Angels Hold Line on Season Tickets

Merry Christmas, Angel fans. For the first time since the Angels took the wrapping paper and construction tape off the renovated Edison Field, Disney is not raising prices on season tickets.

And, in the wake of the departure of pitcher Chuck Finley, Disney is not trying to promote the Angels as contenders.

President Tony Tavares said the Angels were so putrid last season that Disney could not justify the traditional price hike.

“No,” he said, “not off last year’s performance.”

Prices for full and partial season-ticket packages will be frozen, Tavares said, with single-game ticket prices to be determined. The Angels’ average ticket price of $13.19 ranked 19th among the 30 major league teams last season, according to Team Marketing Report.

The Angels lost 92 games. They lost their manager, general manager, minor league director, scouting director, five coaches and 12 scouts. Oh, and they lost Finley, who has won more games than any pitcher in franchise history.

So what marketing pitch will the Angels use to persuade fans to renew their tickets? Honesty, Tavares said.

“We are committed to getting this team back on track,” he said. “We are being honest in identifying our weaknesses. We will find a way to fix them.”

The fans may be more understanding than Disney had hoped, or just apathetic. Since the Angels announced Tuesday that they would not offer Finley a new contract, the ticket office has received only three calls of complaint, the public relations office two.

The embarrassment of this winter contrasts sharply with the giddiness of last winter, when Disney Chairman Michael Eisner participated in strategy sessions that resulted in the $80-million signing of Mo Vaughn.

“You can cut back, not be a competitive team and maybe make a little money or break even,” Eisner said then. “You can stay in the middle and be in a place where you’re not a competitive team but you’re not an embarrassment, in which case your fans, I think, start to lose faith.

“Or you can try to be a really competitive team and hope you start putting people in the stands. That justifies your decision to go for it. We decided . . . we were going to go for it.”

That experiment, apparently, is over. Vaughn fell into a dugout on opening night, injuring his ankle, and the Angels followed him downhill. The team crashed into last place, and attendance dropped 11%, to 2.25 million.

“We didn’t get the big pop we expected last year. Nothing much happened,” Tavares said.

“We tried to ramp up. We tried to get Mo and a pitcher [Randy Johnson]. We got Mo and didn’t get the pitcher. It just put us in the middle of the pack, the same place we were before.

“We overestimated how good we were before. This past season certainly shed light on the holes we have. You’re not going to fill those with one player.”

In that light, Tavares said, why spend $9 million per year on Finley? He might be a franchise icon but, with him or without him, the Angels aren’t likely to be playing come October.

“If you’re losing $3 or $4 million, you might want to take the plunge and lose $12 million,” Tavares said. “If you lose the kind of money we’re losing, it’s another thing.”

Tavares insists he has received no orders from corporate headquarters to slash payroll in order to make the Angels more palatable to potential buyers. Still, the Angels claim losses of more than $70 million in four seasons under Disney management, including more than $20 million in each of the past two seasons.

“When you have to feed that monster, people don’t want to buy the team,” said Marc Ganis, president of the sports investment banking firm Sportscorp Ltd., “or you have to give away the team at a lower asset price.”