FREEWAY SERIES BECOMES FREEWAY SERIOUS : After a 36-Year Wait, High Noon Has Arrived

Long ago, they were called the Los Angeles Angels, and their boss was the frontier minstrel, Gene Autry. There was also another baseball outfit in town, run by a city slicker from back East. But eventually there was bound to be a showdown, because the cowboy knew that this town waren’t big enough for the both of ‘em.

“There is nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for Walter O’Malley, and there is nothing he wouldn’t do for me,” deadpanned Autry, way back when. “That’s the way it is. We go through life doing nothing for each other.”

OK, turn the calendar now to 1997. The names have changed, but the game remains the same. The family O’Malley is getting out of the baseball business. The family Autry has already all but cleared out. And the city of Angels has no Angels, because soon they became the California Angels, then later the Anaheim Angels, changing their identity more often than a fugitive on the lam.

Yet tonight, none of that matters, because at long last, we bring you a backyard scrap that some have waited 36 years to see. Here we go, the Dodgers against the Angels, under new management (or almost), but still the neighborhood baseball nines who have never before met on a diamond in anything that meant a hill of beans.

Observe tradition. Come late. Leave early. But come.

It is a two-night series, commencing at Chavez Ravine at 7-ish tonight. Doing the pitching for the Dodgers will be their Asian rotation of popular right-handers Chan Ho Park and Hideo Nomo, neither of whom gave any thought to a Dodger-Angel rivalry while growing up. On the mound for Anaheim tonight will be Chuck Finley, a 34-year-old Louisiana boy who has won 132 games in the majors, not one of them against the National League.

What can we expect? Who knows? This is Hollywood. Perhaps glamorous old Dodgers and Angels of old will turn up. Perhaps fans will sit in the stands, reminiscing of days when St. Louis was baseball’s idea of a Western road trip. Or perhaps even Charlie Sheen will buy up the entire left-field pavilion and sit there by himself, as the actor once did at an Anaheim game. Never forget, California isn’t a state; it’s a state of mind.

Some things do change.

A man named something other than Alston or Lasorda is the manager of the Dodgers now, for the first time since 1953. A company that opened an amusement park in 1955 is now the proprietor of the Anaheim characters who work and play a few blocks away. Players from both sides now wear patches on their sleeves in remembrance of a Dodger, one who never swung a bat professionally on California soil.

Otherwise, a number of things haven’t changed much. The man broadcasting Dodger baseball is the same man who did Jackie Robinson’s games. The uniforms that the Dodgers wore back then are still in vogue, if not in Vogue. And the number of World Series appearances by the Angels hasn’t changed a bit since the day they were born, so who says tradition is dead?

Do today’s Angels give a damn about that?

“I doubt it, but they should,” says their first-year manager, Terry Collins, who spent the 1981-88 seasons managing in the Dodger farm system. “There should be a pride thing. Some players with the Angels probably feel they don’t get as much respect as the Dodgers do. Well, the only way you get that respect is to win.

“I’ve respected the Dodgers most of my life. They have established themselves, repeatedly. But us [the Angels], we’re still trying to get somewhere.”

On Dec. 6, 1960, an expansion American League franchise was awarded to Autry, Robert O. Reynolds, Paul A. O’Bryan and associates at the league’s winter meeting in St. Louis, and a rivalry theoretically was born. This occurred a little more than 14 months after Los Angeles had celebrated its first major professional sporting triumph, the Dodgers’ victory over the Chicago White Sox in the 1959 World Series.

But the only way the Angels and Dodgers would ever meet--other than in a cozy little “Freeway Series” to close spring training--was to be in a World Series, for which their fans began waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting. Ed Yost was the first Angel batter. He popped out. Eli Grba was the first Angel pitcher. He lost. Baltimore was the first Angel opponent. The Angels lost. And the rest is misery.

It took an entirely new book of rules for the Dodgers and Angels to be able to play together in the same sandlot.

Tommy Lasorda once joked, “People say I curse a lot. People say I got a bad temper. Hey, I’m not an Angel. I’m a Dodger.”

Hey, it was a local joke. Maybe you had to be there.