Whooeeee! Whooeeee! Whooeeee! : Whose Turn to Whistle Now?

Through the rumble of automobile engines, the shrill and hollow blast of an air whistle startled the steady streams of baseball fans pouring into Anaheim Stadium late Friday afternoon.

“This whistle makes sure the Boston Red Sox win the pennant,” said former Massachusetts resident and die-hard Sox fan Richard Halloran, now living in Cerritos.

“Who the hell cares how much it costs?” Halloran said in answer to a question about the eight-foot-tall former factory lunch whistle, now painted bright red and emblazoned with the name of his favorite team. Beside it, on the back of a pickup truck, was a portable generator to power the whistle.

Spirits High

“You can’t put a price on victory,” Halloran said.

Then he added: “About $3,000.”

But it wasn’t enough for the Red Sox Friday, as they fell to the Angels, 5-3, amid the roar of the local fans.

Pre-game tailgate parties were few, but spirits were running high Friday for the Angels’ first home game of the American League playoff series.

About 50 feet away from Halloran’s red whistle, another party was going on in the shadow of the Big A, this one made up of Angels fans good-naturedly disdainful of the Boston pep rally.

“They have to use mechanical means,” said Clark Hills, 38, of Santa Ana, drinking beer and wine coolers with his buddies. “Let’s hear how they sound after the game.”

“The Angels will take the series,” said Bill Cecil, 32, of Anaheim Hills, sipping beer with fellow stockbrokers in the parking lot before the game. Glancing over at the Red Sox “victory whistle,” he added with a smile, “The Easterners are a very hostile people.”

While many fans showed up in T-shirts and caps declaring their favorite teams, a good number of others were dressed in suits or dresses, arriving in a frantic rush to the ballpark for the 5:20 p.m. game.

Tom Schriber, 44, left his Costa Mesa real estate development firm at 3 p.m. to get to the stadium early but spent more than an hour in traffic. “It was worse coming early than late he said, adding that his partner, Dan Donahue, who stayed in the office until quitting time, had an easier drive.

The trick, said Paul Haupert of San Juan Capistrano, who drove a carload of friends to the game, was to avoid the freeways.

Once inside the ballpark, the fans forgot the traffic and turned their attention to baseball.

Ed and Nancy Bennett of Fullerton, sat four rows away from Wally Joyner and first base, wearing hats decorated with cutouts from Angel bumper stickers.

The Angels were bound to play better at home than they did Wednesday in Boston, said Ed Bennett, cheering as Wade Boggs hit a ball to center field and made the first out of the game.

“They’ve got 65,000 people rooting for them, instead of 32,000 people rooting against them,” Bennett said.

But not all of the people in the stadium were cheering for the Angels.

Anne McComas, 18, a Boston resident attending Azusa Pacific College, held up a hand-lettered Red Sox sign with her roommate, Kristi Anderson, 18. Their sign, McComas said, had generated “a few boos, that’s all.” Otherwise, their out-of-town enthusiasm was being tolerated well, even by a friend, an Angel fan, who drove them to the game, they said.

“We told him we’d help him with history in exchange,” McComas said.

On the ground level of the stadium, the Players Pub was packed with Angels fans watching the game on a TV screen. With drinks in hand, their cheers inside the bar blended with those of other fans just a few feet away watching the action in person.

Why come to the ballpark to watch a game on television?

“Have you seen these tickets? I couldn’t see a thing from my seat!” said Mike Hayes, a construction worker from Anaheim. The tickets were a gift from a hardware salesman, but Hayes did not know until he picked them up at the will-call window that they would be stamped “obstructed view.” Indeed, the best view from his seat in right field was of a wall, he said.

“I got the tickets for nothing. Now I know why,” he said.

He and his friend, Chris Parsons of Fountain Valley, missed a day’s pay to take off and go to the game, they said. Still, they were happy to be there, they said, cheering as they watched the Angels come from behind on the bar’s TV.

“Here, we’ve got an unobstructed view, and we’re close to the drink line,” Parsons said. “This is the place to be.”

The two dozen in the bar broke into unrestrained cheers as they watched Dick Schofield and Gary Pettis hit home runs.

“Time to change your oil!” one fan yelled at the television image of Boston pitcher Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd.

The game over, the fans in the bar stood up and cheered, and several with tickets for tonight’s game made plans to get together in the pub again.

Leonard Cuevas, 21, of Stanton said the pub has the best seats in the stadium.

Outside, “there’s too many people to block your view,” he said. But he wouldn’t dream of sitting home and watching the game on television, he said.

“You’ve got to be out in the crowd to yell,” Cuevas said. “What’s the fun of the playoffs being here unless you’re in the crowd?”