Anaheim’s Boys of Slumber Fan--Again

From my perch beyond the right-field foul pole, it was easy last Wednesday night to tune out the Angel season. Was it just the distant vantage point, or were the Angels actually shrinking with every pitch? By night’s end, even Chuck Finley looked two inches tall.

Midway through the game, the stadium announcer implored the fans to stop launching paper airplanes. Unfortunately, the air show was the best thing going. The announcer should have directed the authority of his microphone toward a more pressing problem (“Will the gentlemen seated in the third-base dugout please take those sticks of lumber off your shoulders and begin hitting the ball more efficiently!”).

Yes, the series flopped. I’d come out to the ballpark, for the second time in three nights, hoping to contract pennant fever. All I caught were the blahs. For baseball fans, nothing compares to playoff atmosphere, and this series had can’t-miss written all over it: two teams tied for first with a week to go.

You’d have to try really hard to make a series like that boring.

The Angels must have tried really hard.

It’s unclear who lost oxygen first--the Angels or the fans--but it sure was quiet in there. It’s noisier at art gallery openings; but there, at least, you get free wine and cheese. For Angel fans, the entire series was like getting tickets to the hottest musical in town and finding out that all the performers had laryngitis.

Baseball’s a funny game. The Angels went into Yankee Stadium in late August and treated New Yorkers to five of the most invigorating games of the season. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, and the Angels proved then they could play with the big boys. Angel fans had legitimate reason to believe the team was playoff worthy.

After last week, all we’ll hear at Edison Field are the sounds of silence. Hello, darkness, my old friend.

And it’s that silence that vexes. A series that should have been electric never got plugged in.

Wondering why, I’ll start by looking inward.

I’m a Pirate fan, have been since I was 8. I’ve been to Pittsburgh both for playoff games and regular-season games with playoff implications. And even though Pittsburgh is no baseball haven, the tension at those games was palpable. After a playoff-game victory in 1992, 50,000 fans poured out of Three Rivers Stadium chanting without orchestration, “Let’s go, Bucs!”

Will Edison Field ever hear such goings-on?

If I’m typical of large numbers of Angel fans, the answer is no. I wouldn’t be chanting. My Pirate loyalties run too deep, and while I want the Angels to win, I don’t have passion for them. Last week, Edison Field probably had too many people like me: transplanted baseball fans who like the team but whose heart is elsewhere.

Short of banning people like me from the stadium, how do the Angels build their fan base? And not just with numbers, but intensity?

As the former Angel management acknowledged, they can’t surrender someone like Nolan Ryan in mid-career. He’s the kind of player who creates and perpetuates local baseball history.

Using more contemporary hindsight, you get players like Mark McGwire. I wasn’t among those clamoring for McGwire last year, but like those people, I was quite wrong. You don’t even need an imagination to know what McGwire, who lives in Orange County in the off-season, would have meant this year to Angel fans and the franchise.

He wouldn’t have guaranteed the team a playoff spot, but do you think Edison Field would have been the tomb it resembled last week with McGwire and his then-65 homers in the house?

St. Louis, a city that understands baseball passion, locked up McGwire when it could.

Earlier this month, Sports Illustrated wrote this about Chicago Cub fans after Sammy Sosa hit his 62nd home run: “. . . tears streamed down grown men’s cheeks at Wrigley, and the thunder of 40,846 fans took six minutes and three curtain calls to subside.”

I didn’t go out to Edison Field expecting tears to be streaming down my face. At minimum, though, I wanted a charge of some kind.

Instead, I mostly sat quietly through two games, as if at a poetry reading. Part of it was the Angels played like poets, but had I been in Pittsburgh or St. Louis or Chicago, with the pennant up for grabs, the fans would have risen up as one and continually been exhorting the laggardly jocks.

Somehow, someway, baseball passion and Orange County must meet.

Instead, in my section, we got some teens trying to start the wave--when Texas was at bat.

And, of course, paper airplanes.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com