Anaheim, Calif. ? A city known as little more than the home of Disneyland is hoping the media glare from the Angels’ trip to the World Series will remove the long shadow cast by the metropolis 30 miles to the north.

“Identity it’s something we work on all the time,” said Ron Marshall, a restaurant owner on the board of the Anaheim Visitor and Convention Bureau. “We really fight to differentiate between LA and Anaheim.”

But if Anaheim’s history is any guide, it’ll take more than a Rally Monkey to get that big gorilla called Los Angeles off its back.

When the San Francisco Giants won the NL pennant Monday night, Giants fans shouted, “Beat LA!”

Anaheim Angels fans quickly logged on to the Giants’ Web site to point out that the Angels are not from Los Angeles. One Giants fan mockingly chanted: “Beat the Greater LA metropolitan area!”

That’s what happens when the 59th-largest city in America is just a freeway ride away from the second-largest.

To those outside Southern California, the distinction is difficult to discern. The term “Los Angeles” is casually applied to the cluster of suburbs and cities between the Tehachapi Mountains and San Diego County.

Making the distinction harder to draw is the enormous demographic change that is making Orange and Los Angeles counties increasingly similar.

Orange County, birthplace of Richard Nixon and home of the Reagan conservatives, has become one of the most ethnically diverse pockets in the state. It is home to large concentrations of Vietnamese, Palestinians and Hispanics. Anaheim is 47 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Asian.

Longtime Anaheim residents think of themselves as a world away from Los Angeles.

“It’s quieter than LA,” said Marvin Hora, as he waited in a two-hour line this week to buy Angels souvenirs. “If LA had won the pennant, there’d have been a riot. Here, everybody had a good time and then we went home.”

Orange County was carved out of Los Angeles County in 1889. Anaheim fought to become the county seat but lost out to Santa Ana.

Anaheim ultimately triumphed, however, when Walt Disney opened his theme park here in 1955. The city quickly became one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions.

Today, Anaheim (population 328,000) is a sprawling mass of hotels, chain restaurants, industrial parks and neighborhoods, boasting the largest convention center in the state and a thriving manufacturing and high-tech economy.

In 1964, Anaheim persuaded the singing cowboy Gene Autry to move his Los Angeles Angels to a new stadium the city was building. But Anaheim couldn’t manage to get its name on the new team’s jerseys. The team became the California Angels.

When Disney bought the team in 1996 and changed the name to the Anaheim Angels, civic pride soared.

But it is still hard for Anaheim to get noticed, because it shares a television market with Los Angeles. That means even as the Los Angeles Dodgers were fading in September, Dodgers results always topped Angels scores.