Quet Tims

By BILL SHAIKIN

March 29, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame, with fans slapping on sunscreen and sucking on water bottles in anticipation of the first pitch. It’s the season for spring training in Palm Springs, with players jogging to their positions beneath an impossibly blue desert sky, in the shadow of mountains crowned by snow.

Fans? Seven, if you count the one in the stroller. Players? The pitcher meets the catcher halfway to the mound and extends his hand.

“I’m Henry,” says the pitcher.

“I’m Mike,” says the catcher.

The Angels don’t play here anymore. They trained at Angels Stadium for 32 years, then traded up for the comforts of Arizona in 1993.

They left behind memories of the most star-studded spring home in baseball history. Gene Autry, America’s beloved “Singing Cowboy,” invited celebrity friends like Bob Hope, Cary Grant, Lucille Ball and former President Dwight Eisenhower to watch his team.

The Angels left behind their stadium too. In their place, on a recent Sunday, is a recreational adult league.

“When I go out to the outfield, I think, my God, this is the same outfield Willie Mays played on,” said Grant Doheny, 49, of Cathedral City.

To families across Southern California, Palm Springs was synonymous with spring training. Vero Beach, the Florida hamlet where the Dodgers train, is a pilgrimage. Arizona’s Cactus League is accessible, but Palm Springs was baseball on a whim, a two-hour drive to swimsuits in the stands and the frozen lemonade cart behind home plate.

The cart is gone now. The national anthem is not played before Henry throws his first pitch to Mike. And, in an almost mocking way, the only public address announcements are those from a dog show in the adjacent park. The seventh inning is interrupted by a booming voice proclaiming, “We’re ready to start judging the Chihuahuas.”

On an exterior wall of the stadium, on a weather-beaten plaque a little bigger than your hand, a civic leader is memorialized “for his unceasing effort in bringing the California Angels to Palm Springs.”

Miss that plaque, circa 1966, and you’ll miss the only apparent evidence the Angels played here. Even the stadium name did not survive the Angels’ departure; it’s Palm Springs Stadium now.

Autry bought the Angels as an expansion team in 1960 and brought spring training to Palm Springs, at a time when the desert resort was Hollywood’s favorite hideaway.

“Every day at the ballpark was an adventure--especially for me, a kid from Ohio,” said Buck Rodgers, then the Angel catcher. “Every day, you’d see a star. The actors were all friends of Gene’s.”

Dinah Shore threw out the ceremonial first pitch before the Angels’ first game in Palm Springs. The players mingled with Doris Day, Angie Dickinson and Ann Margret at the Chi Chi Club and applauded as Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra performed to benefit the Palm Springs Police Department.

Rodgers recalls playing touch football with Desi Arnaz Jr. Outfielder Albie Pearson presented a bat, autographed by all the players, to Eisenhower.

“President Eisenhower was really quite a fan,” Pearson said.

The Freeway Series was born here, with the Angels beating the Dodgers, 6-5, in 1962. The next year, the local booster club gave the Angels a golf cart, a dash of desert flavor, for shuttling relief pitchers from the bullpen to the mound. The Angels loved the idea, used the cart all season, and started a trend throughout the major leagues.

As Autry’s contemporaries faded away, the stars in the stands were replaced by stars on the field. The Angels played to win--and paid to win--with high-priced heroes like Don Baylor, Rod Carew, Reggie Jackson, Bobby Grich and Fred Lynn leading the team to its only American League West championships in 1979, ’82 and ’86.

Palm Springs attendance more than doubled from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, with temporary bleachers accommodating overflow crowds, including a record 6,002 for a game in 1986. Game days were ditch days for kids at Palm Springs High, located just beyond right field.

“I used to skip fifth period and come over here,” said Henry Bringas, 27, of Cathedral City. “All the kids would come out for batting practice.”

Whether you caught a ball or brought a ball, you could join the scramble for autographs. The kid behind you might have been Troy Percival, a Fontana native who grew up to pitch for the Angels.

“I got to see [beloved coach] Jimmie Reese hitting fungoes, and I got his autograph. I got Rod Carew’s autograph,” Percival said.

“Reggie told me to get out of his way. Actually, I believe it was, ‘Get the [bleep] out of my way.’ ”

The glamour evaporated, slowly but surely, on all fronts. Desert glamour moved east, as Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert attracted the wealthy, and Palm Springs struggled to define itself beyond senior citizens and spring break riots. Stadium glamour took a hit each time another team moved into a grand new complex in Arizona, triggering another round of Angel complaints about the cramped clubhouse and peeling paint in Palm Springs.

And baseball glamour no longer wore a halo, with dizzying salary escalation compelling Jackie Autry to close her husband’s saddlebags. The Autrys signed their last marquee free agent, Mark Langston, in 1989; they sold the team to Disney in 1996.

Gene Autry loved the game, and the game loved him in return, never more than in Palm Springs. He was the face of the Angels here, from their first game at Angels Stadium to their last.

In the final years, he sat beneath the stands and behind home plate, in the shade of a tunnel, always impeccably dressed and always with a kind word for players and fans alike. Players and their families flocked to his barbecues at the Autry Hotel, an anachronistic touch in the modern era of corporate ownership. Gene Autry Trail still leads from Interstate 10 into town.

In 1992, as the Angels spent their final days in Palm Springs, pitcher Scott Bailes sold T-shirts from his locker, for $10 each. The inscription: “Last Hurrah in Shangri-La.”

Sold out.

The divorce was inevitable, the squabbling pointless. The late Sonny Bono, then mayor of Palm Springs, charged the Angels with “whining” about their aging desert home. Richard Brown, then the Angel president, shot back that he had not whined “since I wanted a lollipop at age 3.”

Cactus League rivals complained about long bus trips from the Phoenix and Tucson areas and little space to work out. The Angels seconded the latter complaint, since the lone diamond adjacent to the stadium was also adjacent to a street. Batting practice was forbidden, lest foul balls injure pedestrians or shatter car windows.

If Gene Autry had not owned the Angels, they might well have fled Palm Springs a decade earlier. By the time the Autrys relented, Palm Springs was doomed. By itself, the city could not afford to grant the Angels their wish list. Neither could Tempe, but by then Arizona poured millions of tax dollars into the construction of lavish training complexes. Tempe tapped that pool of state money, and Tempe got the Angels.

Shangri-La? Not there. Of the 10 Cactus League teams, the Angels outdrew only the Milwaukee Brewers last season. Unsuspecting players risk bites from the scorpions that can infiltrate shoes and equipment bags at Tempe Diablo Stadium.

But the stadium offers ample seating and parking and uncrowded aisles for fans and multiple diamonds and a spacious clubhouse and weight room for players. The Angels did not make money in Palm Springs; they do in Tempe.

The Angels were not alone in abandoning Palm Springs. The minor league team that occupied the creaky ballpark each summer found paradise in Lake Elsinore and its jewel of a stadium. The Pepsi All-Star charity softball game bolted for a Cathedral City recreation complex featuring miniature renditions of Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium.

A semipro team, the Promise, survived one summer in Palm Springs Stadium. An independent minor league team, the Suns, survived two, providing the last job for Al Campanis, the late, disgraced architect of championship Dodger teams. The Suns embarrassed themselves with such promotions as Nude Night, which was canceled, and Intermission Night, in which the Suns stranded the visiting team in the field while their players hopped into the stands to sign autographs.

While Palm Springs would welcome the return of professional baseball, city parks and recreation manager Vicki Oltean said, promoters tend to dangle promises and visions rather than present evidence of financial viability.

“Guys tell you, ‘I’ll fill the stadium,’ ” Oltean said. “No you won’t, not in July and August when it’s 120 degrees.”

There is no identity crisis without pro baseball. Palm Springs has reinvented itself numerous times in recent years, as the home of an acclaimed film festival, retro architecture, a casino and spa, a rock climbing school and a newly vibrant downtown, as a family-friendly hometown as well as a mecca for gay and lesbian tourists.

Palm Springs Stadium celebrated its 50th birthday last year--its original name was the Polo Grounds--as a community asset. Although the city loses about $20,000 per year in operating expenses, Oltean said, amateur baseball games and tournaments and a youth football league help fill the stadium for some 150 dates annually. A Japanese baseball team recently rented the facility for spring training; a weekend blues festival is scheduled for October.

If blues bands could play here for a day or two, why not the Angels? In 1991, in the letter that officially terminated the Angels’ lease in Palm Springs, Brown wrote, “It is our desire, with the consent of Major League Baseball and the Cactus League, to return Major League Baseball to the city of Palm Springs in the form of exhibition games in the near future.”

The Angels have yet to return. Tim Mead, the Angels’ vice president of communications, said the team has not even discussed the possibility.

“It’s really not practical,” Mead said.

The San Diego Padres left Yuma, Ariz., the year after the Angels left Palm Springs, but the Padres return to their ancestral training ground for two games each spring. Percival said he would be happy to play a day in Palm Springs, and perhaps the Angels could stop by on their way home from Arizona.

“That would be great, even just for a couple games,” Oltean said. “It would be packed.”

That would be one difference from the games in Tempe. Another difference, Percival said, is that Tempe fans tend to be baseball fans. Palm Springs fans were Angel fans.

The Cowboy’s team, the Cowboy’s town.

Staff writer Mike DiGiovanna contributed to this story.

DIANE PUCIN

Don Baylor didn’t get a chance at managing the Angels, but he’s making the most of things at the helm of the Cubs. Page 10

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Spring by Numbers

The Angels attracted thousands of new fans during their first two years of spring training in Tempe, Ariz. Since then, however, they have drawn no better in Tempe than they did in their final years at the aging stadium in Palm Springs.

PALM SPRINGS

1987: 4,425

1988: 4,527

1989: 4,670

1990 *: 3,581

1991: 4,783

1992: 4,306

TEMPE

1993: 5,882

1994: 6,486

1995 **: 2,446

1996: 4,876