"Include the Name Anaheim Therein": Angels Lease Clause Outlives the Sale

Rams owner Stan Kroenke's purchase isn't final yet, and the stadium lease he would take on expires in six years.

The Angels are being sold; the ballpark isn't. Anaheim owns Angel Stadium, the lease that comes with it runs six more years, and that lease still requires the team's name to include the word Anaheim. Rams owner Stan Kroenke agreed this week to buy the last-place club from Arte Moreno, and columnist Bill Shaikin set out what sits underneath the handshake in a Los Angeles Times column published September 3, 2026. The sale won't close until early 2027.

The money isn't the ballpark. It's the 130 acres of parking lots wrapped around it, which the city also owns, and which stand empty all winter and every other week of the summer. When Moreno pitched a development plan for that land in 2019, Anaheim's own estimate put the shops, hotel rooms, offices and housing at $10 million a year in tax revenue, the Times reported, with the Angels committing to stay through 2050.

Anaheim has been shopping that site for years. An NFL stadium, a Disney-run retail and entertainment center, an indoor surf and snowboard park: none of it happened, per the column.

Kroenke's other properties are the argument for optimism here. He's built around SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, around the Rams' practice facility in Woodland Hills, and has a planned arena in San Diego. Shaikin's read is that a new ballpark plus a new neighborhood on the Angel Stadium parcel is Kroenke's likeliest first plan, given how rarely a lot that size opens up next to freeways and transit.

He also has a second plan, and everybody in the negotiation knows it. An industry official familiar with franchise sales, texting the Times on condition of anonymity, said the option of putting a small ballpark at SoFi Stadium hands Kroenke enormous leverage over Anaheim.

Then there's the name. The lease Kroenke would inherit says the team name must “include the name Anaheim therein,” and under Moreno the “of Anaheim” tail on “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim” quietly went away. The city could press that clause again. It could also, Shaikin notes, sell the whole site to the highest bidder with no requirement that a ballpark stay on it.

Sacramento has already put a thumb on the scale. A bill Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in late August 2026 lets Anaheim let Kroenke earn more from developing the site if he agrees to call the team the Anaheim Angels, the Times reported.

Elected officials aren't hiding what they want. Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken called the sale “Christmas in September” to the Times, and Assemblyman Avelino Valencia (D-Anaheim) pointed to six decades of crowds and a World Series banner raised under the Anaheim name.

The city has been here before, on the other side of the answer. Long Beach offered the team a home in the 1960s on the condition it be called the Long Beach Angels; owner Gene Autry declined and went to Anaheim, where officials told him to call the club whatever he liked. It debuted at the new Anaheim Stadium in 1966 as the California Angels. The team has worn the Los Angeles name for 27 seasons and the Anaheim name for eight.

Kroenke and his people aren't expected to say much until the sale is final in early 2027. The negotiating over the parking lots, the price and the name runs from there, against a lease that expires in six years.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 3, 2026.