Park Place

The memories are sweet and plentiful, just like the perfectly plump oranges that used to dangle from the trees blanketing Los Angeles in the days when the only baseball circuit that mattered was the Pacific Coast League, and the team of choice was the L.A. Angels. For those who remember it best, the opportunity to pick a favorite story is too juicy to resist.

“Today, Los Angeles is like Mars, but it was so far different then,” said John Schulian, a television writer and former sportswriter raised in the city and its since-demolished ballparks -- the Angels’ Wrigley Field and the Hollywood Stars’ Gilmore Field. “It used to be like a small town, with the orange groves, a streetcar system that worked, and a real nice section that was Hollywood. My mother didn’t drive. She went everywhere in town on buses. Can you imagine that?”

So much from that period does seem unfathomable now, especially this notion that minor league baseball could so effectively grip the attention of a market that was growing so large, sophisticated and major league.

“You have to remember,” said veteran broadcaster Stu Nahan, “these were the days before coaxial cable.”

Those were also the days before the Dodgers’ 1958 arrival and the 1961 major league debut of Gene Autry’s expansion Angels. Certainly, football was king in the city -- with the Rams, USC and UCLA -- but for more than 30 years there were no more important baseball games in the Western United States than those being played at Wrigley, located in South Central Los Angeles on the corner of 42nd Place and Avalon Boulevard.

The Angels debuted when the Pacific Coast League started in 1903, led by a 41-year-old deaf mute center fielder named William “Dummy” Hoy who stole 48 bases and scored a league-best 157 runs. Baseball legend has it that umpires first used signs for balls and strikes because of Hoy. The franchise won five league titles before being purchased for $125,000 by chewing gum magnate and Chicago Cub owner William K. Wrigley Jr. in 1921. The Angels relocated from a downtown park in 1925 to 20,500-seat Wrigley Field, a $1.3-million ballpark designed to look like Chicago’s famed field -- with some notable exceptions.

The exterior was California-style -- red-roofed with a white facade. The power alleys were a hitter’s dream -- 345 feet. There was a 15-foot high wall in left field with no seating. A 12-story office tower was placed at the entrance. And, in 1931, lights were installed.

“A beautiful park, a monstrous hitter’s park,” said Dick Beverage, president of the Pacific Coast League Historical Society. “The problem with it was the plot of land it was on. The fences couldn’t [connect] in a semicircle. Across the street there [beyond left field] was a bunch of houses. The balls just rained on this one house in the power alley. The window on the top story would be broken, and there were dents on the boards.”

Wrigley’s brightest star was center fielder Jigger Statz, who spent a record 18 minor league seasons with the Angels. Statz carved the palm out of his glove to get a better feel for the ball and roamed the outfield so effectively that when someone once asked native Californian and Brooklyn Dodger Duke Snider who was the best center fielder he ever saw, he bypassed fellow New Yorkers Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays to note Statz.

Statz, making $10,000 a year, was on the 1934 Angel team that the National Assn. of Professional Baseball named the best minor league team of all time. League most valuable player Frank Demaree won the triple crown, batting .383 with 45 home runs and 173 runs batted in.

Most impressive, the 1934 Angels were so dominant (137-50 in the regular season) that the league made them play a collection of all-stars from other teams in the league championship series. The Angels won the series and finished the 1930s with three titles and more than 1,000 wins. Lou “The Mad Russian” Novikoff became another triple crown winner in 1940, hitting .343 with 41 homers and 171 RBIs while his wife, Esther, occasionally verbally abused him from the seats.

“He’d strike out and she’d curse him,” Beverage said. “[Fans] were closer to the players. You could hear the players. The players could relate to the fans. There was a lot of what they called bench jockeying. The guys on the bench would yell at opposing players. All the players knew each other’s weaknesses. That’s why the memories are so pleasant. You could really see that the players were people.”

Beverage dismissed the rumor that dogged Novikoff during his playing days. He was such a terrible outfielder it was said he suffered from an incurable fear of vines, a devastating phobia given that Wrigley’s left-field wall was covered with ivy. The theory gained momentum because Novikoff would let balls sail over his head and carom off the wall. He later said the problem was a crooked left-field line.

In 1943, Negro League stars Lou Dials, an outfielder, and Chet Brewer, a pitcher, were offered a tryout by Angel President Clarence “Pants” Rowland, but owner Phil Wrigley refused to sign them. In other areas, the PCL made considerable progress in the 1940s. Attendance was rivaling that in some major league cities. The nation’s depth of talented players overflowed from the 16 major league teams into the eight-team PCL.

“Most of these fellas were a step slower, threw the ball a little slower and couldn’t hit as well as the big leaguers, but, still, this was very good baseball,” Bill Weiss, a longtime PCL statistician, said.

Players loved the league because the pay often exceeded major league salaries, the travel to cities such as Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego was enjoyable, and trips to each city lasted from Tuesday through Sunday.

“It was civilized living,” former Angel pitcher Ralph Mauriello said. “You were able to enjoy your family at home and hang up your shirts and unpack your bags on the road.”

In 1945, Rowland, then the PCL president, petitioned for his league to be designated a third major league. The cause never won enough support, but the league was declassified from triple A standing for the 1952 season and allowed to restrict players from being called to the major leagues. The Angels were a Cub affiliate. Television coverage of games cut into the Angels’ attendance in the 1950s, although the team boasted a future TV star on its roster in 1951, Chuck Connors of “The Rifleman.”

Most tragic for the team was Walter O’Malley’s heightening interest in moving his Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles.

“I remember talking to Mr. O’Malley about baseball in Los Angeles during spring training in 1956,” said Mauriello. “He was asking me if L.A. was a good sports town. I told him it was a football town and expressed doubt that a baseball team could make it. Maybe my opinion was biased. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and when I had come to L.A., it just seemed that baseball wasn’t that important, that all the kids’ heroes were football players.”

Yet, one homegrown Angeleno, Gene Mauch, knew that wasn’t entirely true. Mauch, who would later manage the California Angels to American League West titles in 1982 and 1986, was a second baseman for the Los Angeles Angels from 1954-56.

“Those were the happiest three years of my playing life,” Mauch said. “I had played in the big leagues six to seven years before I was an Angel, and no one in L.A. knew who in the hell I was. As soon as I came to L.A., I made a lot of new friends.”

Friends, and enemies. Mauch recalls suppressing a chuckle when opposing pitcher Chet Johnson would shake his knees for comic relief before delivering a pitch to Mauch, who typically wore out left-handers. Earning a robust $15,000, the future manager was regarded as the league’s smartest player, PCL statistician Weiss said. Mauch proved it by remaining constantly alert. He knew, for example, that when opposing base coach Jimmie Reese winked to a baserunner, it meant a steal was coming. So Mauch repeatedly signed for his catcher to call a pitchout whenever Reese winked, one-upping the man he’d later work with in Anaheim.

Meanwhile, Mauch drew a line between gamesmanship and poor sportsmanship. He didn’t appreciate the behavior of Carlos Bernier, the flamboyant member of the Angels’ rival Hollywood Stars. Mauch said Bernier stole bases even if his team was winning in a rout. “That burned me up,” Mauch said. “I wouldn’t let anyone else on our team tag him out.”

Mauch took it a step further, grabbing a handful of dirt when Bernier reached first base so he could throw it into his eyes en route to second. “We had a fierce, fierce rivalry with that team,” Mauch said.

“It was like a class thing,” said Schulian. “The Stars’ name alone, plus their affluent location, exacerbated that idea.”

The Stars, a Pittsburgh Pirates affiliate, were owned by Bob Cobb, president of the Brown Derby and the Cobb Salad inventor. Actor Gary Cooper also owned a piece of the team.

The rivalry heated up during the Angels-Stars bitter 1953 fight, described by most reporters as a riot. It started between two gentlemen, Angel pitcher Joe Hatten and Frank “Mousey” Kelleher, who had six consecutive hits against the Angels. Hatten wouldn’t accept a seventh, hurling a pitch in Kelleher’s back. Kelleher charged the mound, igniting a 10-minute brawl.

Seconds after order was restored, Star pinch-runner Teddy Beard slid into Angel third baseman Murray Franklin “so high he would have sailed into the seats if his spikes hadn’t hit Franklin in the chest first,” said Nahan. The brawl that followed was so intense -- players turned to boxing, umpires ducked punches -- that William Parker, Los Angeles’ chief of police, ordered a herd of police to Gilmore Field. The police remained there for the next day’s doubleheader. “They kept all the players [who weren’t playing] in the clubhouse,” Angel right fielder Max West said. “When a manager wanted a ballplayer, they told the police and he went into the clubhouse to get the guy.”

The action didn’t last much longer. In 1956, Angel first baseman Steve Bilko, a former-day Mark McGwire in the midst of three consecutive MVP seasons, won the triple crown with 55 homers, 164 RBIs and a .360 average. The Angels finished 107-61 and won their final PCL championship.

“Steve Bilko was a great athlete, very loose, with a great pair of hands,” Mauch said. “He loved to eat -- if you left icing on the tablecloth, he’d eat it -- and he loved to drink beer. If he took better care of himself, he would have been an outstanding major league player. No one had a bad word to say about him ever. There was none better.”

Bilko hit 56 homers for the Angels in their final season, 1957, and was so valued by the team -- earning an estimated $17,500 -- that he was forced to take a pay cut when he joined the Cincinnati Reds in 1958. His teammates on that final Angel team included pitcher Tom Lasorda and second baseman Sparky Anderson. Bilko died of a heart attack in 1978. The Times ran his obituary on the front page.

The PCL Angels’ obituary came in October 1957, eight months after Phil Wrigley sold the team to O’Malley for $2.5 million and the rights to the Dodgers’ triple-A club in Fort Worth. O’Malley’s decision to move the Dodgers west resulted in the Angels’ relocation to Spokane, Wash., and the Stars’ move to Salt Lake City.

“I didn’t mourn over it,” Mauch said. “I thought the people of Los Angeles deserved a major league team.”

The city added a second team when Autry’s Angels became an expansion team in 1961. The team played, appropriately, in Wrigley Field in 1961. Bilko homered in the team’s season-opening win against Baltimore, and, fittingly, struck the final homer hit in Wrigley.

In 1966, Wrigley Field was torn down to make room for a community center.

“I never felt like I was experiencing anything less than anyone else in the country because I was living in a PCL town,” Schulian said. “I was mesmerized by these guys, and even today, I think about how Bilko and guys like Casey Wise and Gale ‘Windy’ Wade would have been in the big leagues today.”