Billboard King Hits a Home Run

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The Trappers

From 1986 to 1992, Mr. Moreno and 17 others, including comedian Bill Murray, owned the Salt Lake City Trappers, a Class A Pioneer League baseball team. Before they sold the club for $1.75 million (they bought it for a tidy $150,000), Mr. Moreno and his fellow investors were fixtures at Trappers games, smoking cigars and drinking beer in the stands. Mr. Moreno was also known to take batting practice on occasion, and even answered phones and collected tickets at the front gate.

Mr. Moreno has taken pains to carry over that sense of informality and reverence for the game to the Angels organization. At his introductory press luncheon, he made a point of telling everyone at the outset that he prefers to be called “Arte.”

One of his policies as a Trappers owner was to give free admission to any kid showing up to watch a ballgame dressed in a little league uniform. He has said that he will consider similar promotional ideas for the Angels.

Mr. Moreno is circumspect in the way you’d expect someone with his kind of wealth to be. Forbes has valued his net worth at $940 million – enough to make him, in the magazine’s estimation, the 246th-richest man in the United States and the second richest in Arizona.

A fourth-generation Mexican-American, Mr. Moreno is the oldest of 11 children born to a newspaper publisher in Tucson. His grandfather founded the semi-weekly Spanish-language newspaper El Tucsonense in the 1920s, which Mr. Moreno’s father ran until it was discontinued in 1966.

Mr. Moreno worked at Old Pueblo Printers, the family business that exists in downtown Tucson to this day, while attending Tucson High School. After graduating from nearby Rincon High School in 1965, he enlisted in the Army and served a tour of duty in Vietnam before returning to Tucson and earning a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Arizona.

Edison Field

A packed Edison Field in 2002 during the World Series

Mr. Moreno’s first job out of college was selling billboard space for Phoenix-based Eller Outdoor. It would prove to be a fateful career move. He later told a Fortune interviewer that despite a less-than-lucrative start – his first commission check was for a paltry $2.25 – he was taken with the industry almost immediately. “It’s a fun business, a people business. Lots of entertaining, going to ballgames or the theater,” he says.

Mr. Moreno joined Outdoor Systems, then a small Phoenix-based billboard firm, in 1984, and went on to become president and CEO. Mainly through an aggressive acquisition campaign, he methodically built the firm over the next 10 years into the largest outdoor advertising company in North America, increasing annual sales from $500,000 to $90 million.

He took Outdoor Systems public in 1996, and within three years the company’s stock soared 1,460 percent, rivaling initial public offerings from the likes of Amazon and Yahoo. Just before the market swooned, he and longtime partner Mr. Levine sold Outdoor to Infinity Broadcasting/CBS for $8.3 billion in stock and assumed debt. The latter company subsequently merged with Viacom.

Mr. Moreno has displayed the same “Midas touch” in other business dealings. Almost four years ago, he and Mr. Levine teamed up with several other investors to form Pacific Partners. The investment group ultimately came away from a failed takeover bid against homebuilder Del E. Webb Corp. with an estimated $20 million profit. He also owns real estate and a golf course in Phoenix.

With his purchase of the Angels, Mr. Moreno became the first Hispanic to own a Major League Baseball team in its entirety and just the second Hispanic to own a major pro sports franchise outright. Bastion Capital Fund Chairman Daniel Villanueva was the first to enjoy the latter distinction, though he has since sold the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team to billionaire Philip Anschutz.

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