Carew Ends the Feud by Rejoining Angels

Big news conference at Anaheim Stadium Tuesday morning. The Angels wheeled out the club sandwiches and chocolate cake, wheeled in Richard Brown and Buck Rodgers and triumphantly announced that they had re-signed their .300-hitting first baseman.

The years were 1979 to 1985, I believe.

Wally Joyner remains AWOL, probably contemplating real estate opportunities in St. Louis and Atlanta as we speak, but Rod Carew is an Angel again and if that can happen, anything and everything is possible.

Carew is the Angels’ new hitting coach--new for the Angels, not Carew. Ever since Mike Port forced Carew’s retirement six autumns ago, Carew has been coaching hitters, be they members of his daughters’ softball team, Cleveland Indians, clients paying for the privilege at his hitting school in Placentia--anybody but the Angels.

From his office overlooking the last-place batting order in the American League West, Brown considered this an extravagant waste. He started counting.

How many Angels have batted more than .300 throughout their Anaheim careers?

One, Carew, .314.

How many former Angel hitters have been elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame?

Two, Carew and Frank Robinson--and Robinson is still busy playing managerial musical chairs.

And how did the Angels rank against the rest of the American League in batting average, on-base percentage, runs and walks during 1991?

Ninth, 13th, 13th and 14th.

With the walls falling down and the roof caving in, how much could a little fence-mending hurt?

Brown and Carew did lunch, which is more than Port and Carew ever did. Carew remembers Port as the man who effectively fired him, having refused Carew a new contract following the 1985 season. See, the Angels had this kid named Wally and Carew was coming off a down year. He didn’t lead the team in hitting; he only finished second.

Carew knew about Joyner--he could hear the line drives from here to Edmonton--but insisted he could live the life of a part-timer and a pinch-hitter. At least, he wanted the chance. At worst, he wanted to part company with a bit of dignity--maybe a final press conference, some mutual words of gratitude.

He got neither. It was an early glance at the Port business approach: No Carew, no comment.

“I had some bitterness,” Carew said Tuesday. “That was expected . . . When I had lunch with Richard Brown and Darrell Miller before the start of the season, they asked me, ‘Do you still have hard feelings toward the Angels?’ I told them, no, that was taken care of the last couple of years.

“You can’t go on harboring those feelings forever. It’s a business. And I wanted to get back into the game again.”

Time heals. Family helps the process, too. Carew says his anger “could have gone on a lot longer but I got involved with my daughters’ softball teams and that took my mind off it. We drove around in our motor home, saw the country. That allowed me to forget what had happened.”

The thaw became complete this spring, when Carew visited Palm Springs to check out the Angels and bumped into Port. Not bodily, figuratively.

“It was, ‘Hi, Mike, how you doing?’--like nothing ever happened,” Carew said. “It was kind of amazing. I was surprised we could talk as easily as we did.”

Port’s eventual dismissal was seen as the first step toward an Angels-Carew reunion, but Carew claims he could have worked for Port. “Yeah, I would have, if it would’ve helped the guys on this team,” he said. “Because the most important person you’re working for is Mr. Autry. You know what they say: If you can’t work and enjoy working for him, you can’t work for anyone.”

The Angel lineup has turned over, more than once, since Carew last wore a batting glove. Of the position players, Dick Schofield is the only remaining member of the ’85 Angels.

But Carew has continued to watch from afar, from his seat in Anaheim Stadium and by way of his home satellite dish. He already has some projects in mind.

--Schofield. “Sometimes he goes through stages where he tries to pull everything, which is something I can’t understand,” Carew said. “I’ve seen him pull a ball breaking away from him. You just don’t do that. He has the ability to drive the ball to all fields and if you get him to start doing that, it would make him a much more consistent hitter. . . . He should hit .285, .290 with some power.”

--Junior Felix. “I know he should be a much better hitter than he was last season. I watched how he hit the year before, when he was with Toronto. He should hit .300.”

--Luis Sojo. “He has to learn to be himself and not be Davey Concepcion. Watch him. Everything he does, he does like Davey Concepcion. But he can’t do the same things Davey did, he has to be himself. He should be able to handle the bat, bunt a little, move the runners over and not go for the big swing all the time.”

Great hitters do not automatically make great hitting coaches. Ted Williams became a full-time fisherman out of acute frustration: How come no one out there can hit like Ted Williams? Yogi Berra could get so exasperated around the batting cage that he’d push the slow learner out of the way, grab a bat and say, damn it, why can’t you do it this way?

Carew also will be faced with obstacles Williams and Berra lacked: Three-million-dollar-a-year hitters who think they already know it all.

“I can’t be intimidated if a guy is making more money than I do,” Carew said. “Hopefully, they’ll say, ‘This guy was in the Hall of Fame, he knows what he’s talking about.’ ”

Brown foresees no problem.

“If a guy’s making $3 million now, I’d tell him that if you follow Rod’s advice, you’ll be making $4 million,” Brown said. “A young prospect like Eduardo Perez, I can hardly wait for Rod to tell him, ‘Put your left foot there.’ That would be just tremendous.”

To say nothing of the music Joyner and Carew might finally create, if it isn’t already too late.