ANGELS 1988 PREVIEW SECTION : Team’s Expectations Rely on Some Questionable Arms : Staff’s Recovery Is Key to Reverse of ’87 Collapse

What goes around always manages to come around, but never, in even their darkest visions, did the Angels anticipate just how swiftly fortune’s wheel could turn.

In the space of precisely one calendar year, the Angels have come full circle--from first place to last place in the American League West, from baseball’s oldest manager to its newest, from a team built on pitching to a team desperate for it.

Seldom has change hammered one team so hard so quickly.

Spring, 1987. A good time to be an Angel. The AL West title was theirs to defend, and with a starting rotation boasting Mike Witt, Kirk McCaskill, John Candelaria and Don Sutton, confidence drenched the club’s training camp.

“I was the cockiest man in the world,” said Gene Mauch, the manager of that team. “I was popping off all the time about our great pitching staff. I didn’t have a question in the world.

“But,” he added with almost a wince, “I lost my credibility in trying to analyze a pitching staff.

Spring, 1988. The Angel mood is several degrees more somber now, tempered after having been burned in 1987. A collapse must be repaired, a 75-87 record must be reversed. And a pitching staff that once held no questions now must find answers that are not necessarily forthcoming.

All this has been dumped into the lap of a new manager, Cookie Rojas.

Mauch has retired, citing health reasons and a desire to place the club in younger hands. Gone, too, are Candelaria and Sutton, lost in the Angel pitching purge of ’87.

What happened to Angel pitching last season is a tremendous argument against banking on blueprints and icing champagne in March. The harder the sell, the harder the fall--and last season, the Greatest Angel Rotation in History fell flat on its aspirations.

McCaskill went from 17 victories in ’86 to four in ‘87, with a stop on the surgeon’s table and a three-month stint on the disabled list along the way.

Candelaria, the American League’s comeback player of the year in ‘86, set the stage for a reprise of that award-winning performance in ’88. Last season, Candelaria had more arrests for suspicion of drunk driving (two) than complete games, and more days spent in a rehabilitation center (28) than starts. He won eight games with the Angels and wound up a New York Met by the first week in September.

Sutton, who made history in ’86 with his 300th career victory, established a different kind of precedent in ‘87--serving up a whopping 38 home runs in 34 starts, a record for Angel pitchers. He was released a month after an 11-11, 4.70 season.

Urbano Lugo, supposedly the solution to the club’s ongoing fifth-starter dilemma, instead provided only Urbano blight. Five starts and he was gone, taking his 9.32 ERA to Edmonton, never to be heard from again.

Even Witt, the only starter to remain standing by season’s end, developed blemishes. Witt won 16 games and made the all-star team again, but he was no longer the Angels’ pillar of stability. A troublesome shoulder knocked him out of starts earlier than before, his ERA rose to 4.01 and he failed to pitch a shutout for the first time since 1983.

As with the others, Witt nearly left once the season was over, closely examining free-agent enticements from Oakland and the New York Yankees before finally re-upping with the Angels for $2.8 million for two years.

That’s a whale of a price for a 16-14 pitcher--remember when the Angels told Nolan Ryan sayonara after a 16-14 season?--but when all your other options are depleted, you brace yourself for some healthy inflation.

Besides Witt, this is how the Angels’ new, but not necessarily improved, rotation shapes up for 1988:

--No. 2 starter: McCaskill, trying it again after arthroscopic elbow surgery, a 4-6, 5.67 season and a six-month layoff.

--No. 3 starter: Dan Petry, another post-op pitcher who went 9-7 with a 5.61 ERA in 1987, wrenched his back during the first week of spring drills and was shelled in each of his first three exhibition outings.

--No. 4 starter: Willie Fraser, 10-10 as a rookie but only 7-9 with a 4.34 ERA in the role of a starter. He, too, suffered through arm ailments last year--specifically, shoulder fatigue--and yielded 25 home runs in 23 starts.

--No. 5 starter: Chuck Finley, the latest experiment here, a former mop-up reliever with three professional starts to his credit. The Angels were 4-31 during games Finley pitched in 1987.

Combined, this quintet went 41-44 with a 4.54 ERA last season. Not exactly the kind of numbers that fan the flames of pennant fever.

At spring’s outset, however, Mauch went out of his way to recite the best-case scenario, hoping that somebody might be listening.

“You’d like to feel Mike Witt will have as good a year as he’s ever had,” Mauch said. “And that’s 18 wins.

“I feel the same way about McCaskill--17 wins--and why couldn’t he? I feel the same way about Petry--18 or 19 wins. And why couldn’t he do that?

“You’d like to feel there’ll be a normal amount of improvement by Fraser. And that would mean something over 10 (wins).

“It could all happen. It’s not like any one of them are decrepit.”

Such thinking is to assume every break will go the Angels’ way, something that has never happened in the franchise’s 27 years. And that’s just the starting rotation.

What about the bullpen, which entered spring training as a relative strength and emerged as yet another question mark?

Just as soon as Donnie Moore takes care of one bone spur--having the one in his back surgically removed last October--up pops another. This one, growing in his right elbow for some time, is something Moore says he can live--and pitch--with. We’ve heard that before. The results so far this spring have been inconclusive, with Moore’s outings fluctuating between smooth and ragged.

Greg Minton, who helped pick up the pieces in the wake of Moore’s lost 1987 season, has pitched once all spring. He sprained a ligament in his right elbow during the Angels’ second exhibition game and has not returned to the mound since. Minton is a likely candidate for the disabled list on opening day.

And although DeWayne Buice says he’s healthy, that doesn’t mean he’s altogether sound.

Buice, the Angels’ surprise bullpen savior last summer with 17 saves as a 30-year-old rookie, finished the season exhausted and decided to spend his winter as a man of leisure. The rest was necessary, Buice says, but the price was trying to work himself back into shape during exhibition games. That’s never easy, as Buice’s 7.71 ERA after seven spring outings will attest.

The problems confronting the veterans of the Angel bullpen have reopened the door for Stewart Cliburn and introduced us to Bryan Harvey, Frank DiMichele and Ray Krawczyk. It’s likely that two of these names will wind up on the 24-man roster, and possibly three.

Cliburn was the DeWayne Buice of 1985, an eight-year minor-league veteran who finally got his chance and made the most of it--winning 9 games, saving 6 others and recording a 2.09 ERA. Then--surprise--arm problems.

Cliburn underwent shoulder surgery and two years of rehabilitation just to get invited to the Angels’ 1988 camp as a nonroster player. He’s had a strong spring, and as long as his 32-year-old arm holds up, Cliburn should have a place on this team.

DiMichele, too, figures to be included, mainly because he’s a left-hander. With Gary Lucas’ release and Finley’s move to the rotation, the Angels found themselves without any left-handed relievers. Now, they’re asking a 23-year-old with only Class-A experience to fill that role.

Two other rookies entered the last week of spring training with shots at making the final 24. Harvey, the hard-throwing former softball player, and Krawczyk, the hard-to-pronounce former Pittsburgh Pirate, have waged the kind of duel pitching coaches love.

That competition has been among the brightest news to emerge from an Angel camp that began with Wally Joyner in a contract dispute and went downhill from there. Soon after, there were the injuries to Petry and Minton, Johnny Ray’s controversial introduction to left field and the worrisome events leading up to Mauch’s resignation.

Mauch left the club March 11 to undergo examination for what was initially feared to be a serious chest illness. When the doctor’s diagnosis came back as “only” chronic bronchitis, it was the highlight of the Angels’ spring.

At first, Mauch talked of returning as manager as soon as the antibiotics kicked in. But last Saturday, he decided to step aside altogether, saying he could not stand losing anymore and was hopeful that the Angels’ winning ways in exhibition games could be sustained under Rojas.

Rojas, 49, inherits a young team with intriguing offensive potential. Aside from Bob Boone, the ancient catcher, the average age of the Angels’ regular position players this year will be 26.1.

Joyner, 25, is back at first base to bid for his third straight 100-RBI season.

Mark McLemore, 23, and Dick Schofield, 25, are back to try it again as the double-play combination--with McLemore, possibly, in the new role of leadoff man.

Jack Howell, 26, is finally the starting third baseman after three years of waiting.

Devon White, 25, is the center fielder, trying to improve upon his .263, 24-home run, 87-RBI, 32-stolen base rookie season. And alongside him will be Chili Davis, 28, in right and Johnny Ray, 31, in left. Both Davis and Ray have hit .300 in the National League--Ray as recently as 1986, Davis in 1984--and figure to upgrade an offense that placed last in the American League in batting average (.252), slugging percentage (.401) and total bases (2,231).

There also should be more home runs in 1988 than in ‘87, when the Angels placed 11th in the league with 172.

For one, Davis is replacing Gary Pettis in the lineup; last year, Davis outhomered Pettis, 24-1.

For another, Howell will be a full-time player after hitting 23 homers in a platoon role.

And for another, Brian Downing figures to be the full-time designated hitter, which makes him happy. In ‘87, Downing spent 118 games as the Angels’ DH and responded with his best home-run total ever--29.

Along with Joyner and White, the Angels will have five regulars capable of hitting at least 25 home runs.

But will that be enough for the Angels to overtake the Oakland A’s, the Kansas City Royals, the Minnesota Twins . . . and their own pitching?

Petry, one of the main men on the spot, realizes the Angels’ success in ’88 hinges on his arm and nine others.

“Nobody knows what to expect from our pitching staff,” Petry says, “and that’s understandable. Both me and McCaskill have had big years, and both of us have had arm surgery. People don’t know what to expect.

“I think it’s all right that people don’t think of us as being that good a baseball team. But I pitched against the Angels last year, and that was no last-place team, not in terms of talent.

“It’s good everybody is picking us fifth. That way we can sneak into the season and when we’re one or two games out in early September, everybody’ll be saying, ‘Where did the Angels come from?’ ”

If so, that’ll be a change. Last September, the operative question around the American League was: Where did the Angels go?

The answer? They went as far as their pitching.