The Lakers just won the NBA championship, and Southern California celebrated with them, with hundreds of thousands of fans attracted to a parade down Figueroa Street and a rally at the Coliseum.
There are 122 teams in the NBA, NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball. And Southern California is home to the team that best repays its fans "for all the emotion, money and time fans invest," according to an ESPN study to be unveiled today.
That team is not the Lakers. That team is the Angels.
The Angels have ranked as the most fan-friendly baseball team for six consecutive years in the annual ESPN study, but this is the first time the Angels have ranked No. 1 among all the teams in the four major North American sports leagues.
The Lakers ranked No. 51. The Clippers ranked last, at No. 122.
When Arte Moreno bought the Angels in 2003, he bet he could transform an intermittently successful team marketed to Orange County into a perennial powerhouse by expanding its reach to Los Angeles and beyond, in the process generating enough revenue to keep the player payroll up and ticket costs down.
Moreno negotiated a $500-million television contract with Fox, bought a radio station and changed the call letters to KLAA, and prevailed in a four-year court fight that secured his right to call the team by the Los Angeles name.
In their first 43 seasons, the Angels never had three consecutive winning seasons, with a record attendance of 3.06 million in the year after winning the World Series. In five full years under Moreno, the Angels have won the American League West four times and drawn at least 3.34 million every year.
The Angels have fielded one of the top six player payrolls in baseball every year under Moreno. The cost for a family of four to attend a game at Angel Stadium has ranked among the bottom six every year since 2005, according to Team Marketing Report. The Angels offer a cap for $7 and charge $8 for parking.
The study by ESPN used a combination of surveys of fans and quantitative research to rate franchises in eight categories: affordability, coaches, players, owners, fan relations, stadium experience, championships, and "bang for the buck" in converting revenues into victories.
"This honor means a great deal to our organization because it was voted on by the fans," Moreno said in a statement to ESPN.
