Les Carpenter / Times staff columnist
Angels' owner doesn't hesitate to pay the price

	MATT YORK / AP Anaheim owner Arte Moreno, left, talking to manager Mike Scioscia, has beefed up the Angels' roster in the offseason.
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TEMPE, Ariz. — The Steinbrenner of the West arrives in a silver Impala with the cloth top down and the sunshine pouring in.

"It's just my weekend car," Angels owner Arte Moreno says.

He is walking the hallways of Diablo Stadium this afternoon in a bright-red team jacket. A wind is whipping off the desert. But he won't go inside. There are hellos to be said: to Angels executives, to players' wives, to the men in sombreros playing guitar at a small party in the stadium's plaza.

"We were checking out your ride," catcher Bengie Molina says as he reaches to shake Moreno's hand. "What year is it?"

"1969," Moreno says proudly.

Somehow, you can't imagine Paul Allen doing this.

In the winter of the Yankees and Red Sox and the great East Coast arms escalation, there came a new player in the baseball free-agent market. Maybe the rest of the league underestimated the owner of the Angels, the one who took a look at the $8.50 beer on the concessions menu in Anaheim and announced on the first day that he was cutting the price.

Because, just as the rest of the game thought it had confined the salary explosion to New York and Boston, there came a string of signings from Orange County. Kelvim Escobar. Bartolo Colon. Jose Guillen, then Vladimir Guerrero. In all, Moreno poured more than $145 million into two of the top starting pitchers and two of the best outfielders in the game. Suddenly Arte Moreno was about more than cheap beer and $3 seats on Tuesday nights.

In a matter of weeks, everybody was afraid. He attended an owners' meeting, and half the men in the room ignored him. What started as baseball's great success story — the tale of a fourth-generation Mexican-American who grew up the oldest of 11 kids living in a two-bedroom apartment in Tucson, Ariz., only to become a billboard magnate worth more than a billion dollars — became something else.

No one was prepared for the Angels to spend like Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Now with a starting rotation so deep a double-figure starter might be cut, Anaheim might well be the best team in the American League, and the game has gotten just a little heavier at the top.
 
Moreno squints into the breeze. The band is playing louder now, everybody is eating, burritos, beer and soda. Children are laughing. The Angels' owner glances at them and smiles.

"What are we trying to accomplish in the long term?" he asks. "Is it to try and stay competitive? If you have the opportunity to get better, why don't you take it? Our baseball people felt we needed to change our pitching, so we signed Colon and Escobar. We needed a right fielder, and we went out and got Jose Guillen. At the 25th hour we had the opportunity to get Guerrero.

"Basically what am I supposed to do when I tell the Los Angeles papers I had the opportunity to get a player of (Guerrero's) caliber and didn't? I would have been doing a disservice to the fans."

Instead, he gave them everybody they could have ever wanted.

Maybe this is what the rest of baseball fears: an owner who cares, who is so accessible that he drives into spring-training camp in an convertible Impala and cuts ticket prices and yet at the same time signs all the players the team needs to win. It's something they've never considered before.

"Let me ask you a question," Moreno says. "Do you like Guerrero playing in Seattle? How about Colon pitching?"

Which is, of course, the question. And which is, of course, the question that is being asked in nearly every city in major-league baseball. What does it take to win? Do you do it?

Moreno is asked what he thinks of Steinbrenner. He pauses for a moment, then says, "I think he has done a heck of a job for New York."

Arte Moreno is prepared to do a heck of a job for the Anaheim Angels, which is a problem for the rest of the AL West. In a division where everyone is scrambling to cut costs, he has thrown raises around the front office, added $30 million to the Angels' payroll and spent more on the fans than probably any team in the league.

This month, team employees came down to Tempe with about 1,000 Angels caps in a box. The idea is for the vice presidents and secretaries to walk around with handfuls of the hats, handing them to children they see in the stands. When they run out, all they have to do is call back to Anaheim, and another box will be on its way.

And this is Moreno's world. So different from the others in a stiffening, corporate game. Yesterday Angels pitcher Jarrod Washburn noticed the team's owner standing on the field talking to the groundskeepers.

"I think that's awesome. He treats guys the same no matter who they are," Washburn says.

It makes you wonder.

Will the other owners ever catch up?

Les Carpenter: 206-464-2280 or lcarpenter@seattletimes.com.

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