Ben Shahon- Creative Nonfiction
I Need a Sign
What does it mean to love a sports team? To use a royal we to describe the actions of players you’ve never met (and likely never will outside the kind of cheesy photo ops usually meant for children). Living in the Los Angeles region, I could be eating so well sports-wise. I’ll root for the Rams in football, who are always competitive. The Lakers and Clippers are usually pretty good, at least in my lifetime. But I’m not a basketball fan, and I’ve always preferred baseball to football. And then there are the Dodgers.
I’ve chosen to be an Angels fan, which is hard. No one should do it. And yet…
I was five the first season I paid attention, and it was magical; the 2002 team made the playoffs on a wild card, and snuck their way into the World Series. I remember sitting with my parents in our little suburban house, watching the games on TV. Sometimes only my mom watched with me, sometimes an aunt or uncle if my parents had scored tickets to that particular game at Edison Field, an expensive and valuable gift that fall. It was a peak that they still haven’t replicated more than twenty years later, even if they got close a few times.
Sort of. The Angels stayed competitive for the next ten years after that world series win in 2002, thanks to players like the ones on that year’s squad and ones drafted later like Howie Kendrick or Jered Weaver. We made the playoffs most years that decade, usually getting bounced in the first round by the Red Sox (a team I still kind of hate), or an AL Central team like the Twins or Tigers. But the real turning point for modern Angels baseball was in 2010, with the signing of The Machine, Albert Pujols. But we aren’t there yet.
The biggest change for the team from the Disney-Anaheim Angels period today was the sale of the team shortly after that 2002 Cinderella run to a billboard magnate, one Arturo Moreno.
Moreno proclaims himself to be a fan-owner, and for the longest time, it was easy to believe him. During the first half of his tenure, the front office made lots of splashy moves in free agency and trades, acquiring such notable talents as Guerrero, Bartolo Colon, Torii Hunter, Bobby Abreu. Exciting, bold moves that made the team better, players from other teams I had become a fan of. And, a lot of those players became the core of the team that was winning all those division titles.
Albert Pujols was by many metrics the best baseball player in the world during those same early 2000’s seasons the Angels were good. He hit for average and power, played defense and first base well, and was generally the kind of clutch that could propel his team at the time (the St. Louis Cardinals) to multiple World Series wins during that tenure. For a team that had dropped perpetually to the bubble, with a lack of star power, it seemed like a match made in heaven.
But having a sports team owned by (even if they proclaim themselves a fan) a marketing owner, especially one who likes to play GM, comes with drawbacks. Soon, some of the big signings and trades like Vernon Wells, Josh Hamilton, even Pujols himself fell off a cliff stats-wise, and the team started losing. The last time they qualified for the playoffs was 2014, and they got swept by Kansas City (who was on a Cinderella run of their own). I held out a lot of hope in those years that the team would be as good as they were when I was a kid, but they just haven’t been.
The crumbling of the Angels as a franchise matches the rise of the current era of dominance for the Dodgers, the more popular, and more historically-relevant team. They’ve been in pro baseball almost twice as long as the Angels, and every logical bone in my body points me in the direction of the boys in blue. And to be honest, in some ways they’re the model organization to root for. They make big moves, but also develop talent from within. They win a lot, are usually not mired in too much controversy, and are generally better regarded than similar organizations like the Yankees or Phillies. But I also kind of hate them, for the same reasons I hate the Sox or the Yankees. With success comes a level of smugness in the fanbase that always struck me as douchey. The dorks on ESPN and the like always have their backs, and that leads every Dodgers fan to ask, “Why would you even care about the Angels?” as a near-constant-refrain to any open Angels fan in town. I’ve always been a fan of perpetual underdogs, and this is probably where that started.
Moreno has brought big changes to the Angels beyond the roster itself. There have been a number of general managers over the years, a new one fired every time the team failed to live up to expectations. He held on to coach Mike Scoscia longer than he should have, assuming he was the reason the Angels won in 2002 (despite other members of that staff like Joe Maddon, Bud Black, etc. going on to major success with other franchises in the post-2002 period). Many of those GM’s have found various degrees of success around the league as well running other teams like the Mariners, Mets, etc. The team has gone through a pair of name changes aimed at marketability, first to the laughable Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, and later to just the Los Angeles Angels. The stadium employs more fireworks, more ostentatious concessions, bigger cable contracts. The entertainment value is there, even when the team is bad. The aforementioned Pujols was signed for a ten-year, $300 million dollar contract, but a few days later, the team signed a contract worth almost double that much to renew their network broadcasting rights. As a money-making business, they’re an unmitigated success, despite the revolving door of personalities to get attached to and many, many losing seasons. It’s gotten hard to endure the ridicule of fans of other teams who have had more playoff success, because they’re right to ask me why I still root for the Angels. It’s a question most Angels fans have asked ourselves over the years.
In the period since 2013, the Angels have been mostly mired in mediocrity. Many sports teams take a slash and burn approach, cutting their budget to the bone, selling big stars for cash, draft picks, or young players to other teams in order to try to build a new team dynamic from the ground up. Not the Angels. They’ve been “in” for the last twenty years, bragging about the strength of each year’s roster for the short and long haul, even when even the most casual fan can see it’s time for a true rebuild from the ground up. As a result, their ceiling the last few years has been a paltry .500 winning percentage, and their floor has been some of the worst seasons in the history of the franchise. They’ve become the guy still drunk at the bar at 3:00 a.m. bragging about beating the crosstown rival in the state championship back in high school. And I’ve still got the bottle, topping up their next shot.
Many of my friends and family members have moved on, root for the Dodgers, or even the Padres down south in San Diego, and pay no mind to the fuckass baseball team I still feel compelled to root for/pay attention to. Every season we Angel fans tell ourselves that it’ll be different, that this squad of too green rookies and burnt over veterans will be able to pull out some of that 2002 magic. This year was no different, finishing well below a .500 winning percentage, on the outside looking in, again.
The current era of the Angels isn’t without its stars. Mike Trout was the best player in the game for most of the last decade. When it wasn’t him, it was probably Shohei Ohtani, who came to the U.S. via the Angels before eventually signing with the goddamn Dodgers across town. Neither were healthy at the same time, and the other big signing, Anthony Rendon, has wandered back and forth between injury, indifference to the sport, and whatever else we the viewing public have not been privy to. These fuckups haven’t been able to get the three best players on the team on the field at the same time during their entire overlapping tenure of five years, and now one of them is on a team I personally despise. Such is the nature of modern pro sports.
It’s hard to love the Angels, but it’s also hard not to root for the team that made you love a particular sport. The Angels were the first sports team I really ever cared about, since I was just a little kid when they won the whole damn league. I learned to enjoy football, and my loyalties have shifted there over time (I was a UCLA fan when I was growing up and they were loveable losers, but have shifted to rooting for my own alma mater ASU). Baseball is the sport I tie most closely to myself, because of life experience, because of writing, because of the Angels. But there have been so many nights turning off the TV in frustration because I know how the story of that game is going to end, or shaking my head reading a news alert on my phone about a roster move doomed to fail from the jump.
About two years ago, there was seemingly a light at the end of the tunnel. In the Winter Meetings, baseball’s offseason conference of managers, general managers, and owners, Moreno expressed some interest in selling the team. His exit would hopefully mean a new set of investments into the roster (and maybe some of the other line items he’s been pinching pennies on), but alas, he’s held onto the team. Every day I’ve been hoping that he has another change of heart and decides to let this team go. Because I’m probably too deeply invested in this trash fire to do so myself by this point.
Ben Shahon is the author of the fiction collections Short Relief (.406 Presss, 2025) and A Collection for No One to Read (Bottlecap Features, 2024). His nonfiction work has appeared in a number of journals, including Silly Goose Press, The Daily Drunk, and others. He was the founding EIC of JAKE, holds an MFA in Fiction, and received BA’s in Philosophy and Creative Writing from Arizona State. He writes from his home in Greater LA