Stan Kroenke will run Rams and Angels. And Mark Walter no longer runs LA | Opinion

The image was indelible: Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter draping a No. 17 jersey around Shohei Ohtani's shoulders, welcoming the biggest baseball star on the globe to blue heaven with a $700 million contract that stipulated Ohtani will stay so long as Walter, the CEO of Guggenheim Partners, controlled the team.

And it absolutely was: Ohtani led the Dodgers to consecutive World Series titles, generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the ballclub and made L.A. a destination for every major free agent, international or otherwise. Walter, meanwhile, parlayed his riches into a 2025 purchase of the Lakers, making him the bona fide king of Southland sports.

The Los Angeles Angels? On the day Ohtani joined forces with Walter, Ohtani's old team was merely an afterthought. They had little interest, Ohtani confirmed, in retaining him on the same deal he presented the Dodgers. The teams' stations in life seemed to only grow further apart, the distance on I-5 hardly symbolizing the gulf between Arte Moreno's flailing franchise and Walter's jewel.

Yet part of the beauty of sports is its impermanence.

Nothing lasts forever, an unfortunate concept when pondering an aging superstar or a championship core deteriorating. It…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/sports/