This was not something I had thought about recently. In fact, I hadn’t thought about it for years. Nor was it something I set out to solicit anyone’s opinion about. But in looking up Mike Trout’s career statistics I discovered that the name of Anaheim still lives in Major League Baseball.

You wouldn’t know it from Major League Baseball itself. In the eyes and practices of M.L.B. Anaheim doesn’t exist. It hasn’t existed since 2005, when the team’s owners, Arte Moreno, hijacked the Dodgers’ name for his own selfish purposes and Bud Selig, then the commissioner, was too complicit to say to Moreno, “Excuse me, Arte old boy, but the name Los Angeles is already taken and anyway your team doesn’t play in Los Angeles or its suburbs.”

Selig didn’t say anything to Moreno because Frank McCourt, the Dodgers’ owner, didn’t say anything to Selig. I don’t know who was worse, McCourt or Selig. By remaining typically mute, Selig let Moreno do what he wanted.

His practice was a forerunner of don’t ask, don’t tell. Unless one club didn’t complain about what another did, as in tampering with a player or a club executive, Selig did and said nothing. He was the human version of the three monkeys who, separately, covers their eyes, their ears and their mouth, as in see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Rob Manfred was not the commissioner when Moreno hatched the Los Angeles Angels, but he was M.L.B.’s chief legal officer and could have explained to Selig why he couldn’t let Moreno hijack the Dodgers’ name. Like Selig, though, he did nothing. And he has continued to do nothing in his two years as commissioner, thus condoning Moreno’s action.

I called Manfred’s office last Thursday hoping to talk to him about the Angels’ issue. How did he feel about the name change in 2005, and has he done anything about it since becoming commissioner in January 2015?

I did not expect Manfred to return the call because he has neither returned my calls nor spoken to me since I began criticizing his failed diversity hiring efforts. Well, he didn’t call. Instead he had a member of the communications department call to ask what I wanted to talk to him about.

Subsequently, I received an e-mail from the communications official.

“We decline comment,” he said.

Maybe it shouldn’t matter to me what the Angels are called. I have no connection to the Dodgers, no financial interest in them. But I am nonetheless offended by Moreno’s act and at least equally offended that Selig and Manfred would not quash his blatant seizure of another team’s identity. Would Manfred allow Moreno to put Clayton Kershaw on his roster?

Wondering how the Dodgers’ owners felt about Moreno’s bold grab – they are new since that act – I called Stan Kasten, the Dodgers’ president and C.E.O. But Kasten, who usually calls back, did not this time.

David Smith, however, called back. He is the head of the website retrosheet.org, my favorite source for information on players active and retired. That’s why I found Anaheim – ANA, the site says for Trout’s team – and my discovery prompted me to ask Smith why he continued to use Anaheim when everyone else has succumbed to Moreno’s selfish ploy.

The Associated Press deserves the most blame for aiding and abetting Moreno because right from the start it has used Los Angeles or LAA or LA Angels in its daily standing and schedules, and newspapers throughout the country use AP standings and schedules.

Just as I was delighted to find a baseball outlet that retains the Angels’ legitimate name, Smith was pleased to find someone who shared his view. When I suggested that Moreno must have failed geography in school, he said, “We should call them the V.G.C. – the very geographically challenged. They’re not even in the same county.”

How and why did Smith retain the Angels’ correct name?

“In the computer geek world, of which I’m sort of part of,” Smith said, discussing the identity issue, “player ID’s and team ID’s, you don’t have to have much inherent meaning in the codes. Our player codes are the first four letters of the player’s last name and the first letter of the first name so Stan Musial would be MUSIS, then a 3-digit number. If he is the first person with that combination, he would be 001. If he’s the second 002, etc.

“Major League Baseball uses five-digit numbers. Each player is a number. We chose a middle ground. You don’t really have to know the name unless you’re working on the files. Same with the team name.

“How about when the Marlins changed the team name from Florida to Miami? I changed it and we use MIA like everybody else. For a while, I wanted to leave it as Florida. Originally, we had the Angels as LAA from 1961. Then it became CAL and then ANA. I said how much information do we want to put in these damn things?

“Everybody was pressuring the hell out of me to change Marlins from FLO, which we had, to MIA. I wasn’t going to do that. But I said all right, it doesn’t matter although I wasn’t thrilled with it. When the Angels changed from California to Anaheim, I wasn’t thinking about these things. It was so long ago. I’m not happy about that either. I’d be happier if we had stayed with CAL.

“When the Brewers changed leagues, when the Astros changed leagues, we didn’t change their abbreviation. They’re not new teams. Compromise between a blind number with no information and a hybrid with kind of partial information and part objective.”

For those too young to know, the Angels began life in 1961 as the Los Angeles Angels and remained the Los Angeles Angels through 1965. The name was legitimate then because the Angels played their home games in Los Angeles. They played in Los Angeles until they moved to a brand new ball park in 1966.

The city was new, too. It was Anaheim, the home of Disneyland and the first stop on the old Jack Benny comedy railroad line of Anaheim, Azusa and Cu-ca-monga. The Angels remain there today, no matter what Moreno says.

McCourt, who owned the Dodgers and ran them badly from 2004 to 2012, told me, when I asked years ago, why he didn’t fight Moreno, “I have other fights more important than that.”

Had McCourt chosen to fight, I think it would have been difficult even for Selig to justify Moreno’s use of Los Angeles for the Angels’ name. Not only is Anaheim not a suburb of Los Angeles, but the teams don’t even play in the same county. Retrosheet’s Smith liked that distinction.

“The geography point you make is just over the top,” he said on the telephone. “I’m from San Diego. You can’t look at that and call it Los Angeles. Arte Moreno said he wanted to increase visibility and attractiveness to Los Angeles. Fine, he wanted to do that, but it’s kind of silly.”