Angel Stadium: The Singing Cowboy's Team

The stadium visible from the freeway is Angel Stadium of Anaheim, home of the Los Angeles Angels, and the franchise's origin story is one of the more charming in American sports history.

In nineteen sixty, Major League Baseball was considering expansion into the Los Angeles market. Gene Autry, the entertainer known as the Singing Cowboy for his string of western films and radio programs, came to baseball executives asking about broadcast rights to cover the new team on his radio station. The executives, impressed by Autry's enthusiasm, made him a counteroffer: why not own the team instead of just broadcast it? He agreed, and the Los Angeles Angels were born in nineteen sixty-one as one of the American League's first expansion franchises.

Autry owned the Angels for thirty-six years, bringing them from a two-year stint sharing Dodger Stadium as the junior tenant in Los Angeles to their own ballpark in Anaheim when this stadium opened in nineteen sixty-six. The team cycled through names as it moved: from Los Angeles Angels to California Angels to Anaheim Angels to, today, the Los Angeles Angels playing forty miles from Los Angeles.

Autry never saw his team win a World Series. He died in nineteen ninety-eight. Four years later, the Angels did it in the most dramatic fashion imaginable. In Game Six of the two thousand two World Series against the San Francisco Giants, the Angels trailed by five runs after seven innings, facing elimination. The Rally Monkey, a video-screen mascot that had debuted in two thousand, whipped the crowd into noise as the Angels scored three runs in the seventh and three more in the eighth. They won the game six to five, then took Game Seven the next night to claim the franchise's only championship. Autry's wife Jackie brought his World Series ring to the locker room.