Angels May Not Be Men of Troy

Troy Percival turns 32 in August, and although the Angel closer feels he has five or six good years left in his right arm, he’s beginning to wonder if it would be wise to spend them with a franchise that seems to be in a perennial rebuilding mode.

“I would love to win here, but if it’s not going to happen here, I want it to happen somewhere,” Percival said before the Angels extended their losing streak to a season-high six games Tuesday night with a 5-2 loss to the Oakland Athletics before 51,838 in Network Associates Coliseum.

“If we are rebuilding again . . . how many times do you want to go through that? There are nine rookies [actually seven] here. That leads you to believe they’re playing for the future. Do we have enough to win here? Yeah, but when you have that many rookies, it doesn’t seem like you’re trying to win now.”

Percival is in his seventh season in Anaheim. Asked how many rebuilding phases he has been through, he said: “I couldn’t tell you . . . sometimes I think it’s never stopped. We’ve made efforts to win in the past, and it hasn’t worked out.”

Neither is this season for the offense-impaired Angels, who are 23 games behind Seattle in the American League West and 10 games off the wild-card pace. The vultures, not surprisingly, are beginning to hover.

Several teams, including the St. Louis Cardinals, have inquired about Percival, and General Manager Bill Stoneman likely will receive numerous offers for other players before the July 31 trade deadline, as contenders look to bolster their rosters for pennant races.

Percival, who came up with the Angels and has saved 190 games for them, is not pushing for a trade but seems open to the possibility of one. He makes $3.45 million this season and the Angels hold a $5.25-million option for 2002.

“I couldn’t blame them if they wanted to trade me if they could get what they need to improve the team,” said Percival, who is 3-1 with an 0.90 earned-run average and 19 saves in 20 opportunities. “I wouldn’t be upset or angry at the organization for even thinking about it.”

Stoneman said it would be difficult to trade Percival right now, “but the one thing I don’t like doing is saying no right off the bat,” he said. “You never know where something is going to lead.”

The Angels, whose farm system has a shortage of power-hitting prospects, could probably get three top minor leaguers or a big league starter and a top prospect in exchange for Percival.

“We’ll continue to discuss things with other clubs and there could be an opportunity to improve our club,” Stoneman said. “But the opportunities I’m seeking aren’t to improve the team two or three years from now; I’m looking to improve the team now.”

To that end, Stoneman is not ready to write off the season, despite the Angels’ predicament: They have virtually no chance to win the division and there are five teams ahead of them in the wild-card race.

“We feel we have a pretty good club, a balanced club,” Stoneman said. “We felt all along our pitching would be good, and it has been. But we’ve got to kick it in gear right now. We have to start scoring some runs.”

The Angel offense finally got out of park in the second inning Tuesday when Garret Anderson hit a two-run home run off Oakland starter Barry Zito, ending the Angels’ consecutive scoreless innings streak at 27.

But the A’s countered with five runs in the third off Angel starter Pat Rapp (2-9), two on Miguel Tejada’s home run into the second deck in left field, and the Angels had only one hit--Bengie Molina’s seventh-inning single--from the third inning on.

The Angels had four hits Tuesday night. They have one extra-base hit in the last three games. They’ve scored 13 runs and had 44 hits in the last six games.

Anderson endured two nine-game losing streaks in 1995 and an 11-game losing streak in 1999, “but this is as rough as any stretch I’ve ever seen,” the Angel left fielder said.

“We’ve been in stretches in the past where we’ve struggled to score, but not too many where--one through nine--the entire lineup hasn’t done much. Whatever the reason is for that, I don’t know.”