Relief Is Trivial Pursuit for Angels : Baseball: A brief look through history shows the team’s bullpen has been, for the most part, less than effective over the years.

These might be questions only trivia fanatics can answer, but they say a lot about the state of the Angel bullpen over the years:

Which Angel reliever has the record for lowest earned-run average in a season (40 or more appearances)?

Bob Lee. That’s right, Bob Lee. If you’ve never seen Annette Funicello on the Mickey Mouse Club, you probably won’t remember him. He posted that 1.33 ERA in 1964.

Who has the record for fewest runs and fewest hits given up in a season (40 or more appearances)?

Ken Tatum. If you’ve never worn bell bottoms, you won’t remember him. He gave up only 13 runs and 51 hits in 1969.

OK, here’s one for those born after 1950.

Who pitched the most innings in relief in a season?

In 1987, DeWayne Buice, a screwball with a forkball, threw 114 innings of junk at American League opponents.

Lee . . . Tatum . . . Buice . . . the creme de la pen? Is there a better argument for a case that the Angels have had one of the sorriest bullpens in the history of the game?

Growing Pains

In the early 1960s, the Angels’ best relievers were often their starters. In 1962, Dean Chance picked up a 3-2, 10-inning victory in the first game of a doubleheader at Minnesota and returned to earn a save in the 7-6 nightcap.

Rookies Chance and Bo Belinsky combined to start 55 games that season. They also combined for a team-leading nine saves.

“(Manager) Bill Rigney was an innovator when it came to handling the bullpen,” said former Angel Manager Buck Rodgers, who was a catcher with the Angels from 1961-69. “Lee was a big hard-throwing guy who threw one pitch, the fastball, and just came in and challenged everybody.

“He had gotten into some trouble with the Pittsburgh organization and Rigney picked him up out of A-ball and stuck him in there just because he could throw so hard.

“Tatum was pretty much the same kind of pitcher. Minnie Rojas, a guy (General Manager) Fred Haney got out of the Mexican leagues, was the most complete reliever I caught with the Angels. He relied mostly on the slider, but he had a good fastball and that little bit of ice in his veins.”

After a brief respite with Lee, Rojas and Tatum in the latter ‘60s, the Angel Arson Squad began to build a tradition of pyromania.

In 1972--the year Nolan Ryan had a 2.28 ERA, 19 victories, 20 complete games and 16 losses--five Angel relievers made a combined 84 appearances and managed one save. Part-time starter Lloyd Allen led the team with five.

In ‘73, Ryan struck out a record 383, had 26 complete games and two no-hitters. It’s generally accepted that he lost the Cy Young Award that year because he had 16 losses weighing against his 21 victories.

They didn’t keep the statistic back then, but it’s a good bet there were at least one or two blown saves that might have cost Ryan the honor.

In ‘74, Orlando Pena made four relief appearances and led the bullpen with three saves. In ‘76, Dick Drago was the “stopper.” He had a 4.42 ERA and six saves.

In 1979, the Angels won their first American League West title. Mark Clear and Dave LaRoche combined for 24 saves, but the Angels won 88 games primarily because of the offense of Don Baylor (136 RBIs), Bobby Grich (30 homers) and Brian Downing (.326 batting average), to name a few.

Baltimore took a 2-0 lead in the ’79 American League Championship Series when pinch-hitter John Lowenstein hit a two-out, three-run homer in the 10th inning off Don Aase, the franchise’s first Orange County native and first playoff bullpen goat. The Orioles won the series, 3-1.

You want a hero? How about Dave Goltz? He gave up only one run in 4 1/3 innings on Oct. 2, 1982, as the Angels beat the Rangers, 6-5, and won the Western Division title.

Pathos on Gasoline Alley

Yes, there have been highlights breaking up the years of mediocrity, but many of those stories ended on sad or even tragic notes:

* Rojas had 22 saves, a 2.51 ERA, an American League relief pitcher of the year award and a promising career ahead in the spring of 1968.

In the spring of 1970, returning from a family fishing outing near Miami, the car he was driving collided with a truck. Rojas’ two daughters were killed, his wife and infant son escaped with minor injuries and Rojas’ spinal cord was severed. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

* Angel Manager Marcel Lachemann, who was pitching coach for five previous Angel managers, says Luis Sanchez was the most talented relief pitcher during his 11-year association with the club.

But Sanchez’s best year with the Angels was 1984, when he had 11 saves.

“Believe it or not, Luis had the best stuff,” Lachemann said. “He had a great arm. His fastball was way above average with great movement. He had a decent slider, too. But the intangibles didn’t really work out for him.”

General Manager Buzzie Bavasi, then in his 70s, was once so upset with Sanchez--who had just given up a game-winning home run on an 0-2 fastball down the middle--that players and coaches allegedly had to physically remove his hands from Sanchez’s throat after the game.

* Sanchez was history after the Angels picked up Donnie Moore before the 1985 season. Moore, who had been with four clubs and had spent nine of his 11-year career in the minors, became a bona fide closer with the Angels, recording 31 saves and a 1.92 ERA.

Then he tossed up that fateful pitch to Boston’s Dave Henderson. Henderson’s homer in the ninth inning tied the ’86 AL championship series game that would have put the Angels in the World Series. The Red Sox won the game and the next two.

Moore’s widow said he never recovered from the stigma of that one hanging forkball and it played a role in his eventual suicide in July, 1989. Moore, who had been traded to Kansas City and then released, wounded his wife during an argument about the sale of their home and then shot himself in the head.

“Donnie took a lot of heat for that and the game didn’t even end on that pitch,” Lachemann said. “But the point is, he got us there that year. We don’t get anywhere near the playoffs without the way he pitched all year.”

* Bryan Harvey, discovered on a softball field, came up through the Angel farm system and became one the game’s most feared relievers.

“I used to love the look on the hitters’ faces when he’d come in,” Chuck Finley said. “They looked like they were going up there with little, old No. 2 pencils instead of bats.

“I remember one time in ’88 against Oakland, when they were killing everybody and winning a hundred-some games. We were winning by one run and they had a guy on in the ninth with (Jose) Canseco, (Mark) McGwire and Henderson coming up. He struck out the first two just like that and got the last one on a 16-hopper right to him.

“He went through ‘em like they were nothin’.”

Harvey set a club record with 46 saves in 1991 and was named the league’s relief pitcher of the year. A year later, the Angels left him unprotected in the expansion draft.

“Everybody knew there was a chance he’d be there, but it was a big gamble,” said Lachemann, then pitching coach of the Florida Marlins. “He was coming off (arm) surgery and sitting on that very large salary.”

The Marlins took the risk and Harvey had 45 saves in 1993.

Are We Having Fun?

There might not have been all that much great relief pitching, but there have been some great characters.

One of the first Angels in the record book was Ryne Duren, a hard thrower with Roy Orbison-thick glasses who liked to throw his first warmup pitch halfway up the backstop to remind hitters of his wildness.

Then he would walk toward home plate, squinting at the catcher’s signs to remind them of his poor eyesight.

In May of the Angels’ first spring, Duren tied a major league record by striking out four White Sox in the seventh inning. On the downside, however, Chicago scored the winning run that inning on a passed ball.

“Ryno was the ultimate reliever of his time,” Rodgers said. “He just came in and threw gas. He had a little bit of a drinking problem, though, and he liked to fall asleep in the bathtub. More than once we almost lost him.

“The funniest thing was when he got rid of the Coke-bottle glasses and got contacts. We were in Chicago, Duren’s warming up and Luis Aparicio was the first hitter. He turned to me and said, ‘Buck, where’s big Ryno’s glasses?’ I said, ‘He got mad last night in Detroit and smashed them against a wall.’

“Luis looked at me like he wanted to send the bat up to the plate by itself.”

One of the team’s best relievers in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was Greg Minton, who had been released by the San Francisco Giants because he was too fat.

His wife put him on a diet and exercise regimen and he lost 51 pounds. The Angels signed him and Minton pitched more innings than Harvey in 1988-89 and had a better earned-run average in 1989-90.

Minton, who once stole the Giants’ team bus so he could go shopping for boots in Houston, was less the practical joker when he got to the Angels. But opposing hitters used to complain that some of his pitches did strange things on their way to the plate. Minton did what he could to foster the theory.

“I don’t challenge hitters anymore,” he said, “but as long as they supply me with Vaseline, I’ll keep getting them out.”

And then there was the somewhat bizarre case of Buice, who was listed in the media guide as 5-10 and 160 pounds. He must have been wearing lead underwear and a top hat at the time.

Buice, who spent 10 years in the minors, once pitched for two weeks with a a broken arm because he was 5-0 and thought he was on the verge of being called up by Oakland.

“Buice had better stuff than most people thought,” Lachemann said. “He had a good forkball and his fastball was in the 88-90 (mile-per-hour) range, which, considering his size, was pretty surprising.”

Buice amused his teammates with Maxwell Smart and Bullwinkle imitations. He also liked to stuff baseballs in his uniform where his calf and biceps muscles should have been. Opponents would snicker in the dugout when he walked to the mound.

“There was no intimidation factor there,” Finley said, smiling. “But he did a pretty good job. Then he sat on his wallet.”

Buice, fearing that he was about to be sent down the minors in 1988, told club officials that he injured his hamstring when he awkwardly sat on his wallet. He was initially put on the disabled list, but soon included in a trade with Toronto.

Yet Buice remains one of the most successful Angel relief pitchers in club history. One day, Buice and Wally Joyner walked into an Orange County baseball card shop. The owner said he wanted to start his own card company but was having trouble getting approval from the players’ union. Would they help?

He offered either a one-time cash payment or a percentage of the company for their services. Joyner took the money. Buice took a slice of the firm, which became Upper Deck.

A couple of years ago, Buice sold his part of the business for more than $15 million, proving that occasionally there are happy endings for Angel relief pitchers.

And now, nobody would doubt if he said he hurt himself falling off his wallet.