Angels fans might be ignoring sobering truth from Tarps Off movement

While the “Tarps Off” movement has spread across MLB and is now mostly an excuse for young men to take their shirts off in public at a baseball game, it’s easy to forget that it was used as a form of protest for Los Angeles Angels fans who were sick of owner Arte Moreno and the way he’s run the team.

Angels fans have certainly gotten their point across that they want Moreno to sell the team, but ironically they may also be helping Moreno out and could even allow him to tighten his grip on the franchise.

The Halos currently lead the American League West when it comes to attendance. The Angels are averaging 33,610 fans per night at home games which is good for the 11th-best mark in MLB. This could actually be used by Moreno to support his controversial assertion before the season that fans don’t really care about winning that much.

The Angels are not doing a whole lot of winning, that’s for sure. They’re currently in last place in the AL West with a record of 26-42. After a somewhat promising start things have gone off the rails as of late.

Perhaps nothing has been more symbolic for the team’s decline than a recent play involving outfielder Jo Adell. Earlier in the season he made three insane home run robberies in one game. Then, last week he Jose Canseco'ed a ball off his head over the wall for a home run. What a fitting and sad way to show how their fortunes have flipped.

Despite Angels' poor play, it still seems unlikely Moreno will sell

But none of this seems likely to change soon. For years the Angels haven’t invested meaningful money into the roster. The incompetence has been going on for a long time. Someday scientists will study how a baseball team could be so inept when it had both Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani on it. 

Now the Angels just have an aging Trout, a promising ace in José Soriano who has struggled as of late, and a shortstop who seemed like he could’ve been the future face of the franchise in Zach Neto but has had a disappointing campaign.

There’s not much to be all that excited about and some really big changes obviously need to be made to get things turned around.

But Moreno doesn’t have to do anything if he doesn’t want to. People are still showing up to games and he can conveniently hire a new general manager after this season since Perry Minasian’s contract will be up. Maybe in his mind that buys him more time by giving fans a shred of hope that things might change with a new head of the front office, but most fans know better than that.

The only real way Moreno would sell the team is if his pocketbook took a hit and that would require fans not going to games and not supporting the team. That’s a lot to ask because for a lot of fans they’ve cheered for the Angels for decades, but it may be the only real way to get rid of Moreno.

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