A Paradise Lost Amid the Desert : Angels, Citing the Need for Bigger Facility, Kiss Palm Springs Goodby

Last Hurrah

In Shangri-La

--T-shirt created by pitcher Scott Bailes to commemorate the Angels’ final spring in Palm Springs.

It began with a “Welcome Angels” banquet at the Desert Inn, a hacienda-type hotel that stretched from Palm Canyon Drive to the base of Mt. San Jacinto and has since given way to the Desert Fashion Plaza.

It was mid-February of 1961, the first week of the first spring camp of the then Los Angeles Angels. Owner Gene Autry was on his feet, introducing Manager Bill Rigney and explaining how he had tried to hire Casey Stengel, but was pleased to have landed Phil Wrigley.

An audience that knew Rigney from Wrigley, the chewing gum mogul who then owned the Chicago Cubs, gasped and laughed, but understood that Autry was to be excused if his head was spinning.

Only two months earlier, with the Dodgers having left Autry-owned KMPC for KFI, Autry and radio partner Robert O. Reynolds had gone to an American League owners’ meeting in St. Louis hoping to secure broadcasting rights to the AL’s new expansion team in Los Angeles.

They did better than that. They were awarded the team itself, making Autry, who was an American Legion shortstop in Tioga, Tex., before he was the Singing Cowboy, happier than at any time since Rudolph put a red nose at the front of the Hit Parade.

Even the fact that he had only two months, rather than the two years the National League is now giving the Florida Marlins and Denver Rockets, to prepare didn’t dampen an enthusiasm that was endorsed by sidekick Pat Buttram, who told him: “Gene, on the sports pages you never die.”

The reassured Autry quickly selected Fred Haney as general manager, and Haney quickly selected Palm Springs, then primarily a small, sleepy haven for movie stars and a part-time Autry home, as the training site.

“Fred had about five minutes to get organized, and did a great job of finding that little park--then known as the Polo Grounds and now Angels Stadium--in Palm Springs,” said Rigney, who would manage the team for eight-plus seasons and is now a senior adviser with the Oakland Athletics.

“Fred felt it was close enough to L.A. for fans, sponsors and media, and far enough for the players to realize they were in spring training,” Rigney said.

“Everyone loved it. I mean, as long as we were in Palm Springs, I never had any trouble getting players to report early.”

For 32 years, for periods ranging from all six weeks to only two, the Angels have made Palm Springs a spring base, but this is the beginning of the end.

Limited in space here, unable to work out financing with Palm Springs on a new facility and under pressure from the other Cactus League teams to confine their operation to Arizona, the Angels are in the process of playing their last exhibitions here.

They have signed a 15-year lease with two five-year options to conduct their entire training phase at a complex in Tempe, Ariz. The complex has been used by the Seattle Mariners, but will be rebuilt for the Angels.

Autry and wife, Jackie, took out an ad in Sunday’s Desert Sun expressing appreciation to Palm Springs fans for their support.

“Every time Gene and I read the copy we want to cry,” said Jackie Autry, who has lived in Palm Springs for 33 years. “We feel like part of history, part of our lives, is gone.”

Said Gene Autry, who formerly owned the Ocotillo Lodge here and now has a home in back of the hotel that bears his name: “I’ll miss it in a lot of ways. I have a lot of memories from happy times in spring training here. I’ve seen a lot of good players come through here.”

One, Bobby Grich, recently rejoined the Angels as a minor league instructor, after retiring at the end of the 1986 season.

“The thing I’ve missed most is spring training in Palm Springs,” Grich said. “It was my favorite time of the year, with the intimate crowds, the relaxed atmosphere, the great weather, the chance to see some of the young players, and Gene Autry watching from that tunnel under the stands, right there next to the dugout.

“It was a beautiful place to play, and there was no more wonderful view than to stand out at second base and look at that small grandstand with all those tank tops and shorts, and snow-capped San Jacinto in the background.”

If Grich had been in that dugout tunnel during the club’s formative years in the early 1960s, he might have rubbed elbows with celebrities such as Phil Harris, Phil Silvers, Chuck Connors, Joe E. Brown, tire man Leonard Firestone, a part owner of the club, and country-western star Charley Pride.

The latter, an aspiring ballplayer then, got a two-week tryout at that first camp in 1961 and was ultimately released with a bag of tuna sandwiches supplied by equipment manager Tom Ferguson.

Grich would also have met Dwight D. Eisenhower, a frequent dugout visitor on vacation after leaving the White House.

One day, Rigney asked the former President to manage the club for a few innings.

“I don’t know how,” Eisenhower protested.

“If you can run the country, you can run the ballclub,” Rigney said.

“But I don’t know the signs,” Eisenhower said.

“Neither do my players,” responded Rigney.

Palm Springs was different then. Now the gated fairways stretch to Indian Wells and La Quinta on the south. It is difficult to tell where Palm Springs ends and Cathedral City and Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert start.

Then, the city was defined by the El Mirador Hotel--now a hospital--on the north, the Biltmore Hotel on the South and player hangouts such as the Doll House, Howard Manor, Jack London’s, Ruby’s Dunes, ChiChi, and Larry Perrina’s restaurant in between.

Dining with reporters one night, Rigney announced that he finally wanted to see what his players liked so much about the Howard Manor, where the bar was busier than Palm Canyon on spring break.

Bud Furillo, who covered the Angels for the old Herald Examiner, alertly went to the phone to sound an alarm at the Howard Manor. When Rigney arrived, the place was empty.

“What happened?” he asked a waiter, who shook his head and said: “I don’t know, but your players fled as if they were having a fire drill.”

If the city was different in the early ‘60s, so were the expansion Angels.

There were veterans happy to still have a job, and prospects who sensed a quick climb to the majors.

They played baseball together and partied together. It didn’t seem such a sin then. The late-hour gathering place was often a small house on the Desert Inn grounds built by William Randolph Hearst for Marion Davies and occupied for a few springs by reporters covering the team.

One night, the party spilled out onto the lawn, where relief pitchers Ryne Duren and Art Fowler began chipping golf balls off pitching coach Marv Grissom’s front door. Grissom, who had the demeanor of a Prussian field marshal, finally opened it, stared at Duren and Fowler, and growled, “Got something of an early tee time, don’t you, boys?”

Golf at plush and private courses was always a bonus to spring training in Palm Springs. Some club executives opposed it, believing that the manager should ban such activity, but Rigney, who has had two hip replacements and still shoots his age at 73, had his own theory.

“I always thought it was a good idea to let them play,” he said of his players’ golf games. “At least, I knew where they were that way.”

Maybe. The one player Rigney could never be sure about was Bo Belinsky, who set the major league record for meteoric rise and fall and kept his own hours and itinerary.

A streetwise pool hustler from New Jersey, Belinsky was drafted from the Baltimore Orioles in December of 1961 and held a poolside news conference at the Desert Inn that next spring when he staged a contract holdout. This was before he had even thrown his first major league pitch, wooed his first actress, thrown a no-hitter en route to a rookie record of 5-0, or drawn his first fine for breaking curfew.

“Belinsky got us more publicity than (Sandy) Koufax got the Dodgers,” said Roland Hemond, the Angels’ first farm director and now general manager of the Orioles. “He was the ideal guy for an expansion team.”

The Angels got publicity in another way in the spring of 1963, riding bicycles to and from workouts, the initial ride led by Gene Autry. No one seemed to mind the three-mile morning ride to the park, but back?

Buck Rodgers, now the Angel manager and then the club’s second-year catcher, laughed and recalled: “I’d have (his wife) Judy meet me with the station wagon somewhere along the way, and we’d throw the bike in the back and drive to the hotel.”

The concept lasted about three days. Some bikes were found in ditches along the road. The rest ended up one morning at the bottom of the hotel pool, with the name of the culprit never disclosed.

More than anything else, Rodgers and former teammate Jim Fregosi, who now manages the Philadelphia Phillies, said they will always remember the the star-struck informality of Palm Springs in those years.

“I came from a small town in Ohio and could never imagine walking down a street, as you could in Palm Springs, and bumping into stars such as Donna Reed, Gene Barry and Joan Davis,” Rodgers said. “They’d have a police show every spring when we were there, and it was like a celebrity hall of fame.”

Even when management thought that it might be a good idea to get the team away from the neon temptations by having it spend the first few weeks of training in the Imperial Valley carrot capital of Holtville, Palm Springs lured them back. Several players braved the two-hour drive each night, returning at dawn.

Said one, declining to be identified even though the statute of limitations has long since expired: “I’d always take the back roads going back to Holtville and either end up in a cattle drive or get blown off the road by a crop duster.”

The Angels also tried comparably isolated Casa Grande, Ariz., for a few springs and, more recently, a complex in Mesa, Ariz., but it was always with Palm Springs waiting at the end of the spring training rainbow.

Palm Springs . . . where Wally Joyner and Jim Abbott first captured the hearts of Angel fans; where a pitching prospect named Bruce Heinbechner, on the verge of winning a bullpen berth, died in a 1974 spring traffic accident; where Gene Mauch ended his managerial career, retiring on an early spring morning in 1987; where Lew Burdette, in the twilight of his pitching career, arrived in the spring of 1966 and said, “I must be dreaming. You don’t really have spring training here, do you?”

Rigney nodded in recollection and said: “Whenever I run into any of those guys, they always say that their best days in baseball were when they went to spring training in Palm Springs. There was such a special feeling to it--the weather, the scenery, L.A. and Hollywood so close, Gene Autry so much a part of it.

“There couldn’t be a prettier place to train. It’s just unfortunate that they have only the one diamond there and are so isolated from the other teams.”

The process of finding a full-time spring complex for the club’s entire major and minor league operation spanned five years, two trips to Florida and numerous visits with Arizona officials, according to Kevin Uhlich, Angel operations director.

The Maricopa County Stadium District has pledged $4 million, he said, to rebuild Diablo Stadium and the adjoining practice diamonds into a state-of-the-art facility.

However, district officials expressed concern in Phoenix this week that the first month of a rental car tax designed to fund more than $20 million in overall Cactus League improvements during the next decade had failed to generate anticipated revenue, and some plans might have to be scaled back if revenue doesn’t pick up.

Uhlich said the Angels’ contract is signed, sealed and not subject to change. He said there had been lengthy discussions with Palm Springs about a $7-million to $10-million renovation of Angels Stadium that would have still left only one diamond, or a $15-million to $18-million relocation to north of town.

The Angels, he said, weren’t happy with either plan; the city thought that it couldn’t justify that or any more money because the club would be here only two weeks each spring, and there was pressure from the Arizona-based teams, concerned about increased travel costs, to pull out of Palm Springs completely.

Uhlich called it a bittersweet ending, and Jackie Autry estimated that the loss of a major tourist attraction will take $5 million to $7 million out of the Palm Springs economy over a two-week period.

“I’m disappointed,” she said. “I don’t feel we got much cooperation from the city. They wanted us to build the stadium, but we’re not in the business of owning stadiums. We tried to tell them that a new facility could be used for concerts and other events, but they didn’t feel they had the resources. In the end, Palm Springs is the loser.”

There may be no winner. Gayla Perrina, who operates her late father’s popular restaurant in the heart of Palm Springs, said customers are frustrated with the Angels and angry at the city.

“The Angels helped draw major crowds,” she said. “Everyone’s business will be hurt. Plus, it’s another tradition gone, like Desert Circus Week. I don’t think either the Angels or city showed much foresight.”

Scott Bailes did. He’s selling those T-shirts for $10.