Only 161 regular-season games left

JOSEPH N. BELL

In the opening scene of the musical “Damn Yankees,” a dedicated,

committed baseball junkie is huddled over play-by-play on his radio

while his wife sings:

Six months out of every year,

I might as well be made of stone;

Six months out of every year,

When I’m with him -- I’m alone.

Indeed.

And so -- as in “Damn Yankees” -- our new season has started.

Priorities are restructured. Relief from perpetual bad news is in

sight. Hope is rekindled.

Friday night, my daughter, Patt, and I went to see this season’s

first game in Angel Stadium, an exhibition against the hated Dodgers.

The stadium was packed. The evening was blissfully warm. The

winter storms had turned the outfield grass into a rich green. The

hot dogs were as succulent as I remembered them from last October.

The cheap beer was still $4.50, but I think the glass was smaller.

The mood was jovial -- 40-some-thousand people unstuck, at least

temporarily, from taxes, body bags and politicians were feeding off

the knowledge that six months of escape had just started.

And the Angels won.

They were behind in the seventh inning when they rose up and

scored seven runs, mostly on ham-handed and mindless play by the

Dodgers booting ground balls and throwing to the wrong base or in the

dirt. The Angels helped this bizarre behavior along by some cagey

base running that covered up for subpar starting pitching. And so we

drove home uplifted.

Then, Tuesday night, my lawyer friend down the street, Ron

Darling, took three of his neighbors to the first game that counted

-- the opener against the Texas Rangers. And it was deja vu all over

again.

The joint was packed. The crowd, subdued during some unproductive

middle innings, shook the stadium when the Angels -- without the help

of that ubiquitous monkey -- rallied to win. Vlad Guerrero lifted our

spirits and the team with his bat, and Frankie Rodriquez with his

slider. And we went home in first place, eager to face the other 161

games of the regular season.

This sort of thing has been going on in my head and heart ever

since my father took me -- when I was 7 -- to see the Fort Wayne

Chiefs, wallowing in the deep, deep minors in a ramshackle wooden

stadium that looked like Valhalla to me.

I was a high school freshman when I saw my first major-league game

at Comiskey Park in Chicago, and that experience led to a whole

series of hitch-hiking baseball trips with fellow converts --

permitted by parents in those Great Depression years -- to see Ted

Williams and Lou Gehrig play when the Red Sox and Yankees came to

Chicago, and the Dean brothers and Pepper Martin when the Cardinals

visited Cincinnati.

When I returned to the University of Missouri after World War II,

I had a wife and a son and a year to go for my journalism degree.

That’s when baseball reentered my life in a big way.

The St. Louis Cardinals came recruiting for a publicist, and I

think every male graduate that year applied for the job. I got it.

They put me up at the team hotel, but when I found out I was

paying the tab, I moved to the local YMCA while I tried to find a

place for my family in those days when housing for returning veterans

was hard to come by -- especially on the $200 a month I was making.

It didn’t help when I was told that a large part of my job was

convincing the public that the Cardinals weren’t being run by a bunch

of cheapskates.

After three months of living on the edge -- and even though the

Cardinals were clearly headed for the World Series -- I had to quit

my dream job and return to Indiana and my family to look for work

with a living wage.

I found out later that the Cardinals had planned to send me to

Pocatello, Idaho, as general manager of one of their farm clubs --

about as deep in the minors as the Fort Wayne Chiefs -- but no one

had bothered to tell me, which pretty well caught the professional

level of the Cardinals management.

My career in baseball thus ended abruptly, but not my passion for

the game.

I learned over the years since that the muddled management I saw

in St. Louis was typical of baseball in general. It’s rather like the

system of government our founders handed to us more than 200 years

ago, so good that it works in spite of the efforts of the people we

elect to corrupt or mismanage it.

The early owners made their living out of baseball. They were

frequently rotten people, but -- like the original movie moguls --

they knew and loved the game they were running.

Today, baseball is more commonly a write-off for corporate owners

or the plaything of very rich people who inflate player salaries to

absurd levels to please their own egos, or a business investment for

slick moneymen who package group ownership.

Arte Moreno, who owns the Angels, came in with strong, positive

credentials as an owner who cared. His early moves in acquiring

high-performing players and looking out for fans got him enthusiastic

reviews.

Some of that sheen is wearing off now as the rough edges begin to

show in his hard-nosed dealing with expendable players, his cutting

back on disabled seating, the pushing of small-package buyers to the

outer fringes of the ball park and -- especially -- his effort to

denigrate Anaheim while he courts Los Angeles.

But we weren’t thinking about such matters as we drank our beer

and savored our hot dogs on opening night.

Our attention was where it belonged -- on the field.

There we saw the prospects of another World Series in Anaheim, not

Los Angeles. This band of Anaheim Angels may break our hearts in

September, but in April, we know we’re in for a good ride, and that’s

enough.

So play ball.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.