It’s Not All Bad for Angels

The Angels will win the American League West this year.

It could happen.

All the young pitchers might have breakout years. Ismael Valdes has his head and his arm in sync and he wins 18 games. Darin Erstad will confirm what we think, that he is the best player in baseball. Troy Glaus will clobber another 40 home runs and Wally Joyner will say goodbye to baseball by making us all think he was 26 and not 38. Jose Canseco stays healthy and by August we all say “Mo Who?”

The Angels will finish last in the American League West this year.

It could happen.

All the young pitchers could be mediocre. Valdes starts slow, gets moody, wins eight games and makes the clubhouse an awful place to visit. Erstad gets hurt in June and Glaus has trouble when he has no protection in the lineup. We all wish Joyner had retired last year and when we see Canseco, we remember Mo Vaughn. We remember Mo and all his strikeouts.

Trying to gauge the Angels is so hard.

Last year, most everybody thought the Angels would be awful. Too many of us thought Mike Scioscia was a cheap hire as manager when he turned out to be a brilliant find by General Manager Bill Stoneman.

Scioscia coaxed a makeshift pitching staff into holding together until September. Erstad and Glaus blossomed into two of the best young players in the league. Somehow, for no good reason, the Angels hung in the division race until the final weeks of the season. Who knew?

The year before, the Angels were supposed to be great. Disney got crazy and paid Mo Vaughn big, free-agent money to leave Boston. Disney President Michael Eisner all but trash talked the Dodgers.

A team that nearly made the playoffs the previous year seemed poised, after a big, bold, brash move, to take the next step.

Then came Mo’s misstep.

Both player and team crashed.

So now what?

Spring training is starting and already the Angels have a big loss. Vaughn is out for the season after surgery to restore a torn biceps muscle and tendon. That’s bad.

On the other hand, if there is an area the Angels aren’t hurting, it is in the power department. Unlike the company that owns naming rights to its home, Edison Field, the Angels may have enough power, even without Vaughn.

Erstad, Glaus, Tim Salmon, Garret Anderson. The Angels were third in the AL last year in home runs. It is not impossible Canseco will take up Vaughn’s bash quotient. That’s good.

The Angels didn’t sign the big-name pitcher fans hoped for. They signed Dodger reject Valdes. They sent off promising youngster Seth Etherton to Cincinnati in a trade for a 22-year-old shortstop no one has heard of. That’s bad.

On the other hand, Valdes has had seasons of great durability and decent results. He has expressed an eagerness to redeem his reputation and insists he is healthier than ever. Ramon Ortiz, Jarrod Washburn, Scott Schoeneweis, Matt Wise and Brian Cooper have all, at times, pitched well. But what if two or three or all of them pitch well more often this year? That would not be a shock. They have spent a competitive season in the major leagues. They should have all matured. That’s good.

The 22-year-old shortstop the Angels got for Etherton is Wilmy Caceres. By all accounts, he is not ready to play in the major leagues. Gary DiSarcina, once a big plus, won’t be back from his 2000 shoulder surgery until May. And who knows if DiSarcina, who missed all of last year, will ever be able to play the position well again? That means Benji Gil at shortstop again, right? That’s bad.

But what if DiSarcina comes back frisky, strong, raring to go, able to play the position like the old days? And what if Stoneman knows something we don’t about Caceres, who will have had a chance to apprentice for a couple of months before DiSarcina returns? That could be good.

We could go on this way forever about the 2001 Angels. Good, bad. Great expectations, no expectations.

“I think,” Scioscia says, “we are definitely contenders based on last year.

“You have to think the prospects are we will have better starting pitching. It is not a far stretch to think our young pitchers could do what the young pitchers did at Oakland. Our guys are more than capable of doing that. We should be sounder defensively and I believe our offensive production will be at least as good as last year.”

Who is going to call Scioscia a liar? He said the Angels would be competitive last season, and he was right. To not believe him would be to worry that Erstad and Glaus will become baseball’s version of Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne--two great, young talents tied to a team unable or unwilling to fill in the blanks, to make a great team.

The Angels are what nearly every major league team but the New York Yankees are. Impossible to predict.

That’s bad. That’s good. That’s life with the Angels.

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