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07-03-2006, 02:45 PM
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Angels owner Arte Moreno 'just gets it'
Joseph A. Reaves
The Arizona Republic
Jun. 25, 2006 12:00 AM
The baseball gods smiled on the game the day Arte Moreno slipped on an Angels cap.
That was three years ago, May 15, 2003, when fellow owners agreed to let Moreno give $183.5 million to the Mickey Mouse family and take control of the Anaheim Angels.
Three years later, the Anaheim Angels are history.
The Los Angeles Angels are taking over a town that's bled Dodger blue for decades, and Moreno is on his way to becoming a baseball god.
He should be, too. Arte Moreno is a fan's best friend.
"After he took over ownership of the team, there was a pretty dramatic shift toward a real fan orientation," says Tom Boyd, an associate professor of marketing who specializes in sports promotion at Cal State Fullerton just up the road from Angel Stadium.
"It's not that the Angels didn't care about the fans before or weren't trying to attract fans, but Arte Moreno, more than most owners, puts his money where his mouth is as far as the fans are concerned. I know it sounds trite, but he just gets it."
Moreno "gets it" because he is a fan first, an owner second.
Born in Tucson, Moreno is a graduate of the University of Arizona and a Valley resident most of his adult life.
If he had his way, he would have bought the Diamondbacks instead of the Angels. He tried and failed, losing out in a bitter and personal showdown with former owner Jerry Colangelo.
Moreno owned 5.3 percent at the time but wanted to buy a majority stake and ultimately run the club. Colangelo thought Moreno's offer was too low and fought off the possible hostile takeover by rounding up $160 million in new capital from other investors.
Fellow shareholders who were at the meeting said when Colanagelo announced he was looking for more money, Moreno pulled out his checkbook and said: "You don't need those investors. Here's my money."
Colangelo shot him down in what several witnesses described as an angry and embarrassing confrontation.
Moreno and Colangelo have refused to talk publicly about the showdown for years. And Moreno again declined last week when he sat down with The Republic for a rare interview that began over lunch at the Capital Grille and lasted four hours.
During the course of the afternoon, Moreno talked about his lifelong love affair with baseball, his strategies for taking a share of the Los Angeles market from the long-dominant Dodgers, the future of the Cactus League, his team's struggles this season, the fun he had running a minor league team with comedian Bill Murray and how "cool" it is to own a major league club.
"Probably that's the best word, cool," Moreno said, laughing, the crow's feet around his eyes crinkling. "People ask me this question, but that's the word. How cool is it? It's pretty cool."
Moreno, the oldest of 11 children in a fourth-generation Mexican-American family, graduated from Rincon High in Tucson in 1965 and was drafted into the Army a year later. He served two years, including infantry duty in Vietnam, then came home to Tucson and enrolled at UA on the GI bill.
In 1973, Moreno earned a marketing degree and went to work selling billboards for Karl Eller, owner of the Circle K chain, KTAR radio and Eller Outdoor Advertising. Moreno's first commission was $2.25. He needed the money so badly that he cashed the check instead of keeping it as a memento.
Eleven years later, after promotions took him to Kansas City and New Jersey, Moreno returned to Arizona and joined partner Bill Levine in a Phoenix-based billboard business with 80 signs and $500,000 annual revenue.
The company, Outdoor Systems, expanded across the Sun Belt states and grew so rapidly that by 1996 annual revenue was $90 million.
Moreno and Levine took Outdoor Systems public during the height of the stock market boom in 1996 with an initial public offering that was nearly so popular on Wall Street as the IPOs of Yahoo! and Amazon. Outdoor's stock soared 1,460 percent in three years.
Just months before the bottom fell out of the market in 1999, Moreno and Levine sold Outdoor to Infinity Broadcasting/CBS for $8.3 billion. The company later merged with Viacom.
In just 26 years, Moreno went from a paycheck barely big enough to buy a burger to a portfolio huge enough to call in all the cows in Texas. Forbes magazine recently listed Moreno among the 400 richest people in America with a net worth of roughly $1 billion.
Work and fun
Hard work and good luck made Moreno a success, but along the way he never stopped having fun. And fun for him usually involved hot dogs, cold beer and a ballpark.
"When I was traveling, somebody would say, 'You want to go to dinner?' " Moreno said. "I'd be in Atlanta and I'd say, 'Boy, I tell you, I know the Braves are in town. How about we go get a beer and a dog and catch three or four innings?' "
Moreno watched a lot of games in Salt Lake City from 1986-92 when he and a group of investors, including Murray, owned team a Class A team in the Pioneer League.
A year after Moreno's group bought the Trappers the team went on a 29-game win streak, the longest in the history of professional baseball.
"It was unbelievable," Moreno remembers. "We were selling out every game. We had Sports Illustrated out there. We even had people scalping tickets - scalping tickets for a Class A game."
Everyone who got in saw Moreno and Murray clutching beers and puffing cigars in the stands.
Moreno's group bought the Trappers for $150,000 and sold them for $1.75 million.
In Salt Lake, Moreno started a tradition he keeps alive in Anaheim these days, walking through the stands, greeting fans, checking on vendors, sipping beer.
"Sometimes I go out there and can't get back," Moreno says. "But the only way I can learn what's going on is to walk the stadium."
Fans first
Make no mistake. Moreno knows what's going on.
The day he bought the Angels, he cut the cost of beer, tickets and souvenirs. And he hasn't raised them since.
Moreno said he made the decision on the beer Opening Day 2003, six weeks before he took control of the Angels.
"I knew I was buying the team, but nobody else did," he said. "I had tickets by the dugout and I'm walking down the aisle with two beers filled up in these little cups.
"My wife, Carole, says 'Gee, you're being real careful with those beers.' And I said, 'Yeah. They cost $6.50 each. I don't want to spill this stuff."
The only thing Moreno likes more than a beer, a dog and a ballgame is making a young fan smile.
At spring training in Tempe two years ago, Moreno passed out free Angels caps to any kid who wanted one. At home in Anaheim, he ordered a new line of affordable caps and T-shirts for the team's souvenir shops.
"When I came in, our lowest price on ball caps was $19.95," Moreno says. "A guy or a mother takes a son or daughter into the gift shop, you don't want them to be embarrassed. So I put a $6.95 hat in.
"They told me you're going to lose money selling a $6.95 cap. Well, we sold almost 60,000 hats. I'm in the marketing business and those boys are wearing my hats."
Boyd, the Cal State Fullerton marketing professor, says the cheap hats were a stroke of genius.
"It lets the parents be heroes and it lets the kids engage and have a memento of their visit to the ballpark," he said. "I think he's just done a wonderful job of making it easy for kids to become fans."
Not only kids. Grown-ups, too. Moreno tells his staff to treat every game as if it were a Broadway play, a special event.
"We look at that night and we program that whole night," he says. "For some fans, that one game may be the only one they see all year. We want it be special."
In 2003, Moreno's first year, the Angels drew more than 3 million fans for the first time in franchise history. Some of that was because the team was coming off a World Series championship season in 2002. But they drew more than 3 million again in 2004 and 2005 and already have sold 3.2 million tickets this year.
Another reason fans keep coming is because Moreno pays attention to what's happening on the field as well as the stands.
During his first off-season, he spent $145 million to sign four premium free agents: Vladimir Guerrero, Kelvim Escobar, Jose Guillen and Bartolo Colon. Those moves paid off with playoff runs the past two seasons.
Angels for everyone
When Moreno took over the Angels from the Walt Disney empire, the team's total media package was $12 million. This year, just hours before Opening Day, Moreno closed a 10-year, $500 million television contract with Fox Sports.
That package is $160 million more than the once-dominant Dodgers signed two years ago, which makes sense because the Angels' TV ratings were higher than the Dodgers last season.
Moreno just bought a 50,000-watt radio station that will carry Angels games in Spanish this year and next, then switch to English broadcasts in 2008 after a current contract expires.
"We want all the revenue streams we can to help pay for what we are trying to accomplish so the fans can still have an affordable experience," he said.
His fellow owners have noticed Moreno's strategies. They put him on Major League Baseball's marketing and labor committees.
Last year, Moreno negotiated a $20 million renovation of the Angels spring training complex in Tempe - a deal that came after he threatened to build his own facility on land he and a partner own in Goodyear. He's pleased with the upgrade, which he personally helped design, and says the Angels are in Tempe for good.
But he expects two other teams, one of which mostly likely would be the rival Dodgers, to move their spring training facilities from Florida to Arizona some time soon.
"I don't have any inside scoop, but objectively the Dodgers being Florida doesn't make any sense," he says.
One thing that does make sense, a lot of sense, is the way Moreno runs a baseball team.
"For me it's a business, but it's also . . . ," Moreno stopped, struggling to find the right words before remembering John Wooden, the inspirational coach who led UCLA to 10 national basketball championships.
"John Wooden in one of his books - and I like to quote other people because I don't have any fancy quotes - but he said there's a difference between passion and love. Passion is short term and love is long term. For me, I have a love of the game."
Arturo \"Arte\" Moreno
PERSONAL:
Age: 59.
Family: Wife, Carole; children Bryan, Rico, Nikki.
Education: Rincon High, Tucson; University of Arizona.
TIMELINE
August 1946: Born in Tucson. Oldest of 11 children.
1965: Graduates from Rincon High, Tucson.
1966-68: Serves in Army, including Vietnam War duty.
1973: Graduates from the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in marketing.
1973: Goes to work in billboard industry for Karl Eller at Eller Outdoor.
1979: Moves to Gannett Outdoor in Kansas City when Gannett acquires Eller Outdoor.
1981: Moves to New Jersey as president and general manager of Gannett Outdoor.
1984: Leaves Gannett Outdoor and joins Bill Levine at Outdoor Systems, a small Phoenix-based billboard company. Increases sales from less than $500,000 to more than $90 million in 10 years.
1986: Goes in with 17 other investors, including comedian Bill Murray, to buy the Salt Lake City Trappers Class A minor league baseball team.
1986: Marries Carole.
1996: Takes Outdoor Systems public. At the time, the company is operating 237,500 outdoor advertising displays on billboards, subway posters and street furniture in stadiums, bus shelters, malls and airports. In three years, the company's stock soars 1,460 percent.
1997: Forms Moreno Family Foundation.
1999: Sells Outdoor Systems with partner Levine to Infinity/CBS for $8.3 billion. The company merges with Viacom in 2000.
2001: Tries to buy controlling interest in the Arizona Diamondbacks, but no deal is reached.
2001: Moreno Family Foundation gives away $1.1 million, with most going to Arizona causes.
November 2002: Other investors in the Diamondbacks buy out Moreno's 5.3 percent share of the team.
January 2003: Joins Ernie Garcia, owner of the Drive-Time used car chain, to purchase the Phoenix Thunderbirds Golf Course for $4.8 million.
April 2003: Reaches deal in principle to buy Anaheim Angels from Disney for $183.5 million.
May 15, 2003: Baseball owners approve Moreno's offer, making Moreno the first Hispanic to own a professional sports franchise.
Winter 2003-04: Moreno signs four of the baseball's biggest free agents available in the off-season, paying a combined $145 million for Vladimir Guerrero, Kelvim Escobar, Jose Guillen and Bartolo Colon.
October 2004: Moreno's Angels win the American League West, but are swept by the Red Sox in the playoffs.
January 2005: Moreno changes his team's name from Anaheim Angels to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
February 2005: Anaheim city officials file suit to stop the name change.
October 2005: Angels beat Yankees in the playoffs, but lose to the White Sox in the AL Championship Series.
February 2006: An Orange County jury rules Moreno was within his rights to change the team name; Moreno later asks judge to order city officials to reimburse the $7 million he spent fighting the lawsuit.
March 31, 2006: Moreno negotiates a 10-year, $500 million television contract for the Angels.
May 2006: Anaheim City Council votes to appeal the lawsuit it lost over the team's name change.
May 2006: A Los Angeles psychologist who was denied a red nylon tote bag during a Mother's Day promotion at an Angels game files a sex and age discrimination lawsuit against the team.
June 23, 2006: Moreno brings his Angels to Phoenix to play the Diamondbacks.
Reach Reaves at (602) 444-8125 or joseph.reaves@arizonarepublic.com
Email this article Click to send
Print this article Choose File Print or Ctrl P or Apple P
Most popular pages Today | This Week
Email this article Click to send
Print this article Choose File Print or Ctrl P or Apple P
Most popular pages Today | This Week
Angels owner Arte Moreno 'just gets it'
Joseph A. Reaves
The Arizona Republic
Jun. 25, 2006 12:00 AM
The baseball gods smiled on the game the day Arte Moreno slipped on an Angels cap.
That was three years ago, May 15, 2003, when fellow owners agreed to let Moreno give $183.5 million to the Mickey Mouse family and take control of the Anaheim Angels.
Three years later, the Anaheim Angels are history.
The Los Angeles Angels are taking over a town that's bled Dodger blue for decades, and Moreno is on his way to becoming a baseball god.
He should be, too. Arte Moreno is a fan's best friend.
"After he took over ownership of the team, there was a pretty dramatic shift toward a real fan orientation," says Tom Boyd, an associate professor of marketing who specializes in sports promotion at Cal State Fullerton just up the road from Angel Stadium.
"It's not that the Angels didn't care about the fans before or weren't trying to attract fans, but Arte Moreno, more than most owners, puts his money where his mouth is as far as the fans are concerned. I know it sounds trite, but he just gets it."
Moreno "gets it" because he is a fan first, an owner second.
Born in Tucson, Moreno is a graduate of the University of Arizona and a Valley resident most of his adult life.
If he had his way, he would have bought the Diamondbacks instead of the Angels. He tried and failed, losing out in a bitter and personal showdown with former owner Jerry Colangelo.
Moreno owned 5.3 percent at the time but wanted to buy a majority stake and ultimately run the club. Colangelo thought Moreno's offer was too low and fought off the possible hostile takeover by rounding up $160 million in new capital from other investors.
Fellow shareholders who were at the meeting said when Colanagelo announced he was looking for more money, Moreno pulled out his checkbook and said: "You don't need those investors. Here's my money."
Colangelo shot him down in what several witnesses described as an angry and embarrassing confrontation.
Moreno and Colangelo have refused to talk publicly about the showdown for years. And Moreno again declined last week when he sat down with The Republic for a rare interview that began over lunch at the Capital Grille and lasted four hours.
During the course of the afternoon, Moreno talked about his lifelong love affair with baseball, his strategies for taking a share of the Los Angeles market from the long-dominant Dodgers, the future of the Cactus League, his team's struggles this season, the fun he had running a minor league team with comedian Bill Murray and how "cool" it is to own a major league club.
"Probably that's the best word, cool," Moreno said, laughing, the crow's feet around his eyes crinkling. "People ask me this question, but that's the word. How cool is it? It's pretty cool."
Moreno, the oldest of 11 children in a fourth-generation Mexican-American family, graduated from Rincon High in Tucson in 1965 and was drafted into the Army a year later. He served two years, including infantry duty in Vietnam, then came home to Tucson and enrolled at UA on the GI bill.
In 1973, Moreno earned a marketing degree and went to work selling billboards for Karl Eller, owner of the Circle K chain, KTAR radio and Eller Outdoor Advertising. Moreno's first commission was $2.25. He needed the money so badly that he cashed the check instead of keeping it as a memento.
Eleven years later, after promotions took him to Kansas City and New Jersey, Moreno returned to Arizona and joined partner Bill Levine in a Phoenix-based billboard business with 80 signs and $500,000 annual revenue.
The company, Outdoor Systems, expanded across the Sun Belt states and grew so rapidly that by 1996 annual revenue was $90 million.
Moreno and Levine took Outdoor Systems public during the height of the stock market boom in 1996 with an initial public offering that was nearly so popular on Wall Street as the IPOs of Yahoo! and Amazon. Outdoor's stock soared 1,460 percent in three years.
Just months before the bottom fell out of the market in 1999, Moreno and Levine sold Outdoor to Infinity Broadcasting/CBS for $8.3 billion. The company later merged with Viacom.
In just 26 years, Moreno went from a paycheck barely big enough to buy a burger to a portfolio huge enough to call in all the cows in Texas. Forbes magazine recently listed Moreno among the 400 richest people in America with a net worth of roughly $1 billion.
Work and fun
Hard work and good luck made Moreno a success, but along the way he never stopped having fun. And fun for him usually involved hot dogs, cold beer and a ballpark.
"When I was traveling, somebody would say, 'You want to go to dinner?' " Moreno said. "I'd be in Atlanta and I'd say, 'Boy, I tell you, I know the Braves are in town. How about we go get a beer and a dog and catch three or four innings?' "
Moreno watched a lot of games in Salt Lake City from 1986-92 when he and a group of investors, including Murray, owned team a Class A team in the Pioneer League.
A year after Moreno's group bought the Trappers the team went on a 29-game win streak, the longest in the history of professional baseball.
"It was unbelievable," Moreno remembers. "We were selling out every game. We had Sports Illustrated out there. We even had people scalping tickets - scalping tickets for a Class A game."
Everyone who got in saw Moreno and Murray clutching beers and puffing cigars in the stands.
Moreno's group bought the Trappers for $150,000 and sold them for $1.75 million.
In Salt Lake, Moreno started a tradition he keeps alive in Anaheim these days, walking through the stands, greeting fans, checking on vendors, sipping beer.
"Sometimes I go out there and can't get back," Moreno says. "But the only way I can learn what's going on is to walk the stadium."
Fans first
Make no mistake. Moreno knows what's going on.
The day he bought the Angels, he cut the cost of beer, tickets and souvenirs. And he hasn't raised them since.
Moreno said he made the decision on the beer Opening Day 2003, six weeks before he took control of the Angels.
"I knew I was buying the team, but nobody else did," he said. "I had tickets by the dugout and I'm walking down the aisle with two beers filled up in these little cups.
"My wife, Carole, says 'Gee, you're being real careful with those beers.' And I said, 'Yeah. They cost $6.50 each. I don't want to spill this stuff."
The only thing Moreno likes more than a beer, a dog and a ballgame is making a young fan smile.
At spring training in Tempe two years ago, Moreno passed out free Angels caps to any kid who wanted one. At home in Anaheim, he ordered a new line of affordable caps and T-shirts for the team's souvenir shops.
"When I came in, our lowest price on ball caps was $19.95," Moreno says. "A guy or a mother takes a son or daughter into the gift shop, you don't want them to be embarrassed. So I put a $6.95 hat in.
"They told me you're going to lose money selling a $6.95 cap. Well, we sold almost 60,000 hats. I'm in the marketing business and those boys are wearing my hats."
Boyd, the Cal State Fullerton marketing professor, says the cheap hats were a stroke of genius.
"It lets the parents be heroes and it lets the kids engage and have a memento of their visit to the ballpark," he said. "I think he's just done a wonderful job of making it easy for kids to become fans."
Not only kids. Grown-ups, too. Moreno tells his staff to treat every game as if it were a Broadway play, a special event.
"We look at that night and we program that whole night," he says. "For some fans, that one game may be the only one they see all year. We want it be special."
In 2003, Moreno's first year, the Angels drew more than 3 million fans for the first time in franchise history. Some of that was because the team was coming off a World Series championship season in 2002. But they drew more than 3 million again in 2004 and 2005 and already have sold 3.2 million tickets this year.
Another reason fans keep coming is because Moreno pays attention to what's happening on the field as well as the stands.
During his first off-season, he spent $145 million to sign four premium free agents: Vladimir Guerrero, Kelvim Escobar, Jose Guillen and Bartolo Colon. Those moves paid off with playoff runs the past two seasons.
Angels for everyone
When Moreno took over the Angels from the Walt Disney empire, the team's total media package was $12 million. This year, just hours before Opening Day, Moreno closed a 10-year, $500 million television contract with Fox Sports.
That package is $160 million more than the once-dominant Dodgers signed two years ago, which makes sense because the Angels' TV ratings were higher than the Dodgers last season.
Moreno just bought a 50,000-watt radio station that will carry Angels games in Spanish this year and next, then switch to English broadcasts in 2008 after a current contract expires.
"We want all the revenue streams we can to help pay for what we are trying to accomplish so the fans can still have an affordable experience," he said.
His fellow owners have noticed Moreno's strategies. They put him on Major League Baseball's marketing and labor committees.
Last year, Moreno negotiated a $20 million renovation of the Angels spring training complex in Tempe - a deal that came after he threatened to build his own facility on land he and a partner own in Goodyear. He's pleased with the upgrade, which he personally helped design, and says the Angels are in Tempe for good.
But he expects two other teams, one of which mostly likely would be the rival Dodgers, to move their spring training facilities from Florida to Arizona some time soon.
"I don't have any inside scoop, but objectively the Dodgers being Florida doesn't make any sense," he says.
One thing that does make sense, a lot of sense, is the way Moreno runs a baseball team.
"For me it's a business, but it's also . . . ," Moreno stopped, struggling to find the right words before remembering John Wooden, the inspirational coach who led UCLA to 10 national basketball championships.
"John Wooden in one of his books - and I like to quote other people because I don't have any fancy quotes - but he said there's a difference between passion and love. Passion is short term and love is long term. For me, I have a love of the game."
Arturo \"Arte\" Moreno
PERSONAL:
Age: 59.
Family: Wife, Carole; children Bryan, Rico, Nikki.
Education: Rincon High, Tucson; University of Arizona.
TIMELINE
August 1946: Born in Tucson. Oldest of 11 children.
1965: Graduates from Rincon High, Tucson.
1966-68: Serves in Army, including Vietnam War duty.
1973: Graduates from the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in marketing.
1973: Goes to work in billboard industry for Karl Eller at Eller Outdoor.
1979: Moves to Gannett Outdoor in Kansas City when Gannett acquires Eller Outdoor.
1981: Moves to New Jersey as president and general manager of Gannett Outdoor.
1984: Leaves Gannett Outdoor and joins Bill Levine at Outdoor Systems, a small Phoenix-based billboard company. Increases sales from less than $500,000 to more than $90 million in 10 years.
1986: Goes in with 17 other investors, including comedian Bill Murray, to buy the Salt Lake City Trappers Class A minor league baseball team.
1986: Marries Carole.
1996: Takes Outdoor Systems public. At the time, the company is operating 237,500 outdoor advertising displays on billboards, subway posters and street furniture in stadiums, bus shelters, malls and airports. In three years, the company's stock soars 1,460 percent.
1997: Forms Moreno Family Foundation.
1999: Sells Outdoor Systems with partner Levine to Infinity/CBS for $8.3 billion. The company merges with Viacom in 2000.
2001: Tries to buy controlling interest in the Arizona Diamondbacks, but no deal is reached.
2001: Moreno Family Foundation gives away $1.1 million, with most going to Arizona causes.
November 2002: Other investors in the Diamondbacks buy out Moreno's 5.3 percent share of the team.
January 2003: Joins Ernie Garcia, owner of the Drive-Time used car chain, to purchase the Phoenix Thunderbirds Golf Course for $4.8 million.
April 2003: Reaches deal in principle to buy Anaheim Angels from Disney for $183.5 million.
May 15, 2003: Baseball owners approve Moreno's offer, making Moreno the first Hispanic to own a professional sports franchise.
Winter 2003-04: Moreno signs four of the baseball's biggest free agents available in the off-season, paying a combined $145 million for Vladimir Guerrero, Kelvim Escobar, Jose Guillen and Bartolo Colon.
October 2004: Moreno's Angels win the American League West, but are swept by the Red Sox in the playoffs.
January 2005: Moreno changes his team's name from Anaheim Angels to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
February 2005: Anaheim city officials file suit to stop the name change.
October 2005: Angels beat Yankees in the playoffs, but lose to the White Sox in the AL Championship Series.
February 2006: An Orange County jury rules Moreno was within his rights to change the team name; Moreno later asks judge to order city officials to reimburse the $7 million he spent fighting the lawsuit.
March 31, 2006: Moreno negotiates a 10-year, $500 million television contract for the Angels.
May 2006: Anaheim City Council votes to appeal the lawsuit it lost over the team's name change.
May 2006: A Los Angeles psychologist who was denied a red nylon tote bag during a Mother's Day promotion at an Angels game files a sex and age discrimination lawsuit against the team.
June 23, 2006: Moreno brings his Angels to Phoenix to play the Diamondbacks.
Reach Reaves at (602) 444-8125 or joseph.reaves@arizonarepublic.com
Email this article Click to send
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