Angels Looking for Relief in Compensation Draft

General Manager Mike Port said Wednesday that the Angels will attempt to improve their bullpen today with their first choice in the compensation draft for teams that lost Type-A free agents.

Port would neither confirm nor deny speculation that the Angels will select Atlanta relief pitcher Donnie Moore, who had 16 saves with a 2.94 earned-run average in 1984. Moore, it is believed, has been strongly recommended to the Angels by former Atlanta Manager Joe Torre, who will be an analyst on Angel telecasts this year.

The Type-A designation is determined by a player’s statistics over two seasons. Three clubs will get compensatory picks--the Angels, who lost Fred Lynn; Toronto, which lost Cliff Johnson, and St. Louis, which lost Bruce Sutter.

The Angels, Blue Jays and Cardinals will each select one of 2,000 unprotected players. Most major-league clubs were allowed to protect 24 players if they had signed a Type-A free agent, or 26 if they had not.

Exempt from the entire process were the Dodgers, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Boston, which chose to be excluded from the drafting of Type-A free agents, and the New York Mets, New York Yankees, Cincinnati and St. Louis, which had each lost a player to the compensation draft in the last two years.