Angels (heading OT)

Mark Baker-Wright nicodemuslegend at gmail.com
Sun Jun 25 18:42:36 CEST 2006


On 6/25/06, kimba1962 at comcast.net wrote:
>
>
> Steven Rowe wrote:
>
> > guess yall can see Im not a baseball fan (although it was Gene Autry who
> > owned the Angels, right?)
>
> Yes.  He was the owner of the team when it began as the (original) Los
> Angeles Angels in 1961.  Unfortunately, he didn't live to see the Angels win
> their first World Series in 2002.
>

OK.  This is a bit complex, but in the interests of accurate information,
the team Autry owned was not, technically, the "original" Los Angeles
Angels.  Here's the deal.

The "original" Los Angeles Angels were a minor league baseball team that was
ACTUALLY based in Los Angeles.  They played from 1903-1957, as part of the
"Pacific Coast League." (Actually, this may not even be true, as Wikipedia
suggests that the name has origins in 1892, but I can find evidence of that
team).

The team that Gene Autry founded did indeed start in Los Angeles in 1961,
and did use the name "Los Angeles Angels" for a few years, but moved to
Anaheim in 1966 to the stadium they use today, and changed their name to the
"California Angels."  (One assumes that they didn't think the name of
Anaheim was well-known enough in these early days of Disneyland.)

The team became the "Anaheim Angels" in 1996, which actually caused a lot of
outcry among fans at the time who STILL didn't think that the name "Anaheim"
represented anything important (although Disneyland would have LONG been
connected to the name by this time).

Finally, in 2005, the team changed its name to the current "Los Angeles
Angels of Anaheim," arguing both that the name reflects the team's original
roots and that the name of Los Angeles held greater marketing power.  This
move infuriated Anaheim city officials (who had signed a contract with the
team owners a few years previously stipulating that the name Anaheim would
remain a part of the team's name, and were not mollified by its inclusion as
the inferior end of a "two-city" team name) as well as many local fans, who
by this time had the team's success in the 2002 World Series to add to
Anaheim local pride.  The city sued the owners of the team to try to get the
name changed back, but the court found that the owners had technically
upheld the terms of their contract by including Anaheim at the end of the
name, despite the fact that the team no longer has any technical connection
to Los Angeles (being neither in the city nor in the county of that name),
which already has a team of their own (The Dodgers).

Anyway, my apologies for taking this off-topic....

Mark Baker-Wright
-- 
Assistant to the Faculty and Dean's Office, SOT: Fuller Theological Seminary
Transforming Seminarian (my blog):
http://transformingseminarian.blogspot.com

Ask me about singer/songwriter David LaMotte!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://nafsk.se/pipermail/dcml/attachments/20060625/24cde630/attachment.html 


More information about the DCML mailing list