Los Angeles Angels*

Perhaps the power of a prepositional phrase could have vaulted “New Coke of the Coca-Cola Co.” to commercial success. We’re kidding. We hope the Angels are too.

Let this one roll off your tongue for a while -- the Los Angeles Angels ... of Anaheim. Team officials hope the new moniker will attract more national attention, more TV revenue and more corporate sponsorships by claiming a larger slice of the Los Angeles media market’s 16 million people.

Originally, Angel owner Arte Moreno proposed that his team be called the Los Angeles Angels; Anaheim officials rejected the proposal. In 1996, the Angels (then owned by Walt Disney Co.) signed a 33-year stadium lease with the city that required the team to include Anaheim in its name. Team officials, in a transparent attempt to fend off the city’s lawyers, feel the “of Anaheim” suffix fulfills their lease.

Rightfully, Anaheim officials are in an uproar. City attorneys hope to get a temporary restraining order in the next few days that would force the team to remain the Anaheim Angels, for now. Legal niceties aside, the real advantage of the new name is its jokester potential. Maybe the “San Francisco Athletics of Oakland” could gain a less rough-and-tough, more cultured demographic. (At least Oakland is closer to San Francisco than Anaheim is to Los Angeles.) Players more cheerful than Ron Artest might move to the “Chicago Pacers of Indiana,” at least until they found out the stadium was still in Indianapolis.

The Angels lost about $20 million last season despite record home-game attendance. But plunking Los Angeles on a team’s name doesn’t guarantee a financial windfall. The erstwhile Los Angeles Rams played in Anaheim for 16 years; the name did nothing to save the football team from moving to St. Louis in 1995.

The Los Angeles Clippers are right in town, but what’s commercially missing in that basketball team name is “Lakers.”

For now, the best thing Moreno can do is save his team from further ridicule by issuing the following statement: “Just kidding.” Or he could at least make the change honest, setting the “of Anaheim” in tiny type on a separate page, like the lists of side effects in drug advertising.

*of Anaheim