Finding Port Far From the Angels’ Storm

The old general manager of the Angels is the new assistant general manager of the Boston Red Sox, so your quest for an interview begins with a phone call to the Red Sox’ spring-training complex in Fort Myers, Fla.

“Is Mike Port in?” you ask the woman manning the phones.

“Who?”

“Mike Port.”

“Who’s that?”

“You just hired him last week as your assistant general manager.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know who this person is.”

News apparently travels slowly in Fort Myers. Rather than fax the woman a copy of the newspaper clipping, you negotiate a deal: You leave your name and number, she’ll try to find Mike Port, or someone who has heard of Mike Port, and pass along the message.

A day later, Port returns the call. He laughs at a recounting of the previous day’s telephonic investigative search.

“There were times with the California Angels,” Port says, “when I wished people didn’t know who I was.”

Port is in a good mood. He ought to be. He hasn’t traded anyone for a quarterback or a third baseman with a torn rotator cuff lately. He is no longer accountable to Jackie Autry. He now works for a team that refused to trade Roger Clemens to the Yankees for three minor leaguers and has a chance to qualify for the American League playoffs some time before the next presidential election.

“A lot of excitement going on out there,” Port has noticed.

Somehow, he must have gotten his hands on a newspaper in Fort Myers.

Port seemed genuinely taken aback by the Kelly Gruber fallout. “I can’t imagine,” he said of the Angels’ predicament. “To me, it would seem extremely remote that any team would knowingly trade a player with that type of injury.

“I think this is a case of a hard-nosed player who didn’t tell anyone he was hurt. With many players, you’re always very cognizant of whatever’s bothering them, all the way down to a hangnail. Most of us wished we had more hard-nosed players who played through injuries.”

Except when you trade for one and the injury turns out to be a torn rotator cuff and you’re left holding the bag to the tune of $2.5 million.

“Most unfortunate,” said Port, not gloating, simply sounding like the Mike Port we knew and tried to decipher from 1985 to 1991, the years when Portuguese was the official language of the Angels’ front office.

“I don’t think the Blue Jays knowingly transacted anything involving what you might call ‘damaged goods.’ The Blue Jays are world champions. They didn’t get there through sleight of hand. Quite the contrary, they act above board more than most. They are people of integrity.”

Port said the Angels weren’t necessarily at fault for not requesting a pre-trade physical exam (“Most of the deals I made, that was not a requirement”) and said he could empathize.

“Years ago, when I was at San Diego, we traded for Jim McAndrew, who was a pitcher for the Mets. I’m not saying there was a pre-existing condition, but he made one start for us and his knee cartilage went. We didn’t ask for, or receive, any other compensation.

“It’s one of the risks you take when you make a trade. Who knows?”

Since leaving the Angels in May of 1991, Port has undergone the kind of reputation enhancement presently enjoyed by Jimmy Carter. The passage of time, and the subsequent collapse of the Anaheim franchise, have done wonders for his legacy. Say, didn’t the Angels win 90 games three times during the Port administration?

Self-effacing as ever, Port reflected on the “We Don’t Like Mike” years.

“Early on,” he said, “the signpost of my tenure there read, ‘Lost Don Aase, lost Fred Lynn.’ It was my first year and I’m thinking, ‘So this is what this is all about.’ ”

Port never traded anyone for a pitcher who had retired to play football, but he did draft, sign and pay a large sum of money to a pitcher who moonlighted as a hockey player.

“Kirk McCaskill left us after his double-A season to pursue hockey for a year,” Port said. “Fortunately, he came back. But the whole time he was there, I was hoping someone would whack him with a stick once or twice so that a career in baseball would start looking like a better alternative.”

The glowing achievement of Port’s years with the Angels was the Jim Abbott gamble. Port took considerable heat for spending a No. 1 draft choice on a one-handed pitcher and then thrusting him into the Angel rotation without as much as a day’s experience in the minor leagues.

The gamble worked out better than, say, the Dave Parker gamble, although today, Abbott and Parker carry the same designation-- Ex-Angel.

Asked about the Abbott trade, Port retreats quickly.

“Oh, gee,” he said. “Jim Abbott is someone we drafted, he’s a capable pitcher and I have a certain attachment to him as a person. But I don’t think it would be fair to comment beyond that or say anything that might be construed as second-guessing.”

Port is taking care to say all the right things, which, I suppose, is understandable.

One day, he might want to trade with the Angels.

Now he works for the Boston Red Sox, an odd coupling when you consider his history and theirs. Port’s Angels and Lou Gorman’s Red Sox waged an unholy war for the 1986 American League pennant, complete with Dave Henderson’s crushing blow, from which the Angels have never really recovered.

“I have been reminded of 1986 more than once since my arrival,” Port deadpanned. “Even my cardiologist, after running me through my annual check-up, made a notation that my blood pressure is acceptable ‘except when you make mention of the 1986 playoffs.’

“I don’t know if it’s possible to get any closer to the World Series without actually getting in it.”

Unable to beat them, Port has joined them. It is easy to see how Gorman and Port were attracted, Gorman and Port being polar opposites. Gorman is a throw-back to the cigar-chomping wheeler-dealers who thrived on shooting the breeze in the press lounge. Port was always more comfortable in some back room, crunching numbers and scanning the fine print on an incentive clause. Theirs should be a symbiotic partnership.

From faraway Fort Myers, Port looks back on his Angels years and says, “I’m satisfied to stand on my record. . . . There were probably some things that I did do, or did not do, or did not do and should have done, but in hindsight, I would like to think we were close to doing something good for Mr. Autry and the fans.”

Port pauses.

“We came close. We did the best we could.”

Succinctness aside, Port figures it’s an epitaph he can live with.