Arte Moreno leaves a serious mess for new owner Stan Kroenke to clean up.

A headline in The Athletic called the depths to which the Angels have sunk in the past decade plus the result of their soon-to-be-former owner’s meddling, myopia, and penny-pinching. That’s almost like saying the depths to which the nation has been plunged are the result of its president’s egoism, narcissism, and avarice. Thank you, Captains Obvious.

Angel Stadium is a hope, skip, and catcher’s throw to second base from what’s been called (mostly by its founder and the company he bequeathed) the happiest place on earth. The ballpark itself, and the fan base that fills it almost in spite of itself, hadn’t been the happiest place on earth in a very long time, until this week past.

Arte Moreno first entertained selling the Angels in August 2022 . . . until he didn’t. It wasn’t nice to tease Angel fans suffocating over a team’s ineptitude built (or should we say unbuilt) by the very owner teasing the sale. Then came Wednesday of this week, when the news broke like New Year’s Eve fireworks that Moreno agreed to sell at last, to Stan Kroenke and his Kroenke Sports and Entertainment group.

Christmas in September! Our long national nightmare is on the threshold of over! Goodbye, Arte, goodbye Arte, goodbye Arte, we don’t hate to see you go! There may have been no way season-long “Sell the Team!”-chanting Angel fans could have out-celebrated that news. Not yet, anyway.

The early reviews and previews have had it that Kroenke likes to win, owns a few other sports franchise who like to win just as much, and isn’t what Moreno proved to be. Kroenke isn’t known to be fearful of reasonable investment in his teams and their facilities. The Angel news was barely a day old when speculation arose that he’s willing to build the Angels a brand-new ballpark. With his own money, even.

Moreno was major league baseball’s first Latino owner, and one with pockets almost as deep as the Damn Dodgers or the Empire Emeritus. But this big-market owner with big-market resources preferred to spend like a flea market owner in a one-horse town—where the horse was a hobby horse. Unless he could find what once animated a certain longtime Yankee owner: “name guys who put fannies in the seats.”

Whether they cohered into a solid baseball team was the question Moreno could always ask later.

Since the Angel sale was first announced, observers have tripped over themselves and each other trying to decide Moreno’s top five foul-ups, bleeps, and blunders. Only five? Here we go again:

* He ordered then-GM Tony Reagins to deal for Vernon Wells after he couldn’t convince future Hall of Famer Adrián Beltré to sign as a free agent. Ignorance wasn’t bliss: the Blue Jays probably popped champagne corks over the declining Wells becoming someone else’s headache.

* Seeking scapegoats instead of solutions, he purged international scouting director Clay Daniels and overall scouting chief Eddie Bane over bonus skimming by some Daniels subordinates and never really seemed to address the Angels’s scouting problems at their depth.

* He addressed the Angels’s chronic pitching issues with bargain reclamation projects instead of sound development and free agency pickings—then, he (and Angel fans) watched enough of those projects deflate in Anaheim but a) find revival elsewhere; or, b) leave the game as what-ifs.

* He refused to deal Shohei Ohtani approaching two trade deadlines for much-needed infusions of youth and minor-league replenisments, then watched him walk into free agency and the Dodgers’s arms and back-to-back World Series championships.

* He handled injury-addled Josh Hamilton’s drinking relapse more clumsily than Donald Trump handles international relations: Hamilton obeyed the protocols and told on himself at once, but his Angels boss of bosses ran him out of town on a rail into the arms of the Rangers who wouldn’t have to pay a thing to take him back.

* He refused steadily to entertain dealing Mike Trout for needed youth and farm infusions and wasted the prime of the single greatest position player the Angels have ever known, now in an injury-depleted decline phase in which he has occasional flashes of his former self.

* Instead of entertaining an Ohtani deal, he went all-in on a 2023 trade deadline acquisition haul, but then put five players including their two key deadline acquisition on the waiver wire when that illusory 11-3 July finish turned into an 8-19 August.

* He barely registered the Tyler Skaggs tragedy, the popular pitcher dying of a fetanyl overdose, an Angels employee providing the stuff to Skaggs (he may have become addicted after surgery before he became an Angel), and the team finally settling with the his widow and family.

* He scapegoated several managers after Mike Scioscia’s retirement, especially Joe Maddon, Scioscia’s longtime bench coach turned Cubs curse-busting World Series-winning manager, whose even hands couldn’t lift an Angels team riddled with pitching issues and injuries, none of which were Maddon’s fault.

There’s a reason I haven’t mentioned Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols plus C.J. Wilson, Zack Cozart, and Anthony Rendon. Injuries aren’t Moreno’s doing. He didn’t ask for Pujols to incur numerous lower body issues before releasing him to finish his career a Dodger and then a prodigal Cardinal.

He didn’t ask for Wilson’s body to prompt his retirement after two Angel seasons, for Cozart’s labrum, shoulder, and neck to put paid to his career after he was dealt away, and for Rendon to have nothing but injuries to show for his big deal after a serviceable (abbreviated) 2020. For those, Moreno’s off the hook.

For everything else, Kroenke’s going to have his work cut out for him. He’s going to have to remake/remodel a team whose now-former owner’s biggest legacy is wasting the primes of Trout and Ohtani. No matter how much money he has, no matter how much winning his other sports franchises have delivered, when it comes to the Angels there’ve been oil spills that were easier to clean up.