ANGELS 1988 PREVIEW SECTION : Striking a Balance Between Good Giveaways and Lemons

Consider John Hays as a sofa. Smartly upholstered--suit, tie, cuff links tastefully blending in with the rest of the furnishings in his Anaheim Stadium office.

But under the cushions, where the crumbs and spare change fall, thoughts of musical baseball caps and talking horses slapping high hooves with the paying customers collide.

Would you buy official California Angel tube socks from this man? Maybe not, but you’d probably snatch them up in a Ronco second if they came included in the price of an Angel ticket.

Hays is the Angels’ vice president in charge of marketing, which is a Wall Street way of saying that he’s paid to come up with new gimmicks-- Awwwright! Official Angel salad tongs!-- to get people into the ballpark.

Granted, nothing attracts the folks as well as a winning team. Wally Joyner figures to draw a small metropolis by himself. It’s Hays’ job to fill the other seats with the not-so-rabid fans. The kind who debate the fate of their disposable income, the kind who might need, oh, a little coaxing.

Did someone say merchandise?

Insulated picnic bags, Mother’s Day picture frames, windshield shades, bike bags, musical baseball caps, Father’s Day desk clock calendars . . . Hays, his contemporaries and those hallowed hucksters past have long held the belief that what the public wants, what the public gets, free.

“Baseball and promotions have been together since Day 2,” said Bert Sugar, who wrote a book on the subject (“Get the Sign and a Suit of Clothes From Harry Finkelstein”). “You look at the term bullpen, and that comes from a turn-of-the-century promotion with Bull Durham tobacco. Baseball and promotions go together, pardon the pun, hand in glove.”

So Hays is part of a long tradition of men shot out of cannons (Philadelphia) and women’s halter tops with “Love OUr Giants” stenciled across the front (San Francisco). “Masterpiece Theater” it’s not.

But it is a living, and Hays, who spent 25 years as an advertising executive, seems to enjoy the challenge of finding new and exciting places to stamp the Angel logo. Hays has arranged a back-to-school promotion in September with four straight giveaway dates, doling out all manner of school supplies.

“I have this dream that the Angel name will be plastered all over the public school system,” he said.

Yes, it’s not enough to get the people in the park; you want them to remember the team once they’ve left. The Angels’ success in the 1980s has meant that Hays, who is in his fifth season with the organization, need only put the Angel name in front of the public.

“they know what the Angels are about,” he said.

By contrast, if you’re selling the Seattle Mariners, a team that has never had a winning record, the measures are a bit more epic.

“We’re still trying to become apart of this community,” said Randy Adamack, the Mariner marketing director. “We’re still trying to educate them about the game.”

So the Mariners have taken to building Little League fields, every one of them named Mariners Field, for various cities.

“We consider it a bridge between ourselves and the community,” Adamack said. “We’re still educating the public about ourselves and baseball.”

If education isn’t a problem in Southern California, competition is. Hays and the Angels compete not only against the Dodgers, but Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, the Lakers (spring), the beaches (summer) and the Rams (fall). How you attack is up to your taste.

“We’ve chosen to go beyond the accepted, traditional baseball merchandise,” Hays said. “We think of it as fun stuff.”

Which translates into items such as last season’s musical baseball cap.

“I guess some people would call us gimmicky,” Hays said. “We call it creative.”

And in the larger scheme, Hays is relatively mild. Consider that the Angels have never given away panty hose, underwear or deodorant, as the Washington Senators used to. Never have had a Hot Pants Day, as the Oakland Athletics did. There are no plans for a “Win a Heart Operation Night” at Anaheim Stadium, but there is at the University of Miami. (A Miami surgeon donated the surgery last year, with a drawing held at a Hurricane baseball game.)

And there certainly are no Beer Nights (beer for 5 cents) planned. Such a night was held in Cleveland, and it ended in a near riot.

“Whoever thought of that one must have been brain dead,” said Joel Rubenstein of Major League Baseball’s corporate marketing division.

That doesn’t ever figure to be said about Hays, who is thoughtful almost to distraction about his major league clubs. Almost every item given away at major league ballparks is made in foreign countries, usually Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore or Hong Kong, so Ezell is the middle man between the grand old game and Asia’s lower labor costs.

He was contacted by the Dodgers to run a test market on the musical gym bags. The bag failed, and 2,000 now sit in Ezell’s garage.

“It’s not an exact science,” Ezell said. “So you’re going to get burned sometimes.”

Hays has avoided catastrophe; in fact, he has had only one idea turned down by the Angel hierarchy. That as for an Angel mascot.

“I was thinking of a Western character or a walking, talking horse,” Hays said. “Mr. Autry wasn’t at all thrilled with the idea. Then I realized. Who better represents the Angels than Gen Autry? He’s the best mascot the team could ever have.

“You really have to be careful when you do these things. You have to be careful that you’re not interfering with the integrity of the game. Making it into a circus atmosphere. You have to be aware of safety. You have to have common sense.”

So when the Angels gave away flashlights last season, they didn’t give the batteries away until after the game.

“We didn’t want an outfielder looking into the glare of 10,000 flashlights while he’s trying to make a catch.”

What decides if a promotion is successful? Hays said the formula is that if you can add about 6,000 customers to what the projected attendance for that game was, you have done well.

What makes for a bad promotion? “The most frequent complaints we hear is that the item they got didn’t work or there weren’t enough of them.

“The latter is the worse, since people come all the way down and don’t get what they came for That’s when you get a couple thousand bricks thrown through your window.”

Hays said the Angels do their best to avoid such situations. Who wants a brick through the window? Of course, if you painted the brick red, white and blue, splashed the Angel logo on one side, Gen Autry’s likeness on the other . . .