Los Angeles Angels

Gene Autry's expansion team

The Angels were one of the American League's first two expansion clubs, admitted for the 1961 season, and their founding owner was the singing cowboy Gene Autry, who took the name from a Pacific Coast League side that had played in Los Angeles for decades. The first season was played at the old Wrigley Field in south Los Angeles. From 1962 to 1965 the club rented the Dodgers' new ballpark, calling it Chavez Ravine Stadium rather than advertise the landlord, before moving south in 1966 to a purpose-built stadium in Anaheim, where it has played ever since.

The identity crisis that followed is still a running joke in the sport. The club was the Los Angeles Angels until 1965, the California Angels until 1996 and the Anaheim Angels from 1997 to 2004. After Arte Moreno bought the team it became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim from 2005 to 2015, a formulation designed to satisfy a stadium lease while reclaiming the big-city name. Since 2016 it has simply been the Los Angeles Angels, though it has not played a home game inside Los Angeles since the mid-1960s.

Autry owned the club for 36 years and never saw it reach a World Series. The Walt Disney Company took control in 1997, and Moreno bought it from Disney in 2003 for 180 million US dollars. Autry's number 26, for the '26th man', is retired alongside Jim Fregosi's 11, Rod Carew's 29, Nolan Ryan's 30 and Jimmie Reese's 50. Ryan, Carew and Vladimir Guerrero, inducted in 2018, are the Hall of Famers most closely tied to the franchise.

One October, and the long wait since

The work that matters is concentrated in a single autumn. In 2002 a wild-card team managed by Mike Scioscia won the franchise's only World Series, which remains its only appearance in one. The decade that followed was the club's best sustained run: American League West titles in every season from 2004 to 2009, added to earlier division crowns in 1979, 1982 and 1986, and a ninth in 2014, when the Angels were swept out of the first round of the playoffs.

That 2014 sweep is the last postseason baseball played in Anaheim. Twelve seasons on, the drought is the longest active one in the majors, and the club has not had a winning season since 2015. The gap is all the more striking because those years coincided with the Angels employing two of the best players of the century at the same time.

Trout, Ohtani and the years that went wrong

Shohei Ohtani spent 2018 to 2023 in an Angels uniform and left without ever playing a postseason game for the club. Mike Trout, who has never played anywhere else, is still there, and 2026 began as his healthiest season in years. By the middle of June he had played 74 of the team's 75 games, hit 17 home runs with an.866 OPS, and scored an American League-leading 54 runs, at 34 years old and on pace to appear in more than 140 games for the first time since 2018.

Then the pattern of the last four years reasserted itself. Trout was placed on the injured list before the 19 June game against the Athletics with a hamstring problem, the fourth serious injury in as many seasons. He was candid about it: 'It's tough to go out there and try to play banged up, especially your lower half with your legs bothering you,' he said, adding that it had been fun to compete at his best again. The Angels lost their best hitter at the point in the schedule where the season was already slipping.

2026: a rookie manager, a sacked general manager, 54 and 90

The season was meant to be a reset. Kurt Suzuki, the former big-league catcher and World Series winner, was hired as manager on 21 October 2025 to replace Ron Washington, on a one-year contract that left him described as being on the hot seat before he had filled in a lineup card. The winter's business was modest: outfielder Taylor Ward was traded to Baltimore for pitcher Grayson Rodriguez on 18 November, Alek Manoah signed a one-year deal worth 1.95 million US dollars on 2 December, Drew Pomeranz and Jordan Romano joined on one-year contracts the same month, and Josh Lowe arrived from Tampa Bay in a three-team trade on 16 January.

Suzuki's start was the high point. On Opening Day, 27 March, the Angels shut out the Astros 3-0 in Houston, making him the first Angels manager since Scioscia to win a road opener, with a much-doubted bullpen allowing one hit over the last three innings. The rest of the year went the other way. General manager Perry Minasian, in the final year of his contract and his sixth season in charge, was dismissed on 26 June, with the former Cardinals executive John Mozeliak brought in to run baseball operations while a permanent replacement is sought.

After a loss on 7 September the Angels stood at 54 wins and 90 defeats, last in the American League West and 19 games behind Houston, and were formally out of the postseason for a twelfth consecutive year. They are 30-44 at home and 24-46 on the road, and will not improve on the 72-90 record of 2025. Whatever happens in the final fortnight, the season's story is already written.

The four-billion-dollar sale

The most consequential Angels news of 2026 has nothing to do with the standings. On 2 September Arte Moreno agreed to sell the club to Stan Kroenke, owner of the Los Angeles Rams, for a reported four billion US dollars, a record for a Major League Baseball franchise and more than twenty times what Moreno paid Disney in 2003. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, subject to approval by the other owners.

Kroenke's portfolio already includes the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids, the Colorado Mammoth lacrosse team and Arsenal Football Club. For Angels supporters the attraction is less the sporting record than the end of an ownership that presided over the longest wait in the game. Nothing about the sale changes the roster, the manager's contract or the stadium question for 2027, and none of those has been resolved.

A night at the Big A

Angel Stadium opened in 1966 and was heavily rebuilt in 1998, and it holds a little over 45,000. The two things every visitor remembers are the 230-foot 'Big A' sign with its halo, which is best framed from the left-field seats, and the rock pile with its geyser beyond the centre-field fence, a 1998 addition that the Ballpark Ratings review calls a gimmick that looks out of place in a suburban setting. The same review, updated for 2026, scores the park 67 out of 100 and ranks it 28th of the 30 major-league grounds, faulting awkward seating geometry that produces some of the worst sightlines among modern ballparks and a shortage of bars and social spaces. It does credit relatively efficient parking, with the site sitting beside four freeways, and it praises supporters who, for years, turned up in numbers a team this poor did not earn.

That loyalty is now being tested. For a Wednesday matinee against Cleveland on 26 August, with the team at 52-82 and the temperature at 92 degrees, the club announced a crowd of 25,161, but photographs of the stands showed row upon row of empty red seats. Fans online called it 'embarrassing' and compared it to a pandemic-era crowd. A game is still a standard nine-inning affair with no supporting act beyond the opposition, and the food, the halo lighting up after a win and Trout's at-bats remain the reasons to go. Whether the atmosphere returns depends on what Kroenke does with the roster, and that answer will not come before spring.