COMMENTARY : While His Team Falls to Pieces, Bavasi Tries to Pick Them Up

This is the team that Bill Bavasi built, and it is falling apart before his eyes.

The slump-proof starting rotation he thought he had assembled, with Jim Abbott backing up Mark Langston backing Chuck Finley, is 7-22 with a 6.93 earned-run average since Aug. 16.

The catalytic converter he thought he had imported from Detroit, leadoff specialist Tony Phillips, is four for 40 with 18 strikeouts in first-inning at-bats since Aug. 1.

The bullpen Bigfoot he thought he had recruited to terrorize opposing hitters down the stretch, Lee Smith, hasn’t saved a game since Sept. 12, largely because the Angels haven’t held a ninth-inning lead since Sept. 12, and might not again until April 1996.

Saturday night, Bavasi watched as his Angels lost their ninth consecutive game, 5-1 to the Texas Rangers, which would be franchise-record territory for many teams but is not even Slump Of The Month for this one.

The Angels’ last nine-game losing streak ended on Sept. 4.

The new one started on Sept. 13.

Along the way, the Angels have also lost sole possession of first place in the American League West, shared possession of first place in the American League West, pole position in the American League wild-card derby and, with another defeat today, sole possession of second place.

All things considered, Bavasi would rather be holed up in his Mission Viejo home, perhaps scanning the waiver wire for a veteran exorcist, than serving as an eyewitness to history at the killing fields of Texas. By nature, Bavasi is a stay-at-home general manager, preferring to work the phones in Anaheim instead of the losing clubhouse in Arlington. He travels sparingly and was reluctant to drop in on this trip. “I don’t want the players thinking that anything out of the ordinary is happening,” he said.

But after three Angel defeats in Oakland, Bavasi “realized I made a mistake. It’s my responsibility to be with the team at this point. Either we win together or we go down together.”

Bavasi booked immediate passage to Texas. Upon totaling the mileage Assistant General Manager Tim Mead had logged pacing the Angel offices, he decided to bring Mead with him. “Tim was like a caged lion watching at home,” Bavasi said. “The only reason he’s here is because I looked at him and said, ‘Tim, you’ve got to go.’ ”

Now that they’re here, what can they do, what can they say, once they get “Buck up, Marcel” out of the way?

“We just want to be around,” Bavasi said. “Chat with Lach and the players once in a while. If there’s anyone we can lend support to, fine.”

Mostly, though, Bavasi and Mead sit and suffer.

This is the closest Western society comes to water torture, although, on the record, Bavasi insists he’s holding up fine.

Three weeks ago, while the Angels were muddling through their first nine-game losing streak, Manager Marcel Lachemann lauded Bavasi for getting “me every player I asked for, did everything [he] could do to improve the club. Basically, it’s in my lap.” And Lachemann had a point. Smith, Phillips, Abbott--short of plugging in Cal Ripken at shortstop, what more could Bavasi have possibly done?

“It remains to be seen if all the pieces were in place,” Bavasi said Saturday, “but I think they were. . . . To me, getting Abbott was the final piece. It looked that way then and it still may be. Maybe he’ll be the piece that stops it.”

Abbott gets his latest chance today, with Bobby Witt going for the Rangers. Starting should be easy. Stopping, that’s another story.

Until then, Bavasi was off to his hotel room and maybe another hour of sleep. “Some nights are worse than others,” Bavasi allowed. Maybe there would be a phone call from Dad, also known as Buzzie, who, as irony would have it, spent his first full year as Dodger general manager in 1951, the year the Dodgers blew a 13 1/2-game lead to the New York Giants.

“There’s nothing he can say. What--’Here’s the formula for going through this,’?” Bavasi said, managing a thin smile.

“But I’m not ready to compare us to that. I know what their ending was. I’m not prepared for that.”

Bavasi said he hopes, in a week, to look back on this as “an unbelievably, drastically tough time, a big scare, but we managed to get through.”

Might as well.

At the moment, it beats looking ahead.