Even Angels’ All-Time Team Knows What Can Happen

Mo Vaughn made it through the first inning on opening night without falling into a dugout and injuring his ankle, which means that the Angels are ahead of where they were at this point last season.

As for whether the Angels will finish ahead of where they did in 1999, I’m not optimistic.

No team with two players named Benjie on the opening-day roster ever won anything. OK, one is Benji (Gil) and the other is Bengie (Molina), but that’s just spelling.

The Angels appear destined to finish their 40th season the way they did the previous 39, without winning a world championship. But they do have something in common with their opponents Monday night at Edison Field, the New York Yankees.

Reggie Jackson is among the players on the cover of each team’s 2000 media guide.

As evidenced by the members of their all-time team, whose pictures are part of the new outfield-wall mural, the Angels have had great players. Elected by fans and honored before the game were Jackson, Rod Carew, Nolan Ryan, Jim Fregosi, Bobby Grich, Don Baylor, Doug DeCinces, Jim Edmonds, Chuck Finley, Troy Percival, Bob Boone, Brian Downing, Frank Tanana and Mike Witt.

It would have been a more meaningful ceremony if Edmonds and Finley had been there. The Angels would be better with them in uniform. You could say the same thing about Ryan, Tanana and Witt.

Maybe it wouldn’t make any difference.

Grich believes the Angels are cursed by something other than Disney’s ownership. If you think he’s in the minority, you should have heard the gasp when Vaughn came perilously close to the edge of the visitors’ dugout in the third inning before catching Chuck Knoblauch’s pop foul.

“Strange, it’s very strange,” Grich said before the game of the team’s history of futility. “Last year, when Mo Vaughn went down in the first inning of the first game of the season, I said, ‘Not again.’

“When is this going to end? An uncanny number of things have happened to this organization, even more than to the Cubs. I don’t know how you explain it, but it’s there. Maybe it will end with the start of the new millennium.”

Great. He’s already saying, “Wait until next year.”

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You can bet Mike Scioscia, the Angels’ new manager, was closely scrutinized in his first game as a major league manager. Three other finalists for the job, Boone and Yankee coaches Chris Chambliss and Willie Randolph were in the park. . . .

Scioscia received several calls Monday from people wishing him luck but not one from his former Dodger manager, Tom Lasorda, who was in Japan. . . .

“They don’t reverse charges on calls from Japan,” Scioscia said. . . .

Yankee Manager Joe Torre received a call from Billy Crystal. . . .

“That’s become a ritual,” Torre said. “He called me once in Toronto during a four-game losing streak and we won our next four games. He said, ‘When do I start getting credit?’ I said, ‘When we win five in a row.’ ”

Torre is being roasted today at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. . . .

“Milton Berle asked,” he said. “You can’t turn Milton Berle down.” . . .

They met about 40 years ago, when Torre played for the Milwaukee Braves. Berle asked him and teammate Milt Pappas to have breakfast at his home before a game in Los Angeles against the Dodgers. . . .

“When we got to the park after breakfast, the manager [Bobby Bragan] thought we were just coming in from the night before,” Torre said. “He said, ‘Nobody gets to the park early on Sunday morning.’ We told him we’d just had breakfast with Milton Berle. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said.”

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The Angels’ slogan this season--Come on Home!--is written on the wall in left field, next to the mural of Edmonds. . . .

Edmonds apparently doesn’t miss the Angels. According to Sports Illustrated, he was about to dump his Angel duffel bag into the trash upon arriving in the St. Louis Cardinal clubhouse when new teammate Shawon Dunston told him to save it. . . .

Edmonds dumped it, anyway. . . .

“I ain’t saving this crap,” he said. . . .

This tells you something about the difference in the Angel and Yankee prospects for this season: If the Angels had been able to trade Edmonds for Ramiro Mendoza, Mendoza would have been their No. 1 starter. He stayed with the Yankees as their No. 5 starter behind Orlando Hernandez, Roger Clemens, David Cone and Andy Pettitte. . . .

Headlines in New York over the winter screamed about the $118.5-million, seven-year deal that George Steinbrenner was about to offer shortstop Derek Jeter. . . .

But Steinbrenner apparently had second thoughts when the player he considers the game’s best, Ken Griffey Jr., signed for nine years at $116.5 million. . . .

Jeter insisted Monday that he wasn’t upset. . . .

“I don’t have many complaints about anything,” he said. “If you’re not having fun playing for the New York Yankees, something’s wrong with you. It’s what I always dreamed of doing.” . . .

Besides, he’s still earning $10 million this season. . . .

The Yankees are trying to become the first team since the 1972-74 Oakland A’s to win three consecutive World Series. . . .

Which team was better? Jackson, who played for those A’s and is now a special assistant for the Yankees, chooses Oakland. . . .

“We had better pitching,” he told the New York Times. “It was like we had Cone and Clemens in their prime.” . . .

He also might have mentioned “El Duque,” except that no one knows when the man whose birth date has changed more often than Adrian Beltre’s was in his prime. . . .

It might have been in the fifth inning, when he struck out Vaughn for the third time, this time with the bases loaded. . . .

The fans booed. Baseball was back. The Angels were back.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com