Angels Earn Their Wings

It isn’t that easy, you thought. When the Angels trotted out their new red caps over the winter and made the obligatory reference to the hunt for a red October, your mind wandered through 16 years of Angel futility. The Angels had angered the baseball gods enough over time, and here they were proclaiming the return of October baseball to Anaheim.

But so be it. A hardy band of Angels cast aside decades worth of curses and jinxes and hexes Thursday, with a 10-5 victory over the Texas Rangers that clinched the Angels’ first playoff berth since 1986.

It will indeed be a red October in Anaheim and the wild-card Angels will open the playoffs Tuesday at Yankee Stadium.

“It’s an awesome feeling to get those demons off our back,” pitcher Jarrod Washburn said. “Monkeys off our back? Whatever.”

The victory was sweet to the young players undaunted by the Angels’ repeated failures and sweeter still to the veterans who had lived through them.

Closer Troy Percival got the final out, and left fielder Garret Anderson caught it. Anderson homered and drove in three runs, and so did right fielder Tim Salmon. Percival and Anderson joined the Angels in 1995, Salmon in 1992, and for the first time those lifelong Angels can play in October rather than watch.

“This makes everything I’ve ever lived for worth it,” Percival said. “This is the best feeling I’ve ever had.”

The Angels, relatively restrained in their on-field greetings, erupted in celebration upon retreating to the clubhouse. Champagne and beer flowed atop heads, a seemingly endless supply of alcoholic shampoo. Several players sneaked up behind Ramon Ortiz, grabbed him and dumped him into a vat of ice. Bill Stoneman, the dignified general manager, sloshed through the room in dress slacks and flip-flops.

“It’s everything I thought it would be,” Salmon said, “but I don’t know what I’m thinking right now. I’m taking in the alcohol through the pores of my head.”

The unbridled joy reflected the tension of the past few days. The Angels were one victory away from a playoff berth when they left Seattle’s Safeco Field last Friday, and they were still one victory away when they arrived at the ballpark here Thursday.

“Every day has kind of been like Groundhog Day for us,” Salmon said.

“The last few days had gone painfully slowly for us,” Stoneman said.

The Angels coughed up an 11-game lead in 1995, but that took more than a month. Suddenly, this year’s Angels had coughed up four games in four days, and the echoes of ’95 were stirring.

In the fourth inning, the Angels took their first lead in five days. In the bottom of the inning, on the first pitch, the Rangers’ Herbert Perry hit a home run that tied the score. But the Angels rebounded with four runs in the fifth, with Salmon hitting the single that put the team ahead for good, and the countdown to the first road clinching in Angel history was on.

“We were celebrating anyway, with everything that this team has been through and with the history of the organization,” center fielder Darin Erstad said. “Who cares when it happens or where it happens?”

Since the Angels last appeared in the playoffs, they have changed logos three times, general managers four times and managers six times. Their legendary owner, Gene Autry, died. So did Jimmie Reese, their beloved coach.

Their failures were practically mocked by expansion teams. The Arizona Diamondbacks got to the playoffs in two years, the Colorado Rockies in three. The Florida Marlins won a World Series championship in five.

The Angels, one strike away from the World Series in 1986 and 41 games out of first place last year, survived the worst start in franchise history this year and emerged with the best record in team history. A franchise that has tried everything and everyone from A (Jim Abbott) to Z (Geoff Zahn) now has yet another chance to advance to its first World Series, to win one for the Cowboy.

The winning pitcher Thursday, 23-year-old John Lackey, is so young he had dinner with his parents and grandparents Wednesday. When the Angels crashed in 1995, Lackey was in high school.

“There’s a lot of young guys who don’t know what it took to get here the last seven years,” Percival said. “Hopefully, they never have to go through this long a time to get there again.”

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Post Time

Tentative American League divisional series schedule. Time and TV to be announced:

*--* BEST OF FIVE GAME 1 Tuesday at New York GAME 2 Wednesday at New York GAME 3 Oct. 4 at Angels GAME 4 Oct. 5 at Angels* GAME 5 Oct. 6 at New York* *if necessary

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*--* Past Time Angel playoff history: 1979 Lost to Baltimore in ALCS, 3-1 1982 Lost to Milwaukee in ALCS, 3-2 1986 Lost to Boston in ALCS, 4-3

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