Trading Emotions : Olivares, Velarde Go From Last Place to Playoff Race

Omar Olivares and Randy Velarde will certainly end this baseball season at the same time as their former teammates. Olivares and Velarde will almost surely be in the Oakland A’s clubhouse this week when the A’s are finally eliminated from baseball’s wild-card playoff race.

In an odd bit of coincidence, the young, eager and comparatively meagerly paid A’s, who had gladly grabbed two of the Angels’ best performers of the 1999 season to help them in their own improbable playoff run, might very well be eliminated by Boston while Velarde and Olivares are in Anaheim.

Both ex-Angels would have loved this to be a triumphant return trip, their first since their surprise trade to Oakland two months ago. Instead, it will just be slightly strange and slightly uncomfortable. It will be a reminder of great promise and great disappointment. It will be a reunion with some old friends and also a time to think again of what has gone so terribly wrong.

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A week before this return trip Olivares was sitting at his Oakland locker, eating potato chips and marveling at his good luck.

“Baseball is fun here,” Olivares says. He opens his arms as if to embrace the whole, wonderful world of the Oakland A’s, even the grim and empty seats on a night when barely 6,000 people have come to watch a young team continue its chase for a wild-card berth.

“I felt relief the day I arrived here and now I know why. It’s fun to be here. There is joking around here and players and management are more relaxed here. I don’t feel pressure here. In Anaheim, there was pressure. People were intense. Too intense. Hear the people laughing in here? You didn’t hear that in Anaheim.”

Olivares has a 7-2 record since he arrived in Oakland. He defeated Roger Clemens and the Yankees, 7-1. His ERA is 4.13, which isn’t quite as good as his 4.05 ERA with the Angels, but his record was only 8-9 with the Angels. “Better baseball is being played here,” Olivares says, “so my record is better, of course.” He has felt welcomed and appreciated and he says he would be happy to sign again with the A’s next season.

You do not find Velarde licking potato chip salt from his lips and speaking in giddy riffs about his freedom from the Angels.

Where’s Velarde? “He’s probably stretching,” Olivares says.

“No, he’s probably lifting,” a clubhouse attendant says.

“I think he already lifted,” someone else says. “He might be outside running.”

If you voted for stretching, you’d be right.

Velarde has beat all his teammates out into the hot afternoon. If Velarde is licking salt from his lips, it is sweaty salt.

When Velarde, the serious second baseman, agrees to talk about his teams, old and new, the words are spoken slowly and seriously.

Velarde was not relieved to leave the Angels on July 29. He was sad.

“Here’s the image I keep thinking about,” Velarde says. “I keep thinking about the Titanic. I feel like I was on the Titanic and got on the last lifeboat. I’m looking back at the sinking ship and wishing I could take my friends with me and very sad that I can’t.”

When Velarde found out about the trade, when he heard he would be leaving the American League’s worst and crankiest team for what had become a baseball feel-good story, a story of the peach-fuzzed kids with minimal salaries and wide-eyed enthusiasm, “it was not a happy day,” Velarde says.

Having missed much of the previous two seasons with injuries, Velarde says, “I am and will always be grateful for the way the Angels stuck with me. I felt like I owed them this year. I felt like I owed them a great season and I wanted to be with the Angels when they won something big. It’s what I thought this season was going to be about, so to leave under those circumstances was not what I wanted.

“Today, right now, I feel as if I’ve left something unfinished there and if I could figure out what went wrong, I’d love it.”

There’s no doubt in Velarde’s mind that the Angels are cursed. “Absolutely that’s how I feel,” he says. “All the injuries, how do you explain it? I can’t. Nobody can.”

While Olivares spoke in wonderment about the joy and fun he has found with baseball in Oakland, Velarde is more subdued. “There are a lot of similarities between this Oakland team and last year’s Angels,” he says. “Nobody expected us to do what we did last year, and nobody expected what has happened with the A’s this year.”

And Velarde is quick to stomp out any high aspirations the potential-filled A’s might have for next year. “Things will be so different for this team next spring. There will suddenly be expectations and pressure. There was no pressure on this team. Because of what’s happened now, there will be pressure next year.”

Spoken like a man who has had optimism sucked from him.

Spoken like an Angel.

Velarde has been quietly spectacular with the A’s, starting all 55 games since he arrived from Anaheim. He is batting .326 compared to .306 with the Angels.

While Olivares says he would very much like to return to Oakland next season, Velarde refuses to say where he’d like to play. It could even be Anaheim. “Never say never,” Velarde says. But the 36-year-old Velarde says proudly that he feels he has proved himself after two injury-filled years and that he is sure someone will want him next year.

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Olivares and Velarde spoke last week when the A’s still had a trip to Texas ahead of them and the silly thoughts of a sweep and a run at the AL West title or a sneak attack on the Red Sox for the wild card.

But the Rangers swept the A’s over the weekend and have clinched the division. As the A’s enter their game tonight against the Angels, the Red Sox have a magic number of one to clinch the wild-card spot--one Boston victory or one Oakland loss and that race is over too.

So those teammates left on the sinking ship that is the Angels could torpedo that lifeboat for Velarde. And no one will be happy, not his ex-mates and not him. But that’s the way it has been with the Angels.

No one is ever happy.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address:diane.pucin@latimes.com