It All Comes Out in Wash

One of the Angel regulars, not in Mike Scioscia’s end-of-the-payroll lineup Sunday morning and yet trapped by the vagaries of the regular season’s final hours, looked away from a television when a teammate walked by.

“Hey, get us home-field [advantage],” Troy Glaus said. “I want home-field. I didn’t pack enough clothes.”

So arrived October’s priorities, laundered shorts ranking somewhere between playoff rosters, short-series rotations and a familiar chair in the clubhouse.

In a perfectly unsettled few hours when championship expectations rose with, say, the Angels as quickly as, say, the Oakland A’s cleared out their lockers, baseball’s playoffs settled themselves.

The Angels play the Boston Red Sox on Tuesday afternoon in Anaheim, Minnesota’s loss official by mid-game here, eliminating for the Angels a late-night, cross-country trip to New York but delivering Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez. At breakfast, traveling secretary Tom Taylor had a singular strategy to carry the Angels to the division series: “One plane, two flight plans,” he said.

At about the time that was resolved, the Houston Astros defeated the Colorado Rockies and sent Barry Bonds to gathering his gear along the bench in Chavez Ravine, so there would be no one-game playoff in San Francisco tonight, no matter what Bonds’ Giants did to the wearied Dodgers Sunday.

By mid-afternoon, and in the time to took to re-hydrate Roger Clemens, baseball had its eight.

The Twins open against the Yankees in New York on Tuesday. In the National League, the St. Louis Cardinals play host to the Dodgers on Tuesday and the Astros, all the way back from Jimy Williams, open in Atlanta on Wednesday.

The Red Sox and Astros are the wild-card entrants, significant at a time when the last two World Series champions -- the 2002 Angels and 2003 Florida Marlins -- did not win their divisions.

They’ll all start again this week in best-of-five series, with the same roster frailties and less time to heal them, or hide them.

The Yankees and Cardinals had enough pitching to win more than 100 games each over six months, but might not have enough to win three over the next week.

The Angels finished the regular season and began the postseason without Jose Guillen, Tim Salmon or Adam Kennedy.

The Dodgers just started Elmer Dessens in their most critical game of the season but could have a more temperate Milton Bradley in their lineup by Tuesday. Yankee savior Orlando Hernandez just grabbed his shoulder, forcing the Yankees to look longingly to Kevin Brown again. Brave starters Jaret Wright and Mike Hampton are bruised, and the Chicago Cubs are, well, out.

As infielder Todd Walker groused on his way to winter, “It’s just a freak deal. This whole year has been a freak deal.” Of course, the Cubs’ whole century has had its moments of freakishness, right down to one more final-week collapse.

They’ve left Steve Bartman to find something better to do with his fall nights and the Red Sox alone in this business of curse management, or whatever it is that keeps Red Sox nation from going totally to pieces this time of year.

Regardless of the particulars, they’ll play to familiar postseason themes of achievement (Yankees) and failure (Red Sox) and bits of both (everyone else). The Braves have won 13 consecutive division titles, and have followed only one with a World Series title. The Dodgers have not won a playoff game in 16 years. The Angels and Red Sox will replay their 1986 league championship series, one that ended for the Angels first in disappointment and then in tragedy.

Los Angeles has its thoughts of a freeway series, Minnesota of clinging to Johan Santana as the Dodgers once did to Orel Hershiser, New York of stenciling another year on the outside of its Bronx ballpark and Houston of its first World Series championship, with a team that won 36 of its last 46 games, including 18 consecutive home games.

Then, things change. Brave Manager Bobby Cox, whose habit is a three-man pitching rotation in the postseason, is leaning toward starting four. Despite winning their seventh consecutive division title, the Yankees appear vulnerable, as do the Cardinals and Braves and Angels and Twins and Astros and Dodgers, leaving the Red Sox -- Dare we say? Dare Red Sox fans live with this? -- as favorites. And that might be easier to live with had Martinez, one of the toughest men in sports, not just referred to the Yankees as “my daddies,” seeing as he can hardly beat them anymore.

Before the regular-season champagne had been wrung from the carpet in his office here Saturday evening, Scioscia had telephoned Dodger Manager Jim Tracy. The Dodgers had arrived in the postseason not long after the Angels, and there was symmetry in that, thought Scioscia.

“They’ve taken some shots,” Scioscia said of his former organization’s employees. “You have to feel good when guys have seen tough times. ... You see them energized and you feel good for those guys.”

How good, exactly, will be decided another time.

“A freeway series would be nice,” Scioscia said, “but we have a long list of challenges in front of us before we get to that.”

Incidentally, the American League has home-field advantage in the World Series. And if it’s a freeway series, Glaus wouldn’t have to pack at all.