[新聞] Baseball's Best Boss 富比士雜誌封面故事

看板Angels作者mjhsieh (錯字特攻隊)時間16年前 (2009/04/29 11:56)推噓4(4推 0噓 1→)

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原文 http://0rz.tw/EqBay 封面故事標題 Baseball's Best Boss 作者 Matthew Craft, 04.22.09, 06:00 PM EDT Forbes Magazine dated May 11, 2009 圖 http://0rz.tw/ppmEG 附標 How billboard magnate Arturo (Arte) Moreno turned around the moneylosing Angels by remaking his team's image. After a spring training game in march between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, a half-dozen fans were waiting outside in the warm Arizona afternoon sun to catch autographs from players heading to the parking lot. Back inside Tempe's Diablo Stadium a crowd, six wide and eight rows deep, waited for Arturo Moreno, the Angels' owner, to sign baseballs and hats and pose for pictures. Moreno told his wife, Carole, he should be finished within minutes so they could drive home together. He stayed for another hour, signing almost as many autographs for Dodgers fans as he did for Angels fans. Not very often does a professional baseball team owner get more fan attention than his star athletes, and even less often does the owner give it back, especially to fans of another team. Moreno is not your typical owner, save for the fact that he's wealthy (worth $800 million by forbes estimates). From the day he bought the Angels from Walt Disney Co. in 2003, he has changed the team's image and become in many ways its face. In the process he has turned what had been a team with a small-market mentality into one of the sport's most valuable franchises. Almost everything Moreno has done has been in the service of winning over fans and, as he says, "putting butts in seats." The Angels, with the best record in baseball last year, offer the third-cheapest visit to the park. He has cut ticket and food prices at Angel Stadium and dropped the price of draft beer from $8.50 to $6.50. Most teams charge $20 or more for souvenir caps. The Angels charge $7. In his first spring training in Tempe, Moreno couldn't understand why a section of great seats between third base and left field always remained vacant while people crowded into the section farther out in left field. Moreno walked over to the ticket vendors, who told him that people always asked for the cheapest seats. The outer section was $6. So Moreno cut the empty $12 seats to $6. "Now they're the first to go. Should it have been $8? Maybe. But now their butts are in there. They'll go buy a beer or a dog. We got them in the stadium." Attendance at Angel Stadium in Anaheim was 2.3 million in 2002, the year they turned a wild card into a World Series victory over the San Francisco Giants. The stadium has cleared 3 million a season ever since. Last year's 3.4 million put them second to the Yankees in the American League. By charging fans less, Moreno makes more everywhere else. The team has gone from a $5.5 million operating loss in 2003 to an operating profit (in the sense of earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation) of $10.3 million. Revenue has gone from $127 million to $212 million. The team now has an enterprise value of $509 million, almost three times what Moreno paid for it. In that time the Angels have more than doubled stadium sponsorship revenue to $26 million and cut a $500 million, ten-year deal with Fox Sports Network to put all 162 Angels games on television, up from 90 before. Moreno commutes to Anaheim from his home in Phoenix for most games. He wanders the stands, mingles with fans and occasionally checks to see how well the restrooms were cleaned. Scot Shields, a relief pitcher who has been with the team since 2001, recalls his second encounter with Moreno. During spring training in 2004 he asked about Shields' 2-year-old daughter. "There's not too many owners who'd do that," he says. After pitcher Nick Adenhart was killed in a car accident in April, Moreno flew coaches and players to the funeral in Maryland between games. At the Dodgers spring training game Moreno sat a row back from Angels manager Mike Scioscia, with a cooler of cold beer beneath his seat. He leaned in between innings to ask Scioscia how many pitches Dustin Moseley had thrown. When the Angels' Robb Quinlan smacked a home run in that Dodgers game, Moreno stood up to clap and looked around for Quinlan's father, who had made the drive down to Arizona from Minnesota. Moreno, according to former team general manager William Stoneman, sees costly free agents as an investment, not a corporate expense. Under Moreno the Angels' payroll has climbed from $79 million in 2003, twelfth in the league, to $119 million, sixth. Stoneman put the payroll over budget when he signed Kelvim Escobar, Bartolo Colón and Jose Guillen in 2004. Then Vladimir Guerrero's agent called. Stoneman thought the Montreal Expos' rising star was out of reach but told Moreno anyway. "We didn't talk for even ten minutes. He said, 'We've got a chance to get Guerrero? Go for it.' It was the quickest negotiation I've ever seen." Moreno, 62, grew up in Tucson, the oldest of 11 children. Arte and his brothers were Yankee fans because that was the only team on TV in the 1950s. He played baseball in high school, did a stint in Vietnam and got a bachelor's degree in marketing from the University of Arizona. His first job was with billboard mogul Karl Eller. Moreno left in 1984 for a Phoenix upstart, Outdoor Systems, and, together with Outdoor founder William Levine, built it into the nation's largest billboard company. It was sold to Infinity for $8.7 billion in stock in 1999. Moreno got his first taste as a baseball team owner in 1985 with the Salt Lake City Trappers, then an independent league team. The group that bought the Trappers for $180,000 had a blast running it and sold it in 1992 for $3 million. In 1998 a much wealthier Moreno helped launch the Arizona Diamondbacks and eventually wound up with the second-largest stake but failed in his attempt to take it over. He perked up when Disney hired Lehman Brothers to shop the Angels during the 2002 season. Moreno followed the team throughout the year and was Disney's guest at the playoffs and World Series. For $184 million, it was his. Early on he saw a clear opportunity to apply the principles of the advertising business to baseball. Repetition and reach work wonders. Here was a baseball team in the middle of the country's second-largest media market of 17 million people that had put itself in a small box labeled "Anaheim." Moreno and the executives in the Angels' front office, many of whom he brought over from his ad days, seared that Angels red logo into the minds of fans across swaths of southern California. That meant crimson-red advertisements on billboards and bus stops and ridding the team store of other clubs' merchandise. On the field they replaced the "Anaheim" spread across players' chests with "Angels." Before he had considered making a bid for the team Moreno checked with his attorneys to make sure the stadium lease with Anaheim allowed for a name change. They assured him it would be fine. (After all, the team was born as the Los Angeles Angels in 1961 and played as the California Angels until Disney bought it in 1996.) In 2005 he switched the name to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The city of Anaheim sued, saying the change violated the spirit of the lease agreement. Fans showed up to games with T-shirts reading "We are not L.A." and "The Anaheim Angels of Anaheim." This past January, two court rulings and three years later, the city dropped its fight, leaving the Angels with the unwieldy Anaheim at the end of its name. Moreno will be free to do what he wants when the stadium lease allows him to opt out in 2016. Moreno says he'll be happy as long as the team continues to pull 3 million a year into Angel Stadium. The club might start a series of cable shows or create a southern California version of the New York Yankees' Yes Network. Neither idea is a priority right now, with the economy challenging the Angels' ability to draw 3 million fans a year. By late March the club had sold only 2.3 million tickets. Moreno is already cranking up group specials like $3 tickets for kids on Tuesdays and lower prices for games against teams that rarely pack the stadium, like the Kansas City Royals and Baltimore Orioles. "Our goals are no longer financial," he says. The Angels had a 100--62 record last year and have dominated their division, but they have yet to return to the World Series. Moreno says his goal now is another championship. "Make that championships," he says, correcting himself. Those aspirations took a blow this off-season when first baseman Mark Teixeira signed with the Yankees and closer Francisco Rodriguez, one of baseball's best relief pitchers, joined the New York Mets. Tony Reagins, general manager, and others in the front office say the club's minor league depth and free agent additions should ease the loss of Teixeira and Rodriguez. The Angels picked up Brian Fuentes from the Colorado Rockies to fill Rodriguez's spot and then signed Bobby Abreu, a 35-year-old outfielder from the Yankees, for $5 million for one year. At the spring training game against the Dodgers, three young women dressed in a mix of Dodgers blue and Angels red posed for a picture with Moreno. Michelle and Ericka Carrizal and their cousin Giselle Gonzales made the six-hour drive that morning from Los Angeles to see the two teams they have rooted for since they were children. The closest they get to pinpointing why they say they love Moreno is that the centimillionaire seems "like one of us." That he has Mexican ancestry has little to do with it. By making games affordable and taking an obvious delight in mingling with fans, Moreno has broadened both the Angels' popularity and his own. Thanks to him, Michelle says, she can drive to Angel Stadium on a whim. "Dodgers games are superexpensive" in comparison. "You can wake up on a Saturday morning and think, 'What's going on today? Hey, the Angels are playing, let's go,'" she says. "It's that affordable." Moreno's true competition, he says, is the sunshine. -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 68.5.35.76