Arte Moreno’s place on all-time worst owners list a reminder Angels could have had it worse

With Arte Moreno finally selling his ownership stake in the Los Angeles Angels, fans can breathe a sigh of relief. Moreno was reviled by fans for years for the team’s incompetence and his seeming indifference to winning, but is he really the worst owner in history?

Probably not, even if it certainly felt like it for Angels fans. A recent story in The Athletic by Jon Greenberg dives into a whole host of bad owners from across sports and even ranks them into tiers based on how bad they were. The whole exercise is a great reminder that bad owners are not especially uncommon in professional sports.

Just in Southern California alone things have been messy as of late. Mark Walter, the owner of the Dodgers, is under federal investigation for alleged financial misdeeds, Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has been suspended for the team’s shady business with Kawhi Leonard’s contract, and the San Diego Padres were recently sold after an ownership battle.

That’s a lot of drama going on just in one part of the country and owners all over the U.S. have been making fans angry for a very long time. At least Angels fans aren’t alone.

Arte Moreno was bad, but there have been plenty worse owners

That doesn’t mean Moreno gets a free pass or anything. He really did drive the Angels into the ground. They haven’t been relevant in MLB for a long time and it’s probably fair to say that his ownership has done a lot to drive away talent from the organization. 

11 straight losing seasons is not the legacy any owner wants to leave behind and the fact that he was basically driven out by fans demanding he sell the team shows just how intense fan discontent was. 

Now Stan Kroenke is set to take over which is the fresh turn of the page the franchise has desperately needed. That doesn’t guarantee the team will be winning a World Series this decade or even that they’re going to be all that competitive for a while, but it still signifies that things are changing which is long overdue for the franchise. 

The hope is that Kroenke and interim general manager John Mozeliak, if he chooses to stay aboard which seems highly likely, will be able to usher in a new era of Angels baseball that makes fans forget all about the dark days of Moreno and Perry Minasian running things into the ground. 

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