Angels Turn to Web for Off-Season Pitch

Edison International Field was nearly empty Wednesday, with not a fan in sight. Yet Troy Percival sat in a small office there and talked with hundreds of Angel fans.

Chatted, actually. In these final weeks before spring training, when teams traditionally dispatch players into the community to sell tickets and generate interest in the coming season, the Angels’ star relief pitcher spent an hour in a chat room, answering dozens of questions in an online gathering of fans.

“If I’m at a high school talking to kids face to face, I’d rather do that,” Percival said. “If I have to go talk to corporate people, trying to sell suites, I would rather do this.

“I’m talking baseball. I’m not trying to sell tickets.”

No team can afford to ignore the rise of the Internet in developing sales and marketing strategies. Staples Center sells one-third of event tickets online, spokeswoman Vanessa Kromer said.

However, in an Internet universe with thousands of sports sites, the Angels and other teams must first distinguish their sites to attract fans. According to Dan Migala, executive vice president of interactive marketing for the Leib Group, chat sessions with stars like Percival help teams lure fans.

“They’re the one group of sports Web sites that can really separate themselves from the ESPN.coms and all the others,” Migala said. “You can provide fans with access to the team like no one else.”

So Percival sat in a chair, fidgeting and twisting a pen between his fingers, as the operators of the Angels’ Web site--https://www.angelsbaseball.com--selected questions submitted via e-mail and relayed them to Percival via telephone. He answered on the telephone, and the operators typed his responses into the computer.

Of the 187 questions submitted, operators selected 40. Percival answered them all, including inquiries about the health of his pitching arm, the competitiveness of the team, the hardest hitter for him to strike out (Edgar Martinez of the Seattle Mariners), his favorite players when he was growing up (Steve Garvey and Steve Yeager of the Dodgers) and the job he might have if not playing baseball (installing car stereos).

And who, one anonymous fan wanted to know, had the greatest impact on his life?

“My mom asked that question,” Percival said with a chuckle before responding. “She’s online all the time.” (His answer, of course: “My parents.”)

The Angels offered chat sessions last week with Gold Glove center fielder Jim Edmonds and new manager Mike Scioscia. The team plans to offer regular sessions with players, coaches and management during the season.

The sessions are particularly valuable this winter, said Angel vice president of communications Tim Mead. As the Angels endure criticism for making no trades and signing no major free agents to improve a last-place team, Mead said fans would prefer to hear a season outlook from a player or two rather than a team spokesman or executive.

“From us, it sounds like spin,” Mead said.

The Dodgers launched their award-winning site--https://www.dodgers.com--in 1996, two years before the Angels went online. The Dodgers’ site now attracts 50,000 visitors per day during the baseball season and 35,000 per day during the off-season, Dodger Webmaster Ben Platt said.

The Dodgers invite fans to submit e-mail questions to broadcaster Ross Porter for his weekly radio show; 600 questions were submitted last week.

“We keep saying the Internet is the medium of the future, but the future is now,” said Derrick Hall, Dodger senior vice president of communications. “It caught on much faster than anyone believed.”

So far, Migala said, teams tend to emphasize promotion over hard-core marketing on their Web sites. For every 100 fans participating in a chat session, 25 might click further for information about buying tickets or merchandise, with five to 10 making a purchase, according to Migala.

“Teams are being cautious about about not trying to overcommercialize their sites,” Migala said. “They don’t want you feeling you’re being force-fed into buying a jersey.”