A Pacific Coast League name, a singing cowboy and a stadium shared with the Dodgers.

The Angels name is older than the club that carries it. English Wikipedia says it goes back to the Los Angeles Angels of the California League in 1892, who took it from the English meaning of the Spanish “Los Angeles,” and passed in 1903 to the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League, who played at the city’s own Wrigley Field. When the American League expanded for 1961, adding a new Washington Senators club and a team in Los Angeles, the owner of the new club bought the rights to that name from Walter O’Malley, owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who had acquired the old minor-league franchise.

That owner was an entertainer. In a SABR biography posted on 16 June 2017, Warren Corbett writes that Gene Autry, the singing cowboy of films and records, had built a business that included the Los Angeles radio station KMPC. The familiar story, Corbett writes, is that Autry went to the American League meeting of late 1960 hoping to secure the radio rights for the new franchise and came away owning the team. The new club, he says, took the name of Los Angeles’s other Pacific Coast League entry, the Angels.

The early homes were borrowed. Wikipedia says the club played its opening season at Los Angeles’s Wrigley Field, the old home of the Pacific Coast League Angels, and from 1962 to 1965 shared the Dodgers’ new ballpark, which the Angels called Chavez Ravine rather than Dodger Stadium. Corbett writes that Autry chafed at being a tenant there and that on 31 August 1964 he broke ground for a new stadium in Anaheim, south of the city, to be paid for by the city of Anaheim.

The move changed the name. On 2 September 1965, with a month of the season still to play, the club became the California Angels, Wikipedia says, and moved into Anaheim Stadium for the 1966 season. During construction the ballpark gained its nickname, “the Big A,” coined by Bud Furillo of the Herald Examiner after the tall letter A beyond left-centre field that served as its main scoreboard. The A was moved to the car park in 1980, when the stadium was enclosed and enlarged for the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams.

From Autry to Disney to Moreno, with the city name changing at each step.

Autry kept the club for decades and stepped back slowly. Corbett writes that he turned over control to his wife in 1990, announced an agreement in principle in May 1995 to sell operating control to The Walt Disney Company, and that the deal closed in early 1996, with Disney taking a quarter of the franchise and an option to buy the rest after his death. Autry died on 2 October 1998, Corbett records. The Angels retired the number 26 in his honour, for the team’s “26th man.”

Disney brought a new city name. Wikipedia says that in 1997, after an extensive renovation of the ballpark, renamed Edison International Field of Anaheim, the club became the Anaheim Angels, under a renegotiated lease that required both stadium and team to carry the word Anaheim. Major League Baseball approved the sale of the club by Disney to the businessman Arte Moreno on 15 May 2003, Wikipedia’s article on Moreno says.

Moreno added Los Angeles back. In 2005 the team was renamed the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, keeping Anaheim to meet the lease. The city of Anaheim sued, the change was upheld in court, and the city dropped its case in 2009. Wikipedia says a 2013 plan to drop “of Anaheim” was never finalised, but that by 2020 official sources had largely left the suffix off. Through every change, the home uniforms have carried simply “Angels,” and in Southern California the team is often just the Angels or the Halos.

A sale is now under way. MLB Trade Rumors reported on 1 September 2026, citing the Los Angeles Times, that Moreno, owner since 2003, had agreed to sell his majority stake to Stan Kroenke, owner of the Los Angeles Rams, whose Kroenke Sports & Entertainment also controls the Denver Nuggets and the Colorado Avalanche. Moreno said he expected the deal to close in the first quarter of 2027.

Design and documentation.

A baseball club’s identity can predate its arrival in its current city. When a franchise moves, the name, the colours and the lettering may travel with it, be quietly adapted, or be replaced outright, and the choice tells you a good deal about how the owners want the club to be read in its new home. A relocated team’s visual history often comes in layers, with earlier marks surviving as throwback uniforms, museum pieces and merchandise long after they leave the field.

The cap logo carries an unusual amount of weight in this system. It has to work at a small size, stitched in thread, seen from the stands and on television, so clubs tend to settle on a single letter, a monogram or a compact symbol, and to change it far less often than the wordmark or the uniform trim. Colour choices frequently borrow from local symbolism, such as a state bird, a regional landscape or a civic flag, which gives a palette a story beyond the field.

The ballpark completes the picture. Signage, scoreboards, concourse graphics and distinctive architectural features all repeat the club’s colours and marks at architectural scale, turning the stadium itself into part of the brand.

Blue with red, then periwinkle, then red with a silver halo.

The halo has been on the cap from the start. Wikipedia says the original cap was blue with a red bill, carrying an interlocking “LA” in red trimmed in white with a white halo above it on the crown, and the club’s two earliest logos showed a winged baseball and a halo over a diamond. The home uniform carried the team name and numbers in red trimmed in blue; the numbers used the same McAuliffe lettering as the Boston Red Sox, since both clubs’ uniforms were made by McAuliffe Sporting Goods. Blue with red trim lasted from 1961 to 1996. After the 1965 rename the cap changed to an interlocking “CA,” and in 1970 a sleeve patch showed a gold halo above the outline of California, with a gold star marking Anaheim.

The letter A then took over. From 1971 to 1985, Wikipedia says, the logo set the word “Angels” on an outline of the state, with a lowercase a under a gold halo; for 1972 the cap mark became “the Big A,” taken from the stadium scoreboard, and in 1986 the Big A was set in front of a baseball with California in shadow behind. From 1993 to 1996 the club went back to its 1960s look and the interlocking “CA.”

Disney’s arrival brought the sharpest change. For 1997 the halo was dropped for a cartoon-like “ANGELS” script with a wing on the A, over a periwinkle plate and crossed bats, and the colours became dark blue and periwinkle, with faux-vest uniforms. In 2002 the club returned to a “Big A” with a silver halo over a dark blue diamond, and the colours became mainly red with dark blue and white, as they remain. In 2005 the diamond was dropped, leaving the A and its halo. For the club’s 50th season in 2011 the halo turned old gold for a year. The 2022 City Connect uniform, on a sand base with a script “Angels,” drew on Southern California’s surf culture, Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Los Angeles Angels shows how a single letter with a ring above it can survive four city names, three colour schemes and a change of owner, and how a scoreboard can become a cap mark. Compare the neighbouring National League club in our Los Angeles Dodgers guide, and the cap maker in the New Era guide. For this guide we use halo red, Big A navy and silver halo with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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