Mike Trout says he is excited, and he did not hedge. Word came down that Arte Moreno has agreed to sell the Angels to Stan Kroenke after 23 years, and the face of the franchise called the deal a needed one and a fresh start, pointing straight at what Kroenke's other teams have done. That is a franchise player choosing his words on purpose. Players almost never say a sale was needed. Trout did.
He has earned the right to say it. Sixteen years in one uniform, three MVPs, a contract that runs through 2030, and a postseason ledger that reads three games in 2014, all losses, all sweep. The Angels have not been to October since that ALDS. They have not won a playoff game since 2009. Trout has been the best player almost nobody got to see in a meaningful late-September game.
What does the Angels sale to Stan Kroenke mean for the franchise?
The Kroenke sports portfolio is the whole pitch here, and Trout knows it. Rams, Nuggets, Avalanche, Arsenal, and a run of the last several years in which those franchises have hung championship banners in three different sports. Whatever you think of the man's public profile, and he has never been mistaken for a warm interview, the operating record is a real thing. Big-market spending, big-ticket infrastructure, and a willingness to let basketball people run the basketball team and football people run the football team.
That last part may matter most in Anaheim. The complaint about the Moreno era was never that he refused to spend, because he spent plenty and often loudly. It was the shape of the spending, the front-office churn, the thin pipeline, the sense that the biggest checks in the sport kept landing on a roster that could not stay upright.
Arte Moreno's Angels ownership record and the 2026 sale
Moreno bought the club from Disney in 2003 and he did not inherit a project. He inherited a defending World Series champion. He also gave Southern California a stretch of genuinely excellent teams in the mid-2000s, five division titles in six years, and then a slow fade that never fully stopped fading. He put the market's name on the jersey and fought the city over it. He explored a sale in 2022 and pulled the team back off the market in January 2023. Three years later, he is out.
checked the almanac: the last time this franchise changed hands, the Angels were the reigning champions of baseball. that is the distance being covered here.
What comes next for Mike Trout and the Angels
Sales of this size go before the rest of the ownership group before anybody hands over keys, so nothing about the day-to-day changes this week. The Yankees are in Anaheim for a Wednesday night finale at 9:39 ET, and the same names fill out the same lineup card.
The real questions land in the offseason. Who runs baseball operations. Whether the player development system gets the money and the patience it has been starved of. Whether the stadium question, dormant since the city deal fell apart, comes back to life under an owner who has built two enormous venues already.
And the human one. Trout turned 35 this summer and is signed through 2030. There is still a version of this where he plays October baseball in an Angels uniform, and there is a version where he does not, and the difference between them is almost entirely about decisions he will not be making. He was drafted 25th overall in 2009 by a team that had just been in the ALCS. He has been waiting since.
A fresh start is a hopeful phrase from a guy who has had plenty of reasons to stop using hopeful phrases. Trout reached for it anyway.
What I am watching next: who Kroenke keeps and who he replaces in the baseball operations chair, because that hire will tell you more about the next five years in Anaheim than any press release will.