The day Arte Moreno’s $3.9 billion sale of his ball club to Stan Kroenke went through, you opened a pack of baseball cards looking for Angels. They sell them at the register of a local brewery. You roll your eyes at them every time. You also have a bin full of them at home.

You got Doug DeCinces, the guy who replaced Brooks Robinson in Baltimore.

“Doug didn’t have his most productive years until he joined the Angels in ‘82,” the back of the card explains.

In any other context, “he joined the angels” would mean that he was dead. Fortunately for DeCinces, it just meant that in 1982, he’d come back from having the flu and hit 11 homers in 10 games, including two three-homer games.

That same year, Arte Moreno was working for Eller Outdoor Advertising, a company being sued because a ton of birds were shitting on gas station patrons from one of their company’s billboards.^[1]

The owner of Froggy’s Fill-Up Inc. on W. Warren Avenue in Detroit had filed a suit charging “that hundreds of pigeons regularly roost on the sign and relieve themselves on the hapless employees and customers below.” The Department of Agriculture threatened to make them stop selling food.

It had been a lesson in business: Customers, ideally, do not wish to be shat on. If they are, specifically during their purchase of your product, they will likely associate your product with that time they were “‘bombarded’ by defecating pigeons.”

Arte Moreno, a successful businessman who never met a cost he wouldn’t cut, failed to learn that lesson. And all it got him was four billion dollars.