HALO EFFECT

The Angels Booster Club meets monthly in the basement of newly remodeled Edison Field.

It’s an awkward, low-ceilinged room, with interior partitions that give the meeting space the shape of a gingerbread man. If you arrive late and have to take a seat down near one of the feet, you can hardly hear what’s going on up front. Not that it matters. The meetings are more social than business--they’re the kind of events people bring their knitting to. The boosters, who live to cheer, don’t complain.

At a recent get-together, though, the celebration of the team’s recent good play was marred by an unease the boosters couldn’t quite keep behind clenched teeth.

Their beloved Angels had won three of four games from their hated metropolitan rivals, the going-no-place Dodgers. Still, on this night, the focus of the world outside this room is not on Angel success but Dodger troubles.

“If the Dodgers finished fourth and we were in the World Series, the newspapers would say, ‘Dodgers lose,’ ” says Mary Walters, the club vice president.

Assents are murmured. Grumbles are growled.

Howard Miller complains about the lack of Angel representation on the All-Star team.

He cites Angel shortstop Gary DiSarcina as evidence. “In my opinion, we got the best shortstop in baseball. You can take your Rodriguezes and Garciaparras and Jeters. We got the best. In all phases.”

This is spoken like a true fan, which is to say, defiantly, and in utter denial of all evidence to the contrary, including Alex Rodriguez’s home-run total for the Seattle Mariners, Nomar Garciaparra’s all-around brilliant play for the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankee Derek Jeter’s ex-girlfriend (Mariah Carey), none of which DiSarcina, a diligent blue-collar sort, can match.

By now, there is in the room an air of rebellion. Long-buried slights are unearthed. Half-remembered scorns are held up to the light and subjected to forensic examination.

Somebody complains about the dearth of Angel highlights on ESPN.

Somebody else points out that the radio signal on Angel games fades in and out, as if the FCC was involved in a conspiracy to keep fans downtrodden.

Whatever the specifics, the substance of these complaints is the same:

It’s a cruel fate to be an Angel fan in Dodgerland.

Why do people do it then? There is no identifiable gene or damaged chromosome.

Angel fans seem to be just like other fans, which is a way of saying they are a perverse and deeply troubled lot.

*

The key thing to remember about fans, psychologists who study them unfailingly point out, is the derivation of the word from “fanatic.” These are the same people, remember, who burn cities when their teams win and, for that matter, when they lose.

Most fans are unlikely to burn anything other than their own innards, but it’s worth keeping in mind what little rationality has to do with any of this.

Take Miller. Not even he can make sense of his passion. To prove the point later, after the booster club meeting has adjourned, he says, “You oughta see my apartment. It’s covered. I don’t have a space left on my wall. Nothing but Angels everywhere.”

Miller, of course, is exaggerating. He has plenty of wall space left. It’s true that the living and dining rooms of his Fullerton walk-up are covered by autographed photographs of major league baseball players.

Most of the bedroom is also, as a firefighter might say, fully involved, but the bathroom, providing you could find a reliable way of affixing picture frames to the tile, looks to be wide open.

The display of baseball paraphernalia is notable for the degree to which it overwhelms everything else in Miller’s apartment, including Miller. There’s something about being in the presence of 12 Nolan Ryans, nine Mickey Mantles and eight Brian Downings that makes a man shrink.

In the way of many fans, Howard has no idea why all this started, although he does know the year--1986, coincidentally (he says), the year of his divorce.

He does not say which came first.

“It’s just me here. Why not?” he says, sounding for a minute almost reasonable.

*

William Gayton, who directs an annual conference on the psychology of sport at the University of Southern Maine, says fans are fans:

* To escape the hum-drum of daily existence.

* To appreciate the simple interactions of movement and desire.

* To relish subversive thrills society otherwise disallows--to revel, for example, in the sight of a gloved fist making mulch of a dazed brain.

* To bolster self-esteem by associating with winners.

Because people have been known to root for the home team, Bostonians become Red Sox fans, San Franciscans root for the 49ers.

But what of people like Herb Mallow, an Angel fan who lives and works deep in the Dodger country of the San Fernando Valley, where he is, he guesses, “probably the only Angel fan out here.”

For Mallow, becoming an Angel fan was simple.

He grew up in the Midwest and rooted first for the Chicago Cubs, then the old Milwaukee Braves. The constant was: “I always hated the Dodgers.”

So when he moved west with his job in 1966, he took his Dodger dislike with him.

“And the Angels have had their moments,” he says.

Becoming a fan can hinge on diverse influences.

Bart Giamatti, the late classics scholar and baseball commissioner, once wrote that sport had assumed the role of civic religion for an unbelieving society.

“People gather,” he said, “where the gods have fled.”

It’s unclear how the gods would react to Howard Miller’s apartment.

Maybe seeing it was what made them flee in the first place.