For Disney, Selling Angels Is a Whole New Ballgame : Marketing: Mighty Ducks proved a big hit, but promoting baseball requires a delicate balancing act.

On cue, six “Angels Wings” cheerleaders dance onto the Anaheim Stadium field armed with a giant slingshot and autographed “rag balls.”

Their mission: launch the balls into the stands to entertain Angel fans in the middle of the fifth inning.

Great fun, except for one thing: several yards away, trainers load second baseman Damion Easley on a stretcher after he sprained his left knee.

This scenario from a Sept. 11 game raised questions that Angel and Disney officials are expected to confront in the coming months, if league owners approve the entertainment empire’s bid to buy part of the team.

Where do the Angels--who return home for their final four regular-season games beginning tonight-- draw the line between campy ballpark entertainment and respecting major league baseball as a professional sport?

When do skits, mascots, cartoons and stereo speakers blasting retro music inning after inning become an assault on the central nervous system?

“Baseball, by the nature of the sport, needs to incorporate the entertainment and promotions but not take away the integrity of the sport,” said Bob Wagner, director of advertising, sales and servicing with the Mighty Ducks, Disney’s NHL team.

“I was with the Angels for 10 years, and finding that balance was a real challenge. You have to be progressive enough to attract the passive fan and still cater to your season ticket holders who are more conservative.

“That’s a challenge as far as selecting music and what goes on the Jumbotron screen. You can’t just focus on one niche market.”

When Disney takes over the Angels’ day-to-day operations once the purchase is approved by major league owners, it can apply many of its marketing practices that turned the Mighty Ducks into a marketing hit.

“Can Disney save baseball? I don’t think so,” said Roy Adler, marketing professor at Pepperdine University. “I think baseball is dead, and I don’t think the fans are coming back after the strike.

“Baseball will never be the national pastime again, but Disney can help make it close. But it can’t save it.”

Although Disney officials are mum about their marketing plans until the purchase goes through, hints of their Midas touch are plentiful at Angel home games:

* Cartoons of Goofy and other Disney characters on the stadium’s Jumbotron screen between some innings.

* Cartoon sound effects, such as a Homer Simpson-like “Owwwww!” after a foul ball flies into the stands.

* The “Angels Wings” cheerleaders.

* Live shots of more fans, many of them children, flashed on the Jumbotron between innings.

Other signs of changing times this season: fireworks after each Angel home run and hipster music.

Yes, the ballpark that once lulled you to sleep with ballads by Boyz II Men and New Kids on the Block occasionally plays “Blitzkrieg Bop.”

Dan Monson of Yorba Linda, an Angel fan for 15 years, said he thought the music was “better, a lot better.”

“I’ve definitely noticed some changes,” he said. “The promotions have definitely improved, and they’re only going to get better with the money that Disney is going to bring in.”

Nobody can challenge Disney’s marketing prowess. Its 1994 release, “The Lion King,” made more than $740 million and earned another $1 billion from licensed products. In June, the Canadian Mounted Police hired Disney to oversee the licensing and marketing of its image.

But Adler cautioned that Disney won’t revolutionize baseball marketing.

Today’s minor-league promotions are some of the best around. Two major league innovators, former Oakland A’s owner Charlie O. Finley and the late Bill Veeck, who at various times owned the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox, experimented with wacky sports promotions decades ago.

Twenty-five-cent beer night. A shower and a barber’s chair in the White Sox old Comiskey Park outfield stands. And who can forget “Disco Demolition Night,” a radio-station promotion that sparked a riot at Comiskey in the 1970s?

Disney has another major task--boosting the Angels’ lagging merchandise sales.

The souvenir shop at Anaheim Stadium features nearly as many Mighty Ducks shirts, caps and jerseys as Angel merchandise. The Angels’ hottest-selling items are caps and jerseys with the team’s 35th anniversary logo.

Carole Coleman, manager of business public relations for Major League Baseball Properties, said the Angels have not ranked in the league’s top 10 in merchandising for “several years.”

“When the Angels’ purchase surfaced, I thought it was a good deal because Disney could do so much more with marketing,” Adler said.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do--maybe sky-divers between innings or a marching band for the seventh-inning stretch. But it can work. Just look at what they have done with the Ducks.”

In December, 1992, Disney paid $50 million in expansion fees for the Ducks. Its marketing was an unparalleled success--the team’s value increased to an estimated $108 million this year, according to Financial World magazine.

But it’s too early to tell if the Angels can follow suit.

“The opportunities afforded to other teams, whether it’s football, basketball or baseball, are endless,” said Bill Holford, director of sales and marketing with the Mighty Ducks. “Any number of the things we have done with the Ducks can be translated to those sports, including baseball.”

Wagner said baseball can market its tradition and history better in an attempt to please both the casual and die-hard fan.

“You can’t buy the history and the tradition,” he said. “Baseball should market itself as America’s pastime, but at the same time, be progressive. You can balance that, and a lot of other leagues don’t have that.”

Last year, Disney produced a remake of the movie “Angels in the Outfield,” this time with a new twist--the California Angels are lifted to victory by real angels.

Less than a year later, the company was buying a piece of the real team, a surprise contender in the American League Western Division this season.

Disney had followed the same script two years earlier, naming newly formed National Hockey League team the Mighty Ducks after its children’s hockey movie.

Once it had the team’s name, Disney developed an intimidating team logo--a goalie’s mask featuring a scowling duck with hockey sticks forming a skull and crossbones--that appealed to young and old alike.

As a result, the Ducks led the NHL in merchandising in their first year. T-shirts, caps, jackets, hockey pucks, baby bibs, socks, key fobs. You name it, you can find a Ducks logo on it at the team’s store at The Pond.

The team’s Duck mascot “Wild Wing” is lowered from the rafters amid a pregame laser-light show. The Ducks experimented with a skating chorus line, nicknamed “the Decoys.” Replays on the scoreboard were punctuated by Tinkerbell and her magic wand.

Kids dug it, and parents apparently did too. The team boasts 49 consecutive home sellouts, and its season ticket renewal rate for this season is well over 90%, Holford said.

“This past year, we placed more emphasis on the on-ice games and fan interaction,” Holford said. “We took the entertainment up a notch.

“We had entertainers in the stands, people giving away merchandise, trivia contests, musical groups, dancers, comedy acts. We’re trying to give people something to laugh about during the intermission.”

The Angels have adopted that entertainment philosophy, said Joe Schrier, the team’s vice president of marketing. Like the NHL teams, the Angels are making a “concentrated effort to be more fan-friendly” after last year’s player strike embittered many fans.

“We recognized we had problems we had to fix and solve,” Schrier said. “We were asking the fans to bear with us.

“There were indications as the season began that a good number of people were going to boycott until after the All-Star break. I think that was true, and still is to a degree. But there has been a combination of people coming back because they love the game and because the team has performed well.”

There’s no telling how much impact the Angels’ new promotions have had on their attendance this season. Although the team led the division most of the season, attendance has increased only slightly compared to last year’s strike-shortened season. The Angels have averaged 24,111 fans in 68 home games this season, compared to 24,010 in 63 dates last year.

But there is proof that a winning team and a new ballpark can make a difference. The American League Central-champion Indians had drawn 2.7 million fans through 68 games at 2-year-old Indians Park.

Schrier was mum about the Angels’ future marketing plans, saying that the sale of the team wasn’t complete. But he said this season’s promotions have been well-received by fans, adding that they don’t distract from the game.

Holford echoed similar remarks about the Ducks’ promotions, which he says are the envy of other NHL teams.

“We haven’t had any criticism,” Holford said. “Some of the NHL teams initially had a skeptical attitude about our promotions. But last year we had five NHL representatives, including some from Canada, who sent their marketing people to meet with our front office. They wanted to learn what we do from an on-ice and a fan’s perspective.”

So far, Angel fans have given the thumbs-up to the Disneyesque promotions, particularly the cartoons and the music.

“I’ve always loved Disneyland, and my wife lives for it,” said Jeff Blackmon, 44, of Riverside, “so just about anything [Disney] does, I like.

“They understand marketing there, that’s for sure.”

But where do you draw the line between entertainment and baseball tradition? Monson isn’t sure you need to.

“I think the Angels are doing a good job of marketing to today’s fan,” he said. “Let the ballplayers worry about tradition.”