6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

Raised in Anaheim, Uhlich was the fellow who worked his way up from ball boy to a top position with the team. He was also the fellow who developed the team's red-only uniforms and caps introduced in 2002 -- a marketing master stroke.
 

That actually makes me a bit more mad at Arte for that. Does he just want a bunch of "yesmen" on his executive staff?Uhlich knows the area really well and could certainly have been right (well, the Angels already were essentially like the Clippers in the LA area but that was already starting to change with the WS win). It seems that Uhlich was trying to make a point that the Dodgers are completely and utterly associated with LA (much like the Lakers) and that the Angels are carving out their own niche, identity, and market by branding as Anaheim...something that has for instance (however bad the analogy) has worked for the Green Bay Packers. If they are branded as LA, he was trying to argue that they would certainly be identified with the 2nd biggest city in America, but because the Dodgers own it, the Angels will never be anything but second.

A better analogy to use for Uhlich actually might be that the Angels would become the Mets or White Sox to the Yankees or Cubs. Teams that are invariably recognized as large market, but not strongly followed (relative to the top teams in those cities). The question becomes: would you rather be top dog in a market of 3 million people (OC) or second fiddle in a market of 16 million people (the LA area). Arte has chosen the latter in an effort to become equal to or better than the Dodgers down the road. If he succeeds, it will take 10 plus years and have huge benefits for the team. If he fails, then the team is probably just slightly worse for the wear. If Uhlich was fired for speaking his mind on this topic, then he was seriously wronged (although, it is Arte's money to decide who to have on staff).
 

Actually, if Uhlich really did think that the L.A. market belonged to the Dodgers, then perhaps he DID deserve to be fired. Because according to MLB, he was wrong. If he really didn't know that the Angels and Dodgers share identical territorial rights equally, then he might not have been in the right position. Same thing if he was simply willing to concede such a potentially lucrative market to another team. It certainly suggests a much more limited, provincial vision for the team, a vision not shared by its current owner.

While it's good to have differing viewpoints, an organization cannot thrive if it does not have a unified vision.
 

Uhlich had a medium-market mentality. Arte had a vision and understood the dynamics of a winner in a alrge market - win the games, get the headlines, get the market share.
 

Hilo -- Well, Uhlich's master stroke happened to coincide with the team winning a World Series. Which was more important?

Josh -- I'm inclined to agree with Matthew. "Yes-man" doesn't enter into it; he was too much of the old Angels philosophy, and lacked vision. Maybe the Anaheim location will make a difference, but fielding a winning team every year will do more for the Halos than any marketing campaign ever would. And if Frank McCourt and Ned Colletti continue to construct the Dodgers in the same mold as the Mets (i.e., fill the roster with high-priced veterans at every position), the competition for mindshare could become very serious indeed. People are now old enough to drive and vote who haven't seen the Dodgers win a postseason series, let alone a World Series. Arte was absolutely right to be aggressive, and if this kind of pervasive pessimism was driving the front office, it needed to be chased out.
 

The question becomes: would you rather be top dog in a market of 3 million people (OC) or second fiddle in a market of 16 million people (the LA area).

I think that's an easy one. Would you rather own the New York Mets or the Kansas City Royals? Which one is more profitable?

Arte quickly realized that the Angels were a large market team that was being operated as though it were a small market one. Even if the Angels became something between the White Sox and the Mets, that's a pretty good place to be. But most Southern California fans are front-runners and only the hardest core of Dodger fans ever regarded the Angels like a Cub fan thinks of the White Sox or a Yankee fan regards the Mets.

Whether Arte could have marketed the team regionally without the name change is unclear to me, but anyone who thinks the right way to market the Angels is to concentrate solely on Orange County is as delusional as those people who still think Orange County is a quiet suburban/rural area without any of the problems associated with big cities.
 

Actually, Rob, anyone who is old enough today to vote was born on or before January 25, 1988, and was therefore alive when the Dodgers won the WS in October, 1988, so they still could have seen it. ;-)

But your point is well-taken.
 

I don't think he meant it as the Angels didn't deserve to try for some of the LA market, but that branding them as LA could have it's own problems (ie the Angels become secondary to the Dodgers when talking about LA teams). And Orange County has twice the population of the Kansas City metropolitan area...In fact, if OC was considered it's own metropolitan area, it would rank around 15th, near the Twin Cities and Phoenix. And honestly, looking at this list, I would say that the Angels would be in perfectly fine shape in an "Orange County" only market. The choice is not between the Royals and the Mets...it is probably closer to being between Oakland and the White Sox.

As far as conceding a market, you could alternatively say that Uhlich wanted to attempt to consolidate the Orange County market before expanding (many businesses are sorely hurt when expanding too fast) and was not used to Arte's aggressive tactics. And fielding a winning team has rarely been about payroll, it is about smart executie decisions and good farm systems. Once your team has already started winning, then it can spend on free agents that marginally improve the team (the Yankees did not win their first couple of WS in the 90s by buying all the good players, they built a winning core and filled in what gaps they had), which can lead you from just making the playoffs to winning the WS. In one sense, that could be one argument why the A's and Twins haven't been able to make it there: they build the winning core, but can't move beyond that.

Winning is the thing that will get you more fans in the long run, but winning over a 5 year period is not enough...it has to be almost a generation of winning to fully expand your fan base into new areas. And if you are a strong winner and can build a history that people will tell their children, it doesn't matter the name in front, which is what I always thought was the stupidest part of the move. In my inexpert opinion, Arte was needlessly causing a controversy.

Regardless of anything else, Arte made a risky business move with a potential big payoff at a time that he had as much political capital to spend as any owner ever. It also came after the Angels had just won a World Series (not on his watch) and already had become a popular ticket (essentially maximizing ticket revenue), not to mention he just plopped a bunch of money down as a slap in the face of the mid-market mentality. Finally, the Dodgers were a mess, just having picked up a new owner with little money, and having little success over nearly 20 years. I mean, the Lakers had won a title the same year as the Dodgers, winded down with a couple more Finals appearances, sucked for a couple years, got better again, picked up some great players, won a few more championships, and wound down again all in the span that it took the Dodgers to win exactly one playoff game. If any team was ripe for the picking of its market, it was the Dodgers in 04. And Arte was just the right aggressive guy to do it. And I don't blame him for doing that, he feels it is a lot better for the team. But, I don't agree. I think at best the Angels will do minimally better than they would have. At worst, they may have a couple of drop-off years (and those may be coming soon) where the team isn't successful and people start thinking of them as a secondary team. They don't even become an underdog fan favorite (which mid and small market teams do) when they make the playoffs. Suddenly Angel-Yankee games become about LA vs. NY, rather than the fact that the Angels whup the Yankees' asses. And those big contracts he has signed come back to bite Arte in the ass.

Again, I could be dead wrong in how this all pans out, but Arte could have marketed them as a large market team without changing the name. Hell, if he had worked hard enough (and from all accounts he is a hard worker), he could have led a reorganization in not only how baseball teams are marketed, but in how markets themselves are organized. Why couldn't he give the Anaheim name a chance?
 

Josh -- I just don't understand this:

I think at best the Angels will do minimally better than they would have.

But they have already done better than they have at any point in their history! Back-to-back division titles and three consecutive years of 3,000,000+ attendance (franchise records each year) say you're wrong, Josh.

And those big contracts he has signed come back to bite Arte in the ass.

They already have: Orlando Cabrera? The first half-season of Bartolo Colon? Garret Anderson? I'd be willing to bet that the tail end of Vlad's contract won't be as pleasant, either. But with the crop of kids coming up, it won't much matter, either. The Angels will be competitive this year and, unless the front office screws up too badly, for the balance of the decade and into the 2010's.

Why couldn't he give the Anaheim name a chance?

He's already explained this: the marketing is about selling the team's region to the potential advertisers. And as far as billboard magnate Arte is concerned, Orange County is part of the LA metro area. He's right.
 

My point about them doing only marginally better than they would have, was meant to indicate that they would have had attendence figures above the 3 million mark each of those years regardless of th city name (as a matter of fact, the first two years of that were with Anaheim as the name). As you yourself have said, the name doesn't matter for fan support, only winning does. But at the same time, if the team doesn't win with the new name people that prefer Anaheim will be even more upset than they would have if the team just had a couple of bad years (ie, the thought is that the name change was supposed to make the team a perennial winner, if you don't win every year, then the change wasn't worth it and so it was stupid).

The team's success LAST YEAR and for the next few years will not be changed because of a simple name change. I understand that Arte is looking to the future and taking his own big risk, but my point is this: Would I rather have a winning team named Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim or a team with the exact same success named the Anaheim Angels? I have to go with Anaheim Angels.

Oh, and those contracts have not bit him in the ass yet...he made a concerted effort to get into the market aggressively and he has been rewarded with a couple of division titles. And he was able to spend so much so quickly because the team had a lot of pre-Arte contracts running out (Glaus, Salmon, Appier, Sele, Percy) and a good farm system that can fill in holes cheaply.

As far as the last point goes, yes OC is part of the LA metro area, but it does have a distinct identity. It is fairly well-known outside of the state as a very conservative area, wealthy, and it has Disneyland, the shows "The OC" and "Laguna Beach" etc. It is in the LA metro area, but Arte certainly could have tried to market it as separate and probably could have succeeded. He would have become a hero of Orange County if he would have done this. Is it so impossible to believe that Orange County itself is a big market?
 

As far as the last point goes, yes OC is part of the LA metro area, but it does have a distinct identity. It is fairly well-known outside of the state as a very conservative area, wealthy, and it has Disneyland, the shows "The OC" and "Laguna Beach" etc. It is in the LA metro area, but Arte certainly could have tried to market it as separate and probably could have succeeded. He would have become a hero of Orange County if he would have done this. Is it so impossible to believe that Orange County itself is a big market

This is precisely the type of small-minded provincialism that Arte shuns.

While OC might not be a "small" market, per se, it's part of a HUGE market. To specifically focus only on the subset that is OC or Anaheim, while foregoing the even bigger market, is anathema to a global, or even regional, marketing strategy.

The Angels already have the OC market. They'll always have it, as long as the team plays in or near OC. And while the OC market might be attractive to advertisers, LA (which includes OC) is more attractive.

So what if OC could be successfully marketed? Arte has a bigger vision. The Inland Empire is one of the fastest growing areas in the state, if not the country. Why should he shun that by focusing only on OC?

Ultimately, it's about opening things up, not closing them off.
 

And I am saying that it's not impossible to do that with a team named Anaheim. It may be more difficult in some ways, but it can also be easier. And I credit Arte for his global vision and if it works out for him, then I will admit my wrongheadedness and his rightheadedness. But, I still think that if he fired Uhlich because Uhlich felt that the team should consolidate its fan base in Anaheim (which admittedly was going to be super-easy with the WS and the lowering of beer) before expanding out, then that is just wrong. Yes, the executives should present a united front to the public, but in private, things operate better when they are allowed to find faults in your plans (it makes you think how to solve problems). Uhlich was a link to the past in a business where history matters. Just because he didn't have the vision of the owner (which is extremely ambitious, by the way), doesn't mean he should have been fired (and who knows if it was, he could have been fired for any number of reasons). And I also think that he would do better not caring about the "LA" name and focus on nationwide and international branding. It's no coincidence he picked up a bunch of Latin American players in his first free agent foray. He has plans bigger than LA, and concentrating on growing in LA could hinder the growth into other markets (although, it could also help...who knows?).