Angels’ Season: Fair or Foul?

The Angels will win the American League West this year.

It could happen.

All the young pitchers have breakout years. Ismael Valdes gets his head and arm in sync, learns to read a map and wins 18 games. Darin Erstad confirms what we think, that he is the best player in baseball. Troy Glaus hits 40 home runs again, and Wally Joyner says goodbye to baseball by making us all think he is 26, not 38. Jose Canseco stays sound 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 turn out to be mediocre. Valdes starts slowly, gets moody, keeps ending up at Dodger Stadium instead of Edison Field, 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 managerial hire. He turned out to be a brilliant find by General Manager Bill Stoneman.

Scioscia enthusiastically held together a makeshift pitching staff 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 Vaughn big free-agent money to leave Boston. Disney President Michael Eisner all but trash-talked the Dodgers.

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

Then came Mo’s misstep.

Both player and team crashed.

Now what?

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

On the other hand, if there is an area where the Angels aren’t hurting, it is the power department. Unlike the company that has its name on the stadium, Southern California Edison, the Angels may have enough power, even without Vaughn.

Erstad, Glaus, Tim Salmon, Garret Anderson . . . The Angels were third in the American League last season in home runs. It is not impossible that 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. Valdes got lost on his way to spring training and ended up at the Oakland A’s facility. That’s bad. And the Angels also 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, the A’s have done a pretty good job of finding cheap talent so maybe Valdes’ wrong turn is one of those good omens. And Valdes did have the gumption to ask for directions. How many men do that? Valdes has also had seasons of durability and decent results. He has expressed an eagerness to rebuild his reputation and insists he is in better shape 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 shocking. They have all spent a competitive season in the major leagues. They should all have matured. That’s good.

The 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, sidelined almost all of last season, 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 in 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.

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

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DEAL CLOSED: Mariano Rivera became the highest-paid relief pitcher in baseball, agreeing to a four-year, $39.99-million contract with the World Series champion New York Yankees. D8

WELCOME BACK: Ramon Martinez, who re-signed with the Dodgers in January after two seasons with the Red Sox, reported to Dodgertown and quickly reconnected with his past. D8

IT’S A GRIND: Angel pitcher Scott Schoeneweis, 27, prepares for his third full season with a better grasp of the physical and mental demands of a 162-game schedule. D8