Warriors owner Joe Lacob confirms he’s considering bid for Angels

Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob said that he is considering a bid to buy the Angels, confirming what has been widely speculated for months, but he said he has not yet decided to go forward.

“It’s been reported that we’re interested, which is true, but I don’t know what we’re going to do yet,” Lacob said Thursday on a podcast hosted by The Athletic’s Tim Kawakami.

The topic was mostly basketball, but Kawakami asked about the chances of Lacob buying a baseball team. He said he’d be more interested in one of the Bay Area’s two teams, neither of which are currently for sale.

Lacob said the Angels “have a little bit of an attraction for me” because he grew up in Orange County and worked as a peanut vendor at Angel Stadium.

“It’s an older stadium that’s been around for a long time, but I always felt there were great possibilities,” Lacob said. “L.A. is a huge market and it’s part of that L.A. overall market. And they have drawn over 3 million fans I think 17 out of the last 20 years. So we’re going to look at it. It wouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world to do, because it is not co-located like, perhaps a local baseball team might be. But it may be doable. We’ll see.”

Angels owner Arte Moreno announced in August that he would explore a sale of the franchise he’s owned since 2003. Last month at the Winter Meetings, Commissioner Rob Manfred said that interested parties were looking at the financial data. Manfred said the Angels were hopeful a sale could be completed by Opening Day, but it remained to be seen if the bidding process could be completed that quickly.