Salmon Wonders if Loyalty Is Two-Way Street With Angels

It is New Year’s Eve, the biggest one Tim Salmon will ever see, the end of the century, the end of the millennium, and Salmon is sitting in the cafeteria of St. Joseph’s hospital here. His wife, Marci, is in a bed upstairs. Marci and Tim are expecting twins and Marci has gone into premature labor. “The doctors would like to give the twins two more weeks,” Salmon says. “Every day counts, though. Marci’s got to stay flat on her back. So it doesn’t really feel like New Year’s Eve.”

Salmon surely doesn’t need to be sitting in this cafeteria and answering questions about baseball. Outside, fireworks have already started exploding. Upstairs, his wife is waiting for Tim to bring her a sandwich. And if you think a cafeteria-made deli sandwich doesn’t sound too appealing, “Hey,” Salmon says, “you should see the dinner they brought her. Two nights in a row. I couldn’t eat it.”

But Salmon is a good guy, a guy who doesn’t say no. He’s also a guy who has always felt proud to be an Angel. He’s an old-fashioned guy. He admits it. Salmon is a guy who values loyalty. He’s a guy who says he’ll never forget the day he was in A ball and broke his jaw and, Salmon says, “Billy Bavasi was sitting there. He came up to me on the bench, put his arm around me and said, ‘Whatever you want to do. Whatever it takes. We’ll get this taken care of.’ ”

Bavasi’s gone now. So are many of the scouts and inside people Salmon had come to know. So is pitcher Chuck Finley. Salmon was sure Finley would always be an Angel. It’s all Finley had ever been. Now, a month later, Salmon still can’t quite believe Finley is gone, a free agent signed by Cleveland. A pitcher, something the Angels never have enough of, sent away. A touchstone of the organization lost for nothing. Not a minor leaguer, not cash, not a thing.

“I still can’t imagine what it’s going to be like walking into the clubhouse on the first day of spring training and not seeing Chuck there,” Salmon says. “Who’s going to be the opening day starter? I can’t believe it’s not going to be Chuck.”

Salmon had always thought he would be like Finley. Once an Angel, always an Angel. He thought that until December when his name started coming up in trade rumors.

“That got my attention,” Salmon says. “Being traded, that’s just not a concern I’ve ever had. When I heard my name mentioned the first time, I turned to Marci and said, ‘Well, now I know how 24 other guys on the team have felt.’ You hear your name now, and then you realize that you have nobody to talk to even. There’s nobody I could pick up the phone and ask, ‘Is this true?’ ”

He hasn’t spoken to new General Manager Bill Stoneman yet. He’s had a 20-minute, ‘Hi, I’m Tim, who are you?’ chat with new Manager Mike Scioscia. Salmon has sat at home here, as he says, “enjoying my family and coming to the realization that I’ll be playing baseball somewhere. Frankly, with Marci in the hospital and me being Mr. Mom at home, what’s going on with me and the Angels is not a concern right now.”

When Salmon saw Finley leave, something he never believed would happen no matter what he kept reading and hearing, it made him think a little bit.

“If Mr. Autry were here, I don’t think Chuck would have ever left,” Salmon says. “All of a sudden I’m finding out what most guys already know, I guess. That this is a business. That’s all it is. Loyalty is not a word I use with the Angels now. And it’s not that I’m critical of that. It’s the way things are in most places. But here, for a long time, it seemed like you knew everybody. Everybody was around when you were in the minors. I truly thought I would be here forever.”

Salmon tries to figure out how the Angels got to the point where, as he says, “In July there was all this talk about different players we’d get if we traded Chuck to where we ended up losing him for nothing. How did that happen?”

That the Angels have made no other moves yet also puzzles Salmon. “The week after the season ended,” he says, “it sounded like imminent D-Day. All we heard was that after the season, heads were going to roll. Here we are now, nothing’s happened and it’s January. Other teams have made deals.”

Do the Angels still want to be a good team? Salmon wants to believe that. He says that “I don’t think they brought in Stoneman to slash the payroll.” He says, “I think this organization is still committed to winning.”

But that commitment appeared to get lost last year, and Salmon says, without going into specifics, that the reports of clubhouse friction “were not overblown.” Without being specifically critical about Terry Collins, Salmon says, “Last year management starting asking players their opinions on things. Guys started giving them and then, if those opinions weren’t implemented, guys started getting upset. I’ve found it better to just not give opinions.”

Without Collins, and Salmon didn’t say this, but his timeline indicated it, “The last month of the season we kind of rallied the troops. We kind of all got together and said that all the bickering, all the finger-pointing, it had to stop. We had to make this work. After that, we played together, played better and had fun.”

Without knowing much about Scioscia, Salmon says maybe it will help that his new manager used to be a player. “Sometimes a guy who played will understand better how it is when you’re in a slump or what you’re going through when you’re injured.”

Salmon knows about injuries. He limped through the 1998 season with an injured foot and he missed 2 1/2 months of the 1999 disaster with a sprained wrist. He knows that there are no excuses in baseball, but he says, “[Mo] Vaughn, [Gary] DiSarcina, me, Jimmy [Edmonds], all the injuries. Look at the Yankees, look at Cleveland, they didn’t have those kinds of injuries.”

The cell phone is ringing. It is Marci upstairs. Tim has been gone for almost an hour talking about the Angels. He calls them “we.” He looks at other teams in the American League West and sees that things haven’t been going all that well for them either. “We can still win the division,” he says.

But it’s time to make Marci’s sandwich. Then he will go home to tuck in six-year-old Callie and three-year-old Jacob. The twins will be a boy and a girl. Quite frankly, Salmon finds it easy to stop thinking about the Angels.

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