Key Word Is ‘Include’ for Angel-Anaheim Jury

Some thought the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim was a loopy name for an Orange County baseball team, an affront to the ear and common sense. But whatever their distaste for the tag Arte Moreno hung on his team, jurors said, in the end they zeroed in on the precise language of his contract.

“If they wanted Anaheim to be the sole name, they should have put that in the contract,” said juror Jan Duffy, a 48-year-old technical writer from Laguna Niguel.

Duffy, who was not a baseball fan at the start of the trial and did not become one during its five-week course, voted along with eight other jurors Thursday that Moreno did not violate his lease agreement with Anaheim in renaming the team. The contract required that the team name “include the name Anaheim therein.”

During jury deliberations, which lasted roughly four hours and occasionally grew heated, the debate kept turning to “the famous ‘include’ word,” said Diana Reyes, a 26-year-old high school assistant who lives three miles from Angel Stadium. She voted for the team.

“The contract itself, it is very clear,” Reyes said.

Juror Skip Luke, a 53-year-old Ladera Ranch man who sells flooring at the Home Depot, described himself as a huge baseball fan who attends a dozen games a year. He said that his sympathies at first tilted toward Anaheim. But in the end, he said, he concluded the Angels had not acted in bad faith.

“The city could’ve put more specifics into the contract rather than just including the name somewhere. I felt like that left it really wide open,” Luke said.

Juror Judy Cottrell, a 51-year-old clerical worker from Orange, said she found herself liking the Angel owner, who showed up regularly in the courtroom.

“He’s very personable. He’s very comfortable to listen to. I noticed he was there every day,” said Cottrell, who sided with Moreno.

Juror Martha Santos of Fountain Valley, who voted for the city of Anaheim, seemed disdainful of her fellow jurors.

“Five weeks [of trial] and we took a few hours to decide,” Santos said.

Jack Clay, a 57-year-old port inspector from Huntington Beach who sided with the Angels, said that when deliberations began the panel was split 5-5, with two jundecided.

Clay said he and other jurors would have liked to have seen Michael Eisner, Disney’s former top executive, take the stand. “He was the highest-ranking man at the top of the chain of command and could have answered questions about the intent,” of the contract language.

“Our decision wasn’t based on anything emotional,” Clay said. “Our decision was based on how the contract was written.”

Sheldon Eisenberg of the Santa Monica law firm Bryan Cave wondered if Anaheim attorney Andy Guilford should have acknowledged in his closing argument that Moreno was “technically compliant” with the stadium lease when he changed the team’s name.

“I was surprised he said that,” Eisenberg said. “I don’t think a jury would understand a difference between technical compliance and a breach. The argument in my mind was that the team had completely failed to comply with the contract as it was intended by the parties.”

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Times staff writers Seema Mehta, Dave McKibben, David Reyes, Sara Lin and Jonathan Abrams contributed to this report.