The Old Favorite Has a Moment That Hits Home

For a decade their names have been synonymous, in good times and bad, this small pond and its giant fish.

The Angels and Tim Salmon.

Tim Salmon and the Angels.

Always in the same breath. Forever in the same sentence.

Eternally waiting, it seemed, for a brilliant night like Sunday, when they could share even the same champions’ thump of a heartbeat.

Early in World Series Game 2 against the San Francisco Giants, the Angels were flying, and Salmon was their tail wind.

Midway through Game 2, the Angels were diving, and Salmon was their storm.

Eighth inning of Game 2, score tied at 9-all, the Angels needed a hero.

And Salmon was at the plate.

“I guess it might as well have been me,” he said later, shrugging.

After all these years, could it have been anybody else?

First pitch from tiring Felix Rodriguez, Salmon swatted it over the left-field fence as easily as a man tossing a candy wrapper into his kitchen waste basket.

He rounded the bases like a man strolling from the living room to the den.

He crossed the plate with the eventual game-winning run, his teammates hopping up and down in the dugout, the Edison Field crowd lifting its voices higher than a geyser, and you could feel it as he felt it.

Tim Salmon had, indeed, in every sense of the word, come home.

Home, after a two-run homer that eventually gave the Angels an 11-10 victory.

Home, after saving his team from a possible Series death blow, evening the thing at one game apiece.

Home, where his heart has always been, even if his swing has not.

“You cheer for everybody on our team, of course,” said third base coach Ron Roenicke. “But when a guy like Tim does well, it’s like, yeah.”

Nobody symbolizes the Angels’ recent history more than Salmon. He even has the statistics to prove it before this fall, his league-high 1,388 games played without a playoff appearance.

There is also no better representative of their daily struggles even now, from his comeback after last year’s possible career-ending futility to his comeback during Sunday’s four-hour exercise in frustration.

It actually started Saturday night, in Game 1, when Salmon didn’t have a clue at the plate, failing in all four at-bats in the Angels’ 4-3 loss, including a weak pop foul with one out and runners on first and third in the fifth inning.

Typical of Salmon, “I was up a lot last night thinking about the popup there,” he said. “Last night ... it was a tough night.”

Then came Sunday, when he singled and scored in the first inning, then hit a two-run homer in the second inning, and it looked as if the Angels were going to turn the Giants into just another group of blubbering Yankees or Twins.

“Tim gets mad, but he doesn’t mope,” said batting coach Mickey Hatcher. “He does something about it.”

But then Kevin Appier failed to show up, and the Giants dragged out some former Dodger farmhand named Zerbe to haunt the Angel offense, and suddenly the Angels were trailing.

Then, just as suddenly, they weren’t, when Garret Anderson lined a ball to right field to score Darin Erstad with the tying run with two out in the sixth inning.

And here was Salmon again, back in the middle of the madness, rounding second base on that hit, stopping there with Troy Glaus up at the plate ... but no! He didn’t stop.

He kept running, and the throw from right fielder Reggie Sanders was cut off by first baseman J.T. Snow, who threw to the other side of the diamond to help catch Salmon in a rundown.

End of inning and rally. From hero to hoax in about an hour. Another typical Salmon career mood swing.

Except you know what Roenicke said to Salmon as he left the field?

He told him he did fine. He told him he did not mess up.

“Tim handed me his helmet and asked me whether I thought that Sanders’ throw was going through to the plate, and I thought it was, so he did the right thing by going to third base,” said Roenicke. “That’s what we do around here. We’re aggressive, and if it hurts us sometimes, we’ll deal with it.”

Salmon was still thinking about this when he came to the plate in the eighth inning.

David Eckstein had reached first base on a one-out line drive to right field.

Darin Erstad had reached into Rodriguez’s stamina with a splendid, eight-pitch at-bat that resulted in a fly out.

It was Salmon’s turn to be, well, what do you think?

Aggressive. Mad. The master of his house.

“You had a feeling it was going to come down to something like that,” he said. “That’s something I’ve been dreaming about doing for a long time, and watching it being done from my couch. It was unbelievable.”

And, as the ball sailed over the fence and the owner strolled the grounds, absolutely perfect.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.