COMMENTARY : Sometimes, This Game Is Life or Death

It is common knowledge that the Angels have never won an American League pennant, that three Western Division championships constitute the legacy of 28 years.

The box scores chronicle the failures and disappointments, but not all the demons are clearly defined.

This has been a star-crossed franchise plagued by the macabre, the tragic, the bizarre.

On the eve of the 1979 pennant playoff with the Baltimore Orioles, then general manager Buzzie Bavasi told his wife that he was considering bringing in a priest to perform an exorcism at Anaheim Stadium.

Bavasi didn’t, believing he would have been considered a fool, but his apprehension regarding the club’s haunted history seemed genuine.

Donnie Moore, who committed suicide Tuesday after apparently attempting to take his wife’s life, was no longer part of the Angel organization, but by all accounts the seeds of disillusionment were planted in his last two-plus years with the club.

Moore saved a club record 31 games in 1985 and was rewarded with a three-year, $3-million contract. But neither he, the media nor the fans were able to balance his contributions and accomplishments against the one pitch he threw to Dave Henderson in the ninth inning of the fifth game of the 1986 American League playoffs against the Boston Red Sox.

The Angels were one strike away from their first World Series when Henderson homered, helping lift the Red Sox to a memorable victory that took the heart out of the Angels in Games 6 and 7.

David Pinter, Moore’s agent, said his friend and client never recovered from the home run, never stopped talking about it. And never, of course, was allowed to forget it. Hounded by injuries in 1987 and ‘88, haunted by media reminders, booed by fans, accused of malingering by management, Moore was unable to escape Henderson’s shadow.

It followed him, Pinter said, when he was released by the Angels last September, again when he was recently released by the Omaha Royals of the Kansas City organization.

To what extent the shadow affected Tuesday’s events in the Anaheim Hills home of Donnie and Tonya Moore isn’t clear, but this much is: We are again left to grope with the dark side of the Angels’ history, the parade of agony.

How strange and sad.

We think of Moore and we think of Lyman Bostock, a 27-year-old outfielder shot fatally while riding in a car with family and friends in Gary, Ind., during an Angels’ trip to Chicago in 1978.

We think of rookie pitcher Bruce Heinbechner, 23, dying in a Palm Springs car accident during spring training in 1974 and former Louisiana State quarterback Mike Miley, 23, the Angels’ shortstop of the future, dying in a car accident near his home in 1977.

We think of a rookie pitcher named Dick Wantz, 25, coming out of nowhere to make the Angels’ 1965 staff, then dying of a brain tumor four months later.

We think of the 1968 car accident that left relief ace Minnie Rojas paralyzed and took the lives of his wife and two of his three children.

We think of the humor and laugh of utility infielder Chico Ruiz, 33, killed in a 1972 car accident near his San Diego home, and of a freckle-faced Jim McGlothlin, 33, a consistent winner during five years with the Angels, who died of cancer in 1975 after being traded to the Cincinnati Reds.

We think of seemingly less traumatic events as well.

In April of 1961, the first month of the first season, the Angels acquired a promising pitcher named Johnny James from the New York Yankees. James was in his 37th game with the Angels when he threw a curveball and felt something snap. It was a bone in his arm. He never pitched again.

In April, 1962, after hitting 25 home runs the previous year, outfielder Ken Hunt, waiting in the on-deck circle, flexed his back by arching a bat behind his head. Hunt, too, heard something snap. He had broken his collarbone. He never played a full season again.

In August of that year, with the sophomore Angels making an improbable run at the pennant, Art Fowler, their best relief pitcher, was lost for the final six weeks when hit by a line drive during batting practice in Boston. Fowler lost the vision in his left eye and was never the same pitcher.

In the spring of 1964, Ken McBride, the ace of the early pitching staffs, a winner of 10 consecutive games at one point, suffered neck and back injuries in a car accident and won only four more games in his career.

In the summer of 1964, the Angels gave $300,000 in signing bonuses to outfielder Rick Reichardt and catcher Tom Egan.

Reichardt, a coveted power hitter from the University of Wisconsin, soon started to experience severe headaches. Medical tests disclosed a blood disorder, and Reichardt was forced to have a kidney removed. The once bright potential was never fulfilled, and Reichardt played out his career as a journeymen.

Egan, a widely sought Southern California high school player, eventually became the Angels’ No. 1 catcher. However, he was beaned by Detroit’s Earl Wilson in 1969, suffered a broken jaw, never regained complete sight in his left eye and was forced to retire prematurely.

In April, 1968, first baseman Don Mincher, who had 25 homers and 78 runs batted in the year before, was beaned by Cleveland’s Sam McDowell, his career finished. In June of the same year, third baseman Paul Schaal had his jaw broken when hit by a pitch, much of his promise fractured with it.

In May, 1973, infielder-outfielder Bobby Valentine broke his leg so severely when he crashed into the center field fence while chasing a fly ball at Anaheim Stadium that he never again played on a regular basis.

There were also the injuries that diluted the dividends after the Angels poured millions into free agents and free-agent trade acquisitions such as Joe Rudi, Bruce Kison, Fred Lynn, Rick Burleson and Bill Travers.

We think of all that and of Donnie Moore and we think of the fragility of careers and of lives and, perhaps, of overemphasis and pressure and misplaced priorities.

“It’s not a game, it’s our life,” the Angels’ Brian Downing said in Toronto when told of Tuesday’s tragedy.

Donnie Moore’s life ended at a time when he had still been working out, hoping for another chance in the game, looking for a way to escape the shadow in the same sense that Bavasi had thought about exorcising the Angel ghosts.

“That home run killed him,” agent Pinter said of Moore and the pitch to Henderson. One pitch. One life. Another hanging by a thread. And Downing is right. Sometimes it’s not a game, it’s a crime.