Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

Four years ago, Arte Moreno explored a sale of the Angels. No firm bids materialized, and he ended that exploration the following year. Three years later, however, the tide has suddenly turned. On Tuesday, Moreno agreed to sell the team to multi-sport owner Stan Kroenke in a deal that values the Angels at $4 billion, a record-setting price for the sale of a majority stake in an MLB team.

They say it never rains in Southern California. They also say that when it rains, it pours. Consider those two adages, and then apply them both to the recent ownership changes in MLB. Earlier this year, Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano bought the Padres at a $3.9 billion valuation. Kroenke’s purchase of the Angels sets a new record, the team-sale equivalent of a free agent signing a contract that guarantees them $1 million more than the previous high. It’s a boom time to be selling baseball teams. In fact, these two sales might have set records for transfers of controlling stakes, but the Yankees blew the competition away earlier this year when they sold a minority share to Apollo, a private equity group, at a valuation of roughly $10 billion. It’s a boom time for baseball ownership in general, in other words.

Moreno purchased the Angels in 2003, in the wake of their World Series title. His relationship with both the city of Anaheim and the fans of the team is complicated. At first, his free-spending ways made up for his desire to rebrand the club as a Los Angeles concern. The team was quite successful in the beginning of Moreno’s stewardship, averaging 90 wins in the first 10 years after he purchased the club. That was the best stretch in Angels history by far; they made the playoffs five times, more than the four they’d racked up in the prior 42 years the franchise existed before Moreno bought it.

Moreno brought the Angels to a new financial level, and he capped that early string of success with a landmark deal before the 2012 season. He signed Albert Pujols to a 10-year, $254 million contract, at the time the second-largest deal in baseball history. Pujols was coming off of his own decade-long string of excellence, and his signing showed off the rapidly expanding economics of baseball; consider, for example, that his deal guaranteed him more money than the Angels sold for a decade earlier.

Around the same time, the Angels signed a landmark TV contract, good for 20 years and $3 billion. The rising tide of professional sports was visible across the franchise – bigger TV deals, bigger player salaries, rising attendance, franchise valuations that dwarfed what Moreno had paid for the team. The Astros sold for $680 million in 2011, and the Padres for $800 million in 2012. Every team sold since then has cracked the billion-dollar mark. Moreno had timed his entry perfectly and appeared to be on the verge of sustainable success. Pujols scuffled in his first season in Anaheim, but the Angels didn’t even miss a beat, because Mike Trout’s rookie season, one of the best in history, gave the team a new franchise cornerstone to pair with their free agent superstars.

…And then what happened, Ben?

The Angels made the playoffs in 2014, but that still stands as the only time Trout has played postseason baseball. His arrival coincided with the decline of the team’s previous core, and no reinforcements were forthcoming. The AL West also got a lot tougher. The Rangers have been very good on average since 2010, and the Astros were added to the division in 2013 and have won it in more than half the years since. But it’s not just a story of intradivisional competition getting better; the Angels didn’t keep up with the changing way baseball operated at the big league level.

Moreno’s free agency-fueled approach was timed perfectly with the emerging economic power of the game; he handed out big contracts to players already starring in the majors, and revenues and franchise valuations kept appreciating. Other teams were slower to react to this changing environment. The Angels went from a mid-tier payroll team to having a top 10 payroll for 18 years straight. But as other teams both started spending more and started investing more in scouting, development, and baseball operations in general, the Angels couldn’t keep up.

Figuring out what went wrong over the course of decades is more complex than I would even attempt in an article of this length, much less one written on deadline the day the team is sold. But in general, the Angels didn’t do enough with their farm system, and as they fell further behind, they seemed to mostly stick their head in the sand and ignore the warning signs. A revolving door of GMs – Jerry Dipoto, Billy Eppler, and Perry Minasian – each had long stints at the helm without getting big results.

The scouting group that hit on Trout misfired repeatedly in the following years of drafts. The Angels signed a number of free agent deals that went sour, with Pujols, Josh Hamilton, and Anthony Rendon the lowlights. Repeated win-now trades kept the farm system barren without producing results, and the team turned to drafting near-ready amateurs in an attempt to get Trout and Ohtani reinforcements, a strategy that largely backfired when it became clear those prospects weren’t ready. Their analytical efforts fell behind. Even Shohei Ohtani’s arrival on a bargain-basement deal prescribed by the league’s international bonus system wasn’t enough to get them back into the postseason. And even worse, the spending that characterized the Angels early in Moreno’s tenure dipped just as Trout and Ohtani needed reinforcements.

As the team’s fortunes went south, so did Moreno’s relationship with Angels fans. The team posted huge attendance numbers towards the start of his tenure. Moreno famously slashed beer prices in his first year as owner, and the Angels still maintain reasonable prices and deals for families attending games. But between 15 years of futility and rumors of ownership meddling in personnel decisions, the relationship has soured completely. The stadium was awash in “sell the team” chants this year, at least to the extent that it was occupied. The Angels had top-five attendance from 2004 to 2019; they haven’t so much as cracked the top 10 since.

But while the team’s on-field trajectory has been ignominious, the financial side of things has gone swimmingly for Moreno. He bought the team for $184 million in 2003 and sold it for $4 billion in 2026; that works out to a 14.5% compounded annual growth rate before considering any profits accrued during his ownership. That beats the stock market, which saw an annual growth rate somewhere between 11-12% over that same time period.

If you’re deep into the weeds of financial analysis, Cliff Asness’ concept of an illiquidity discount applies here. If you’re not, let me put it to you this way: The value of the Angels never gets marked down, unlike the value of a stock, and that means that many investors would accept lower-than-market returns to get that kind of return profile. Moreno got higher-than-market returns, and he got to sit in an owner’s box and rub shoulders with some of the greatest athletes in history while those guys called him “sir” and generally deferred to him. This was an absolutely fabulous investment from a financial theory standpoint, as pretty much all sports teams have been in the 21st century. The amount of money flowing into professional sports means that it really couldn’t be any other way.

The new owner, Stan Kroenke, is a great example of this. Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, his holding company, owns the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids, and Arsenal F.C. They’ve all been good investments. They’ve mostly been incredibly successful on the field, too, and Kroenke has poured money into them and reaped the rewards for his spending. That’s not to say they’ll continue to be good investments long into the future – as every financial disclosure reliably tells you, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. But the fact that multiple teams have sold at record valuations in this year alone should tell you that the billionaire class of the world is still interested in betting on baseball ownership.

I’m fascinated by how many of these record sales have come with the backdrop of baseball owners decrying the poor economics of the sport in advance of this winter’s CBA expiration. The league has made this view clear throughout this year, frequently referencing Forbes to show that baseball team valuations just aren’t keeping up with the (Jerry) Joneses of other professional sports leagues. But allow me to counter with some facts: Forbes valuations are just estimates, and they’ve been hilariously low on MLB teams of late.

In 2025, Forbes estimated that the Yankees were worth $8.2 billion, the Angels $2.75 billion, and the Padres $1.95 billion. In 2026, they revised those estimates to $8.5 billion, $2.8 billion, and $3.1 billion, with rumors of a Padres sale already baked into the price. Based on the deals agreed to this year, those prices were low by something like 25%. It sure feels like the low franchise values that concern current owners so much are at least partially due to a poor estimation of demand. How else can you explain how every team that changes hands sets new records?

To be sure, there are some confusing chicken-and-egg questions here. Maybe all these owners are piling into baseball at record valuations because they expect to smash the players union to pieces this winter and sign a new deal that will catapult team values into the stratosphere. Maybe they’re worried that AI will kill us all by 2027 and just want to die while owning the most toys possible. Are the prices going up because the teams are undervalued now, or are they going up because investors expect a change in situation? It’s impossible to say from the data.

However you want to interpret that, though, I think one thing is quite clear. Baseball teams are phenomenally valuable enterprises. Arte Moreno bought the Angels, hit it big for about a decade, and then essentially ran the team into the ground. Despite two of the biggest talent windfalls of the 21st century – drafting Trout and signing Ohtani to a rookie contract with a mere $2.3 million signing bonus – the team has declined from a perennial contender to a laughingstock, and attendance has declined in tandem. But it just didn’t matter; he made out like a bandit anyway. A rising tide lifts all boats, even the boat with holes in it (don’t test this in the real world).

So buckle up, everyone. The financial health of baseball is incredibly contentious this year. The owners and players are flirting with canceling games over their differing opinions of the state of the game. And meanwhile, the billionaire investors of the world are piling in with shovelfuls of cash. The noise on both sides is only going to get louder as we approach the end of the season and the start of the lockout. I wonder how many more teams will have sold for a record price by then.