Mixing Signals to Steal Home

It was inevitable, I suppose. In the wake of Arte Moreno’s efforts to market his “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim” on billboards all over Southern California -- “City of Angels,” they declare, in the bright red letters of the franchise’s logo -- the Los Angeles Dodgers have initiated a PR campaign of their own. Late last month, banner ads began to appear on local buses and billboards, presenting the lineage of the Dodgers, with the tagline, “This is L.A. baseball.” The implication is that the Dodgers are the one true team of Los Angeles, representative of the city’s personality, its soul.

Setting aside for the moment the fact that any metropolitan area as big as this one ought to have a fan base substantial enough for more than one team, the Dodger billboards raise a host of questions about where, exactly, L.A.’s baseball heritage begins and ends.

The Dodgers, after all, are infamous carpetbaggers, lured west from Brooklyn in 1958. Their very name is emblematic of that dislocation; it derives from the kids who dodged streetcars near the team’s Brooklyn ballpark in the early 1900s -- “trolley dodgers,” they were called. This bifurcated history has long made Dodger “tradition” slightly schizophrenic because many of the franchise’s greatest players (Zack Wheat, Jackie Robinson) never wore an L.A. uniform.

Who, for instance, is the Dodgers’ all-time home run hitter? Is it Duke Snider, who hit 316 homers for Brooklyn (he added 73 in Los Angeles), or Eric Karros, celebrated as the L.A. record holder with 270?

The team’s historical confusion seems likely to be heightened this season, which marks the 50th anniversary of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ lone World Series championship. And it emerges, with no little irony, in the new billboards, which seek to connect the present-day Dodgers with their counterparts from the past. In one, several generations of shortstops are juxtaposed, from Pee Wee Reese to Cesar Izturis. In another, a quartet of right-handers -- Don Newcombe, Don Drysdale, Orel Hershiser and Eric Gagne -- illustrates the pitching motion, from windup to delivery.

Neither Reese nor Newcombe, who were icons in Brooklyn, can really be called Los Angeles Dodgers. Although, to be fair, both did play here briefly: Reese had 147 at bats in 59 games in 1958, hitting .224, while Newcombe went 0-6 with a 7.86 ERA in eight starts before being traded to Cincinnati part way through the year. To me, however, that’s like saying Babe Ruth was a superstar for the Boston Braves.

Interestingly, if any franchise could claim to embody Southern California baseball history, it is probably the Angels, which, in one form or another, has been a fixture in the region for better than a century.

Although the team has existed in its current incarnation only since 1961, the original Los Angeles Angels began play in 1901, and two years later became the first champions of the storied Pacific Coast League.

Over the next 5 1/2 decades, until they moved to Spokane after the Dodgers’ arrival in L.A., these Angels won 10 more league titles; the 1934 ball club, which went 137-50 and beat a squad of PCL All-Stars in a postseason exhibition series, has been called the greatest minor league team of all time. The Angels too had legendary players, including first baseman Steve Bilko, the Pacific Coast League’s only three-time MVP, and outfielder Jigger Statz, who set most of the PCL’s lifetime batting records during an Angel career that lasted 18 years.

When, after three years of oblivion, the Los Angeles Angels were reinvented as an American League franchise, they invoked their heritage quite overtly, playing their debut season at South L.A.’s Wrigley Field (home of the minor league Angels, 1925 to 1957), and bringing back Bilko at first base.

Once the team relocated to Anaheim in 1965, it became known as the California Angels, then the Anaheim Angels, name changes Moreno is now attempting to reverse.

These days, of course, it seems a bit ridiculous to discuss baseball in terms of heritage, with second-place teams winning the World Series and the statistics that all true fans hold sacred apparently performance-enhanced beyond recognition or worth.

The ridiculousness is especially true in regard to Southern California, because the Dodgers’ move west -- toward a market monopoly and a sweetheart deal on land in Chavez Ravine -- helped codify the modern ethos of greed in sports and, in the process, rendered many of the game’s traditions moot. In such a landscape, why not consider history as a set of facts to be manipulated, the stuff of marketing strategies, easy to spin.

Which is the real Los Angeles team, the Dodgers or the Angels? Maybe that depends on how you define Los Angeles.

But either way, it’s useful to keep track of a few important details, beginning with which team got here first.