Following Tuesday’s announcement of the sale of controlling interest in the Los Angeles Angels to multi-sport team owner Stan Kroenke, Forbes baseball writer Barry Bloom wrote this:
Kroenke intends to build a new $2.5 billion ballpark to replace aging and decaying Angel Stadium, which opened in 1966 and has been refurbished at least twice.
Bloom gave no source at all for this information, which was rapidly repeated across the journotweetosphere. But then, just a few hours later, that sentence disappeared from Bloom’s article entirely; the Wayback Machine was down yesterday so there’s no record there of the original version, but Angels Substack newsletter Beyond the Halo got a screengrab:
Weirdly, there’s no notice on the Forbes site that the article has been revised. (There’s also no correction of Bloom’s spelling of “empresario,” but that’s another issue.) And Bloom’s X posts are still up insisting that Kroenke is building this phantom stadium “in Anaheim” and is “not going to renovate again” because Angel Stadium “has infrastructure problems and needs to be replaced,” again all without citing any sources.
Presumably this, let’s be generous and call it “information,” is all coming from somewhere, whether that’s Kroenke henchmonkeys or somewhere else. (Bloom has a long track record as an access journalist, so much of his reporting needs to be treated as somewhere unknowable on the spectrum between unverified fact and planted PR slop.) The bigger question now becomes: Who wants us to believe that Kroenke has a $2.5 billion Anaheim stadium up his sleeve, and why are they trying to disseminate that information via Forbes — and what changed over several hours yesterday that Forbes had to take down the claim?
As with any handwavy stadium proclamation, there are tons of additional questions, starting with “Who’s going to pay the alleged $2.5 billion?” and “Is Kroenke going to make another go at getting development rights to the city-owned Big A parking lots, state law requiring affordable housing to be prioritized there be damned?” Kroenke, thanks to marrying a Walmart heiress, is rich enough to buy and sell Croesus before breakfast, so he can certainly afford to pay for a stadium himself, as he did for the Los Angeles Rams; he also almost certainly won’t want to if he can find a way to get some public money to help defray his costs. The Athletic reported on Tuesday that Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said she’s “very hopeful that [Kroenke is] going to want to work with the city to come up with a really innovative development plan that would benefit the residents,” which doesn’t really tell us much of anything, but at least it’s a statement with a name attached that hasn’t been memory holed in the last two days, that’s a start, more actual reporting to follow, one hopes.