Get Over It, Angel Fans and L.A. Foes

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where, out of the womb, everyone is instructed to despise Los Angeles with every fiber of their being. In my formative years, I went to Giant games and saw fans set fire to Dodger pennants.

Then I moved to the East, where everyone who wasn’t moving to Los Angeles was an expert on what a wasteland it was, whether or not they had ever been there.

But as a young man, was I interested in dating nice girls?

Not on your life. What guy wants to date the girls nobody is talking about?

So the first chance I got, I packed my bags and moved to the loathed and irredeemable city of sin. Any place that had everybody talking, going back to my youth, had to be worth at least a brief flirtation.

And what did I find?

That even some of L.A.’s own neighborhoods couldn’t stand the place.

Hollywood wanted out. So did the San Fernando Valley.

So my question is this:

Why did the owner of the Anaheim Angels want to marry the city so many others want to slap around?

Arte Moreno changed the name of his team to the ridiculous-sounding Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, a move that was upheld in court Friday despite complaints by L.A.-hating Orange County fans and a legal challenge by the jilted city of Anaheim.

“My one big rule when following anybody’s decision-making,” said Cal State Fullerton sports marketing professor Tom Boyd, “is follow the money.”

By broadening the fan base, Boyd said, Moreno can sell more Angel trinkets, if not tickets, and command scads more money for broadcast rights and outfield billboards. He wants the whole market, not just some puny slice of it.

Naturally, this has gotten all the L.A. haters worked into a lather, and I have a couple of things to say to them.

First of all, this is baseball, so get over it. It’s played by a bunch of interchangeable millionaires on steroids, and as soon as you grow attached to one guy, he’ll be traded to New York. Only a fool would feel any sense of loyalty to fly-by-night players and owners who are out to make a fast buck.

Second, Moreno wants the L.A. name because it’s a brand. He can’t sell Anaheim or Orange County, where civic pride is founded on not being Los Angeles.

L.A.’s got glamour, the Getty and the movies. It’s got the filthy rich and forever forlorn, a concrete river and a mountain of porn. Those who claim to hate it sneak here in the night like thieves because they’ve got nothing else to do, or they sit at home in front of the television watching everything the city turns out.

I’m not convinced Moreno’s marketing scheme will work. It’ll depend on whether his team, which is pretty good for now, keeps racking up the wins. If the Angels tank, they’re going to have to give away the beer to get any self-respecting Angeleno down to Anaheim.

By that, I don’t mean to suggest that Anaheim is a Mickey Mouse town, but I’ve got news for those folks:

A theme park and a Target store do not a city make.

Can you imagine the Raiders ever being the Anaheim Raiders?

Impossible.

The L.A. Raiders and their fans were a happy team of thugs, and Los Angeles was where they all belonged, skipping church every Sunday to make mayhem in a crumbling Coliseum.

If Anaheim city fathers had any pride, they’d give Moreno and the Angels the boot and let some other city be humiliated.

The Los Angeles Angels of Riverside.

The Los Angeles Angels of Downey.

The Los Angeles Angels of Oxnard.

Moreno, who lives in Arizona, must have come into L.A. by air on his first visit. He was up there in a private plane, no doubt, tapping on the window with his pinkie ring as he looked down and noticed there were no city boundaries anywhere in Southern California.

You might get your mail in Pomona or Hermosa Beach, Altadena or Torrance, but you live in the mythical and borderless L.A. metropolis, whether you like it or not.

“I live in Long Beach,” Boyd said, “but, when I talk to people in other states, I tell them I live in Los Angeles.”

Arte Moreno knows this as well as he knows money.

He wants to date the girl with the reputation.

The girl everybody talks about.

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Steve Lopez writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.