BASEBALL / DAILY REPORT : ANGELS : Perez Returns With Clear Sight

Eduardo Perez returned to the Angels on Friday with a new outlook on the game, but it had nothing to do with the humbling experience of beginning the season as the team’s starting third baseman and spending the last three months at triple-A Vancouver.

Perez can see clearly now, which is something he couldn’t do earlier this season or the last two seasons because of an eye problem that went uncorrected for several years.

“It’s a different world,” said Perez, who hit .169 in 22 games for the Angels before being demoted May 31. “I used to never see billboards on outfield fences clearly--I thought that was normal. I was like someone who doesn’t know he needs glasses but doesn’t realize it until his vision is corrected.”

Perez, the team’s first-round pick in 1991, was hit in the face by a pitch at single-A Palm Springs in 1992 and had problems with depth perception and night vision.

He visited eye doctors in Palm Springs, Phoenix and Anaheim during the next few years and tried several different contact lenses, but nothing helped.

Finally, at the urging of his father, former Cincinnati Red star Tony Perez, he left Vancouver for two days in July to see Dr. John Clarkson, a retina specialist at Miami’s Bascan-Palmer Eye Institute, rated the nation’s second-best eye hospital by U.S. News and World Report.

Clarkson’s diagnosis: The focusing power in Perez’s eyes were unequal. Clarkson prescribed eye drops, which cleared up the problem quickly.

Perez was batting .270 before going to Miami, but his average rose to .326 within about three weeks of his return, and he finished hitting .325 with six home runs and 37 RBIs in 69 games.

Perez’s future with the Angels, though, remains cloudy since his name came up in trade talks this season, and the Angels seem to be high on double-A third baseman George Arias, who has 30 homers and 104 RBIs this season.

“I just hope the Angels judge him on how he does now, and not how he was before,” said Brian Goldberg, Perez’s agent. “He’s not the same player now, because he can see 100%.”

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Manager Marcel Lachemann said he won’t make a decision on whether struggling left-hander Brian Anderson, who has lost his last five decisions, will remain in the rotation until he meets with him today. Anderson didn’t make it through the second inning in Thursday’s 11-6 loss to New York.

“I think he’s trying to do too much, trying to pull the club out of this tailspin all by himself,” Lachemann said. . . . Reliever Mike Bielecki, on the disabled list since July 19 because of biceps tendinitis, returned Friday and threw 1 2/3 innings, giving up three hits and two runs against the Red Sox.