Is the best free publicity and free advertisement. Just ask Paris Hilton. No talent, no brains, needs a nose job, yet she’s a household name.

For baseball, it’s a great tool in reaching out to the casual fan, non-baseball fans, and even convincing those that a team that takes about an 1.5-2 hours or more to drive and see is your home team. In Southern CA (excluding SD and Imperial Counties), this free publicity helps the Dodgers (and Lakers in basketball) immensely outside of their Los Angeles County home.

If you turn on the local news or listen to sports talk radio here in the Greater Los Angeles area (I know my fellow OC residents aren’t going to like this, but I believe we are still considered part of the Greater LA area for media purposes), the Dodgers scores and highlights are mentioned first about 90% of the time while the Angels are mentioned second. Moreover, often times the Dodgers highlights on the local news have deeper coverage with interviews, more plays shown, etc. while the Angels highlights are shown in a blur. This obviously sends a covert message to people which team the news deems more important which can easily convince viewers that the team the news gives more priority to is more important which translates into more fans for that team.

Being the shrewd billboard mogul that he is, Moreno obviously understood the power of publicity and advertisement and realized the local media would continue to neglect the Angels so he took matters into his own hands by changing the team’s name from Anaheim to Los Angeles, placing billboards in LA County, and in his most recent and brilliant move yet purchasing AM 830, moving the Angels there, and turning most of the station into sports talk radio programming. If the local news media wasn’t going to give the Angels much publicity, he figured he might as well do it himself even if he had to spend his own money to do so.

While the Dodgers get all the free publicity locally and while the Red Sox get all the free publicity nationally, Moreno has to pay out of his pocket to generate publicity and media coverage for the Angels. So far it has worked. He has convinced people outside of OC to make the commute to see the Angels play. If the local media for years has been able to persuade people outside of LA County to make the long drive to support and see a “home team” that, at least to South OC residents, is no shorter of a drive than the commute to San Diego to see the Padres, then Moreno figured he could create his own publicity to convince people outside of OC to commute to see and support the Angels. By doing this he created more fans and a bigger market for the Angels on his own.

If the Angels had significant media coverage like the Red Sox do nationally or even the Dodgers locally, then Moreno wouldn’t have had to spend his own money on billboard advertising in LA County or change AM 830 to a predominantly sports talk station in order to generate the publicity that would have came for free from local and national media coverage.

That is why Moreno and fans of the Angels care about media coverage. More media coverage=more fans=higher payroll=higher probability of fielding a playoff team.