{"id":70,"date":"2018-10-25T15:16:40","date_gmt":"2018-10-25T22:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/?p=999923529"},"modified":"2018-10-25T15:16:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-25T22:16:40","slug":"long-beach-angels-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/long-beach-angels-baseball","title":{"rendered":"The Long Beach Angels? That dream has been dashed before"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long Beach is a city in which our wild hopes too frequently meet the same fate as a dinner plate at a Greek wedding.<\/p>\n

An offshore international airport, a space-needle-y observation tower, Smithsonian West, a World\u2019s Fair, Port Disney and DisneySea, a half-dozen Queen Mary do-overs. We\u2019re hip deep in shards of shattered dreams.<\/p>\n

The result of a lifetime of bitter disappointment precludes us from showing even an inkling of excitement over the prospect of Long Beach luring the Angels onto the correct side of the Orange Curtain to play in a dazzling waterfront stadium here in town.<\/p>\n

The idea was analyzed<\/a> in the Post by our sporting friends Mike Guardabascio and JJ Fiddler in a piece in which they kept admirable reins on any show of giddiness over the prospect of the Angels building a ballyard in Big Town. They are, like me and other right-thinking Angelenos, Dodger fans.<\/p>\n

Guardabascio and Fiddler reached the guarded conclusion that the project, which would involve developing the 13-acre \u201cElephant Lot\u201d on the waterfront behind the Long Beach Arena, is doable, but not overly likely.<\/p>\n

The Elephant Lot, which traces its name back to the days when the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus made annual excursions to Long Beach\u2014in fact, the Greatest Show on Earth brought a three-night engagement to open the Arena in 1962.<\/p>\n

That same year, the Angels moved from L.A.\u2019s Wrigley Field to Dodger Stadium as a gaggle of second-class renters. To distance themselves from the name of the stadium, the Angels called the yard Chavez Ravine while they played there until 1965.<\/p>\n

The Angels\u2019 owner, Gene Autry, \u201cthe Singing Cowboy\u201d who amassed great wealth by penning and singing the songs \u201cRudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,\u201d<\/a> \u201cFrosty the Snowman\u201d and \u201cHere Comes Santa Claus,\u201d knew from the start that there was no profit to be made by handing Dodgers owner Walter O\u2019Malley an exorbitant rent check every season. So he set out to find a home field to buy for his club, and what better place than Long Beach, which still had a good amount of undeveloped land in the early 1960s. Club leadership was especially smitten with the area of what\u2019s now El Dorado Regional Park, close to an array of freeways in Long Beach\u2019s booming eastern section, which still held a whiff of bean fields and dairy land.<\/p>\n

The Angels\u2019 top brass\u2014president Bob Reynolds, general manager Fred Haney, and business manager Cedric Tallis\u2014scouted the city in 1963, and things seemed promising. Things always seem promising in the early stages of all Long Beach dreams.<\/p>\n

Negotiations to bring the Angels to Long Beach exploded the following year, though, when Long Beach City Manager John Mansell, in the third year of the 15 in which he would lead the city, demanded that the name of the team be changed to the Long Beach Angels.<\/p>\n

Autry would have none of it. He thought Long Beach sounded bush league and instead insisted the name be the Southern California Angels, to represent not only Los Angeles and Orange counties, but the growing Inland Empire as well. \u201cThat was unacceptable to us,\u201d said Mansell (and the whole project, for that matter, was unacceptable to a group of citizens, led by future councilwoman Renee Simon, who protested the use of planned park land for the stadium).<\/p>\n

And the rest, as they say, is Autry galloping off to Anaheim, a city that didn\u2019t care what name he chose, at least for a few decades. Autry expanded his empire, at least in nomenclature, by calling his team the California Angels, a name that stuck for 31 years, until it was time for renovating the stadium, at which time Anaheim made the Mansellian demand that Anaheim be part of the Angels\u2019 name and its stadium. That wasn\u2019t the end of the Angels\u2019 naming confusion, which peaked when they became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (and Grill).<\/p>\n

And, if they make their humble return to Long Beach, as some hope, but none dare expect, you can bet the city this time will insist on Long Beach being part of the Angels\u2019 name.<\/p>\n

Unless that\u2019s a deal-breaker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Angels\u2019 top brass \u2014 president Bob Reynolds, general manager Fred Haney, and business manager Cedric Tallis \u2014 scouted the city in 1963, and things seemed promising. Things always seem promising in the early stages of all Long Beach dreams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":16428,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[35],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","tag-angels","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}