SPORTS WATCH : Heavenly Opening

Spring doesn’t get much better than it has been out at Anaheim Stadium these last few pleasant April evenings.

The Angels were everybody’s preseason pick for the American League West cellar, but a gang of promising young players is proving the naysayers wrong.

They are on top of the world--first place in the American League West--at least for now. That’s reward enough in a game where early-season expectations can fall as flat as stale beer as the games dwindle down in September.

The young Angels have shown that baseball can be like an ever-freshening breeze. The team’s much-criticized youth movement is suddenly transformed into a month of surprises. Cynicism has given way to exuberance with the crack of a bat.

Two of the young Angels, J.T. Snow and Chad Curtis, are in the current top 10 of American League batters. And another youngster, right-fielder Tim Salmon, brought a roar from the crowd Sunday night when he rifled a throw in to home that stopped a baserunner at third base.

More than 7,000 fans walked up to the ticket windows unannounced on Sunday afternoon, even though the game with the Boston Red Sox was televised. That’s a big change in the atmosphere at a ballpark which, in recent years, has been vastly underpopulated.

Sunday’s defeat of the Red Sox made it six straight wins--count ‘em, six--for Anaheim’s boys of summer. Now let’s hope some of this young Angel magic rubs off on the Dodgers.