Angels in Lead After First Legal Inning

The Angels can operate as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, at least for the next two weeks.

The city of Anaheim lost its bid Friday for a temporary restraining order that would have immediately blocked the Angels’ name change. Orange County Superior Court Judge Peter Polos set a Jan. 21 hearing on the issue and ruled the city would not be irreparably harmed if the team used its new name until then.

“We’re disappointed, but we’re certainly not dismayed or defeated,” City Atty. Jack White said. “This is the first inning of a long contest. This isn’t an indication of whether we ultimately win or lose.”

Temporary restraining orders are difficult to obtain, and the outcome of Friday’s hearing does not necessarily foretell the outcome of the case, said Sheldon Eisenberg, who handles intellectual property and entertainment litigation at Bryan Cave in Santa Monica.

However, if the city loses again Jan. 21, when it will seek a preliminary injunction that would prevent the Angels from using their new name pending a trial, Eisenberg said he believed the city would “proceed to Plan B” and consider settlement.

Defeat in the injunction hearing would make victory at trial unlikely, he said. In addition, a trial might not start for months -- if not a year -- and by then the team could have played an entire season as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

The team can proceed with that name for now. On Monday, the day the name change was announced, the team informed other clubs to refer to it as “Los Angeles” instead of “Anaheim” and “LA” or “LAA” instead of “ANA.” On Thursday, club spokesman Tim Mead said, the team told major league officials to use the new name in 2005 schedules, which he said could be printed “within the next few days.” The team also added the new name to its website.

Although Mike Rubin, the city’s lead counsel, argued that such changes “would be cast in concrete for the 2005 season” if a restraining order were not issued to forbid them, Polos suggested the changes would not be irreversible in two weeks and noted the Angels plan to use the same logo and uniforms they did last year.

The city is suing the Angels for breach of contract, charging the team has violated the stadium lease requirement that the team name “include the name Anaheim therein.” The team denies the charge.

Polos did not issue any rulings on the merits of the case in Friday’s hearing, but he touched on several key issues. During his questioning of Rubin, Polos said, “It appears there’s nothing in the contract that requires them to use the name Anaheim Angels.”

In a question that could point to the path of an eventual settlement, Polos asked whether monetary damages could be properly assessed and would be a sufficient penalty should the Angels be found to have broken their lease. The team’s lead counsel, Todd Theodora, said yes. Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle said this week that the city “negotiated and paid for a naming right.” In court filings, the city referred to the millions corporations pay for naming rights to sports facilities and bowl games.

But White, the city attorney, said even many millions would not compensate for the replacement of “Anaheim” by “Los Angeles” on news and sports shows. “The exposure the city gets nationally and internationally, you can’t buy,” he said.

The city argues that neither it nor the Walt Disney Co. -- from which Moreno bought the Angels in 2003 -- intended any other city to be included in the team name. The two-city name violates the California covenants of good faith and fair dealing, Rubin said, relegating Anaheim to “a useless appendage” and depriving Anaheim of the publicity benefits it expected in return for its $20-million contribution to Disney’s stadium renovation.

“What they’ve done is not only to strip that benefit but to make things even worse than when they were the California Angels,” Rubin said. “At least, under the California Angels, the team wasn’t associated with another city.

“Nobody is fooled by the ‘of Anaheim.’ We all know that’s a joke. We all know the ‘of Anaheim’ is going to drop off.”

The Angels filed motions Friday seeking to throw out significant amounts of evidence in the declarations completed by city officials involved in the 1996 lease negotiations. The team contends the lease constitutes the end result of negotiations and speaks for itself, so the court need not consider testimony about the intent of the negotiators. No ruling has been issued on those motions.

Theodora argued that because Disney had changed the team name “to include the name Anaheim therein” and the lease did not mandate how long that name must stay, the Angels could now call themselves whatever they wished -- even if they dropped Anaheim, a claim White called “shocking.”

Despite that interpretation of the lease, and despite the national ridicule the team has endured with the two-city name, Mead said the team did not adopt the simpler Los Angeles Angels name because it hopes to maintain a positive relationship with Anaheim.