LA Angels Weekend News Crash: Yikes

If any of you are familiar with Dan Loeb – the activist investor who became known as Mr. Pink – his letters to management that eviscerate management decisions and policies were legendary. I asked AI to have Dan Loeb write a letter to Arte suggesting he sell. Here’s what it came up with.  😂  😂 

Third Point LLC
55 Hudson Yards · New York, NY 10001

May 15, 2026 · Private & Confidential

Mr. Arte Moreno
Chairman & Owner, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
2000 E Gene Autry Way, Anaheim, CA 92806

Dear Arte,

I will dispense with the pleasantries, as I suspect you have been spared enough of them by a fan base that has endured eleven consecutive seasons without a postseason appearance — a run of futility so consistent it has transcended mere mismanagement and achieved something approaching art. Not the good kind. The kind that hangs crooked in a dentist’s waiting room and nobody says anything.

Let me begin with your recent remarks to the press, which I confess I had to read twice to confirm they were not submitted by a satirist. You informed the world that winning is “not in the top five” priorities for your fans. Affordability is first, you said. Safety. Good experience. The “purists,” as you so generously classified the people who actually want their baseball team to compete, can apparently sort themselves out. Arte, I have spent thirty years in the business of assessing management’s grip on reality, and I must tell you — this statement would be remarkable coming from the owner of a Waffle House franchise in a depressed zip code. Coming from the owner of a Major League Baseball franchise in the second-largest media market in the country, it is, in the most clinical sense, extraordinary.

You commissioned a survey, it seems, to confirm your priors. I understand the impulse. I too have, on occasion, been tempted to find data that validates a thesis I had already reached. The difference is that when I am wrong, my investors remind me with the brisk efficiency of capital withdrawal. Your investors — the fans — have been sending the same message for over a decade, and you appear to have responded by commissioning a better survey.

Let us briefly review the stewardship record, in the spirit of the comprehensive due diligence Third Point applies to every position. You have presided over an organization that had, simultaneously, two of the five greatest baseball players of the modern era — Michael Nelson Trout and Shohei Ohtani — in the same clubhouse. I pause here to let that sink in. Two generational talents. In Anaheim. At the same time. And the playoff record during this period: a single appearance, dispatched in a three-game sweep. Shohei Ohtani, the most electric player the sport has produced in fifty years, is now wearing Dodger blue across town, having correctly concluded that his career would be better served elsewhere. Mike Trout, whom your own television broadcasts have taken to describing in the past tense, has been to the playoffs precisely once. This is not bad luck. Bad luck is a storm that disrupts one season. This is policy.

I am told you also cited the loss of your television deal as a contributing factor to what can only be described as an aggressively modest offseason payroll. Arte, “we lost our TV deal and therefore cannot field a competitive roster” is an explanation I would expect from a franchise in a market of four hundred thousand people, not one planted in Greater Los Angeles, which contains more human beings than the entire population of Australia. The Players Association’s executive director noted, with the restraint of a man who clearly has more targets than time allows, that “if you can’t have a successful operation in Los Angeles, it’s hard to see what the problem is.” I have rarely seen institutional understatement deployed so efficiently.

I want to address something that I suspect lurks beneath all of this — the matter of ego and its discontents. It is my considered view that you have not, in fact, stopped caring about winning. Rather, you care about it so much, and on such entirely personal terms, that you have confused the franchise’s success with your own vindication. This is a subtle but consequential distinction. An owner who genuinely does not care about winning is merely negligent. An owner who needs to win on his own terms, through his own methods, at his own pace, refusing outside counsel and stubbornly resisting the modernization that the sport has demanded for years — that owner is something more dangerous. He is a hobbyist with a $2 billion toy, mistaking his sentiment for a strategy. Angels fans deserve a steward who treats this franchise as the civic institution it is, not as an ongoing argument Arte Moreno is having with his critics. The distinction between those two things is, at this point, eleven years wide.

In 2022, you placed the team on the market. Angels fans — a loyal, long-suffering constituency — allowed themselves the small comfort of imagining a future under ownership that might approach the enterprise with something resembling competitive urgency. You then, in a plot development that would be rejected by a screenwriter for being too on the nose, removed it from the market after reportedly talking yourself out of selling. I find myself picturing that conversation and experiencing an emotion I do not often encounter in my professional life: genuine sympathy. Not for you, Arte — for the room.

You are now 79 years old. You have described yourself as “here long-term.” I do not doubt your sincerity. I do question whether the Angels fanbase, Mike Trout’s remaining healthy seasons, and whatever organizational momentum can be salvaged from a decade of drift shares your timeline.

The appropriate course of action is clear, and I will state it with the directness for which Third Point has occasionally been criticized and for which I make no apology: sell the team. Not because you are a bad person — I have no reason to believe you are. Not because you have not, at various points, tried — I will grant you that much. But because the evidence accumulated over eleven years suggests that the gap between your vision of stewardship and what the franchise requires is structural, not situational. That gap does not close with another survey. It does not close with another offseason of prudent budget management. It closes when someone with a different mandate, different energy, and a rather less philosophical relationship with winning takes ownership.

Los Angeles is a market that rewards ambition and punishes its absence with a cruelty that is both swift and public. The Dodgers have demonstrated this annually. You have a franchise with history, with geography, with an irreplaceable legacy embodied by a player still — miraculously — in your organization. Do not squander whatever years of Mike Trout remain by debating whether fans really want championships or merely adequate parking.
They want championships, Arte. I promise you. The survey was wrong.

Yours in the pursuit of accountability,

Daniel S. Loeb
Founder & CEO, Third Point LLC

This letter is a work of satire. Third Point LLC holds no position in the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, and Dan Loeb did not write this letter. All quoted statements attributed to Arte Moreno and others are drawn from public reporting.