It’s Truly a Season Gone to Halo

Maybe the Angels should be sold to the Japanese.

Maybe that would help. Something has to, one of these days. The Angels are as bad a team as exists in baseball, and the only way they are going to win the World Series is if they enter the one at Williamsport.

It isn’t even two full weeks into June and already the Angels have been caught and passed by the Kansas City Royals, who once had a record of 1-16.

Actually, the Angels have only two serious problems--the people who play for them and the people who don’t.

Von Hayes has qualified for membership in the RBI-of-the-Month club; no Angel catcher could accumulate even 20 hits in the first 57 games; Chuck Finley and Jim Abbott have (on June 12!) three victories combined, Bryan Harvey is winless and nobody with more than a handful of at-bats is hitting anywhere near .300.

Meanwhile, at last glance, Dave Winfield, Dante Bichette and Wally Joyner each had a batting average above .300, Chili Davis was around .275 and Devon White had more home runs than any Angel except Hubie Brooks, who also happened to be hitting something in the neighborhood of .213.

You could say this team was an accident waiting to happen, but the Angels already have had even that.

Their bus accident was tragic, no doubt about that. It cost the Angels their manager and sped their pulse rates considerably. The whole club is to be commended for the way this episode was handled.

Yet this was a shaky baseball team before that accident and it is a worse baseball team now. It would have to improve immeasurably just to go from worse to bad.

The defense is atrocious. Every infield grounder is an adventure, and I never thought I would watch an outfield that would miss Chili Davis.

The team’s top hitter is Luis Polonia, who at last look had six extra-base hits in 209 turns at bat.

We can sympathize why the Angels were unable to sign Bobby Bonilla, because he cost more than the national debt, or why they were unable to keep Joyner, who got caught up in a personal squabble with the bosses. But why this club chose not to re-sign Winfield remains a mystery for the ages.

This could be the only lineup in baseball without one batter who intimidates pitchers.

As for the Angel pitching, what is particularly difficult to swallow is that a team with Finley, Abbott and Mark Langston in its starting rotation and Harvey in its bullpen could be giving up an average of almost four earned runs a game. But the Angels do.

The situation is so desolate that Scott Bailes, in 15 innings’ work, has more victories than any pitcher on the staff except Langston. Bailes’ earned-run average, last time we looked, was 7.04.

The situation has become so desperate that Bert Blyleven, who pitched professionally in 1969, has rejoined the starting rotation. I can’t much blame the Angels for that. His first couple of times back, Blyleven looked sharp.

Blyleven, Brooks, Alvin Davis and such would be swell people to have on your club if what you needed was one missing piece of the puzzle to challenge in September for the pennant.

The Angels, unfortunately, feel compelled to use these journeymen because of their understandable reluctance to raise the white flag and spend the next four months playing their kids. I pity Buck Rodgers and Duke Wathan, managers A and B, whose instincts undoubtedly persuade them to play the best nine men available rather than nine hungry wanna-bes.

They must find out, nevertheless, if Lee Stevens is going to be good for more than eight RBIs every 113 at-bats, which is the way he began this season. Mark McGwire, he ain’t.

The Angels’ future is in the hands of owners Gene and Jackie Autry and their 297 vice presidents.

The Cowboy and Cowgal must dread the thought of again attempting to buy ballplayers from the home-plate shopping network, considering what they already spent (without results) on everybody from Reggie Jackson to Langston.

Barry Bonds, for example, has expressed a decided preference for playing in Southern California, and popular rumor has him going to San Diego unless the New York Yankees make him an offer he can’t refuse.

Because Bonds considers himself in Ryne Sandberg’s league, it is going to cost somebody $7 million a season to employ him. Already I can hear Angel management gulp. Fans, naturally, will urge them to pay any price, but keep in mind that Bonds is unlikely to be eager to defect to a rebuilding team. I doubt the Angels can get him.

Then again, if they were owned by someone with serious money. . . .