L.A.’s the name, but opener’s not the same

It slipped into our consciousness like a college student showing up late and easing into the back row of a packed lecture hall.

Friday night was the Angels’ home opener.

Who knew?

Los Angeles is the sports market from hell, especially this time of year. Want attention? Want a big splurge for your big deal, such as opening day of a major league baseball season?

Get in line behind the Lakers and the Dodgers and UCLA basketball. Maybe the Clippers too, if they weren’t more of a hospital ward than a basketball team. How about USC and UCLA spring football? Got to have those quarterback controversies.

And then, on the day before your opener, golly gee, Beckham scores a goal. Let’s all be aquiver. For another $250 million, maybe he’ll even score another one.

But if you are Arte Moreno, who owns the Angels and who positioned his team right in the middle of the Los Angeles market by naming it the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, you don’t look for big splurges as much as increasing pieces of the L.A. sports pie.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he says.

He also says, as if to justify a branding strategy that flew somewhat in the face of traditional Orange County local worship, “There are 300,000 people in Anaheim, 3 million in Orange County and 18 million in the metroplex.”

To many in Orange County, the metroplex means that big, crowded, smoggy place to the north and east.

It is hard to get the attention of the metroplex for something happening down there somewhere off the 5 freeway.

After all, it is the 50th anniversary of the Dodgers’ moving to L.A. To celebrate that, we had a game attended by the population of a decent-sized Midwest city. Then, two days later, we had legends walking out of all corners of Dodger Stadium. There they were. Duke and Sandy. Cue the tears and goose bumps.

We had a legend in the dugout to learn more about too, and if Joe Torre isn’t worth a bigger piece of the pie for the Dodgers, then who is? We also learned, at great length again, that Jeff Kent was really a teddy bear under that curmudgeon shirt.

Indeed, the old saying is wrong. April showers bring Dodgers public relations flowers.

Thursday, on the same day that Beckham booted it home -- be still my heart -- Dodgers owners Frank and Jamie McCourt were honored at a luncheon of the Central City Assn. of Los Angeles, middle of the metroplex. They were given the Heart of the City award, and the press release said that without the McCourts, “the downtown Los Angeles we treasure today would not exist.”

Holy cow. What will downtown be like if the McCourts stay here for, say, something long-term, like 10 years?

Moreno’s piece of the metroplex pie comes tough.

We need to know, first and foremost every day, whether Pau’s ankle is still sore, whether Andrew is ready, and what Kobe had for breakfast. This is information vital to the well-being of thousands of 16-year-olds, tapping on their computer keyboards in Philadelphia.

And there must be room for UCLA basketball, the hottest news coming out of the metroplex right now, and deservedly so. We have a storied program, three consecutive runs to the Final Four, a coach who is among the best in the game, and a freshman phenom who seems to have no downside, either in performance or personality.

So, in the face of all this, there were the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Opening night. No Duke and Sandy, but retired general manager Bill Stoneman throwing out the first pitch to an old catcher named Mike Scioscia, as legendary in this southern corner of the metroplex as any old former Yankees manager.

All that was missing was for Scioscia to catch the ball, look to his left and see somebody charging home. We all know who would win that one. Still.

There were no jets, a few fireworks during Kenny G’s national anthem. There was a nice logo behind home plate that said “Opening Day 2008.” That was about the loudest notice it got.

No matter, Moreno says.

“We’ve sold 2.7 million tickets already, 30,000 season tickets,” he says. “We sold 118,000 tickets in spring training, and we used to be one of the worst.”

The theory is that a small piece of a huge pie will always feed you better than forkfuls of a tiny one.

“We have to be able to consistently win, over a long period of time,” Moreno says. “And we have to take care of our fans.”

There were 43,838 of them, a sellout, for the opener, and they weren’t all that well taken care of on this night, at least until the Angels scored all six of their runs in the ninth inning of an 11-6 loss that ended with Garret Anderson nearly hitting one out in right field.

It was a defeat, but Moreno would see it as just one game in a season of 162. The Angels players would see it as a small blip in a season they feel can bring them a repeat of 2002’s World Series championship.

That would get them their due in the metroplex. What a plan: Open softly and carry a big stick all the way to the finish.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. For previous columns, go to latimes.com/dwyre.