten the injunction the city of Anaheim had levied against them against the use of the new name, and the Angels promptly went about dropping the "of Anaheim" from their names in all but the most official of capacities.
Fans
- Shredder (of course)
- David Peng
- Los Angeles Waterloo of Black Hawk
- deb
See Fans of my team for the rest.
Newsstand
- Official Site (angelsbaseball.com) (http://losangeles.angels.mlb.com/news/index.jsp?c_id=ana)
- Orange County Register (http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/sections/sports/pros/angels/)
- Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/sports/baseball/mlb/angels)
- Long Beach Press-Telegram (http://www.presstelegram.com/angels)
- Los Angeles Daily News (http://www.dailynews.com/angels)
- CBS Sportsline (http://www.sportsline.com/mlb/teams/page/ANA)
- ESPN Clubhouse (http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/clubhouse?team=laa)
- Fox Sports (http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/team?categoryId=71589)
- Yahoo (http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/teams/laa)
- USA Today (http://fantasybaseball.usatoday.com/content/clubhouse.asp?sport=MLB&majteam=ANA)
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