City of Anaheim gets last chance at changing Angels' team name
ANGELS
City will ask in a state appellate court to overturn the name change or order a new trial. A jury in 2006 decided that the name, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, did not violate stadium lease.
On the day after the Angels won their third American League West championship in four years under the Los Angeles name, the city of Anaheim will make its latest and probably last legal pitch to reverse the team's name change.
In a state appellate court hearing Thursday in Santa Ana, the city will ask a judicial panel to either overturn the name change, possibly forcing the team to again call itself the Anaheim Angels, or to order a new trial.
The appellate court has up to 90 days to issue a ruling. No settlement is expected before Thursday's hearing, according to city and team sources.
In 2006, an Orange County Superior Court jury decided the team's new name -- the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim -- did not violate a stadium lease clause requiring the team name to "include the name Anaheim therein."
One of the three judges on Thursday's panel already has stated his opinion that the lease "does not permit the oxymoronic inclusion of another city in the team's name." In a 2005 ruling on another issue in the case -- and in an opinion that had no relevance in the jury trial -- Judge David Sills wrote that the requirement to include Anaheim necessarily precluded the use of the name of any other city.
"Journalists know that, English teachers know that and Joe Sixpack knows that," Sills wrote.
That opinion does not necessarily mean that Anaheim already has one of the two votes it needs to prevail, said Sheldon Eisenberg of the Los Angeles law firm Eisenberg, Raizman, Thurston and Wong.
"As a technical, legal matter, it should not predict the outcome of the appeal," Eisenberg said. "The appeal is looking at whether the trial judge made errors in the conduct of the trial.
"But judges aren't robots. Their view of the merits might influence how they view some of the narrow issues."
The city of Anaheim argues that the jury verdict would have been different had Superior Court Judge Peter Polos not made "a series of prejudicial errors" in his rulings during the trial and in his instructions to the jury, most notably in allowing the testimony of Larry Murphy, a former Walt Disney Co. executive who told jurors he had envisioned the possibility of expanding the geographic identity of the team beyond Anaheim.
