By no means am I a Los Angeles Angels/Anaheim
Angels/California Angels/Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim fan; however, there have
been a few moments in time when I can honestly say that I have a lot of respect
for their team, players and fans. 2002 is not one of those years, but that’s
the Oakland Athletics fan inside of me talking.
Unlike their Southern California
counterpart the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Angels have had a lot of weird years
and certainly made their fair share of bad deals in order to entice talent to
make the pilgrimage out to the West Coast in order to buy a World Series title.
Unlike the New York Yankees and Dodgers, the Angels have also made a lot of
interesting attempts to usher in the new era of their recently acquired
superstars with a changing of their logo and colors. In fact, of all the teams
who have been around since the early 1960s, the Angels have been one of the
more notorious teams to not follow my unwritten rules of how to be successful
when making such drastic changes to the uniform. Those rules would be:
1. Don’t do it unless you have a more than capable general
manager.
2. Don’t do it unless you have a competent designer and
marketing staff.
3. Don’t do it unless your intention was to make the fans
cower under their throw blanket door prize with a brown paper sack in which to
barf in because the amount of activity on the uniform has made them nauseous.
With that, I give you the 1997-2001 Anaheim Angels.
During this five-year span the Angels introduced three caps.
One of them featured the “A” logo with angel wings like in the picture above,
but with navy blue panels and a navy blue bill and the other was exactly like
the one above but was made of mesh with a red bill and served as the team’s
batting practice cap. Both of those hats will be talked about at length in
later posts. This hat served as the team’s alternate hat from 1999-2000, and to
be honest, it’s actually a pretty sweet cap. My biggest issue with this era
lies more heavily on the pinstriped jerseys with navy blue sleeves. The really
sad part in all of this is that I actually own one of those jerseys. This one
to be exact…
Oh the humanity!!! It’s one thing to class up a jersey with
pinstripes, but it’s another thing to make the sleeves a different solid color
and adding patches to them.
1999 was an interesting year for the Angels. The team
finished the season in fourth place in the American League West division with a
record of 70-92, and with a changing of the guard at the end of August. Former
manager and current New York Mets manager Terry Collins had managed the team
since the start of the 1997 and produced back-to-back second place finishes
within the division, both of which were winning records. After taking the team
to 51-82 the Angels brass had enough and replaced Collins with former bench
coach and current Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon. Maddon finished the season
going 19-10, yet for some reason was demoted back to bench coach in 2000 to
make way for current manager Mike Scioscia. Even though Scioscia and company
won the World Series in 2002, the team has yet to taste similar success after
Maddon and one of Scioscia’s other coaches, Bud Black, took managerial jobs
with other teams. The best way to look at this is how former Green Bay Packers
head coach Mike Holmgren had a so-so career after assistant coaches Andy Reid,
Tony Dungy and Jon Gruden all took head coaching jobs elsewhere after winning
the Super Bowl in 1996. But I’m getting way too ahead of myself.
Very few people could see it, but 1999 was the key turning
around point for all of the Angels’ misfortune even as peculiar as my rationale
may be. Mo Vaughn had just been signed to a hefty long-term deal after the 1998
season and had modest success in the two full seasons he played with the team;
however, it wasn’t until they traded him to the Mets for Kevin Appier that the
team became well-rounded on both sides of the ball. From 1999-2000 the Angels
lineup had become more offensive heavy and they overlooks rebuilding their
pitching staff; kind of funny how in 2013 the same things appears to be
happening. Solid draft picks and a keen attention to their farm system helped,
but the most critical thing to change prior to the 1999 season was the passing
of owner Gene Autry on October 2, 1998.
With that, my marks for this cap…
#25- One of the best moves the Angels ever made in the
history of their franchise came in 1997 when they drafted a power-hitting third
baseman out of UCLA with the third overall pick in that year’s amateur draft. On
July 31, 1998 he made his debut wearing #12 and had a modest impact in the team
batting .218 with one home run and 23 RBI in 48 games. Despite those numbers,
Terry Collins named Troy Glaus as his starting third baseman at the start of
the 1999 season.
It’s kind of shame that Glaus played in so many games in ’98
because his .240 average with 29 home runs and 79 RBI probably would have made
him a legitimate contender for the AL Rookie of the Year award which went to
Carlos Beltran of the Kansas City Royals. In 2000, under this hat, Glaus
awkwardly and quietly had the best season of his career. He hit career highs in
batting average (.284), stolen bases (14), walks (112), hits (160), OPS (1.008)
and home runs (47), which was also the highest amount in the League that season.
Glaus also had 102 RBI, which is the third best for his career and 37 doubles,
which is the second best for his career. Despite all of those numbers, Glaus
didn’t even crack the Top-30 for MVP votes that season. Instead all he was
given was a Silver Slugger award and a trip to the All-Star Game. Based on the
numbers of the other parties involved, Glaus should have finished at least in
the Top-15 for the award. This is one of the few times I will admit that the
Angels got hosed.
Glaus’s career with the Angels ended in 2004 after he
suffered a shoulder injury that the Angels felt would be an issue for the rest
of his career. When his contract expired at the end of the season the Arizona
Diamondbacks signed him to a four-year $45 million deal while the Angels opted
to make Dallas McPherson their new third baseman with the hopes that he’s be
just as productive as Glaus. Ha! Glaus finished his career with the Angels with
a .253 average, 182 home runs, 515 RBI, three trips to the All-Star Game, two
Silver Slugger awards, a World Series ring and a World Series MVP award after
going .385/3/8 in the series.
#26- Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, was born on September
29, 1907 and was a singer and actor on radio, television and film. He was
active in front of the microphone/camera from 1931-1964 and is a member of the
Country Music Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Oddly
enough, the three songs that brought him the most success for his career,
besides “Back in the Saddle Again,” are “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Frosty the
Snowman,” and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Autry served as a pilot of a
C-47 Skytrain for the US Army Air Corps during World War II, flying dangerous
missions over the Himalayas between Burma
and China.
At the tail end of his showbiz career Autry bought numerous
radio stations including KSFO in San
Francisco, a handful of TV stations and had been in
over 100 films and recorded over 600 albums; however, like most people of the
era, Autry was a huge baseball fan. As a teenager Autry had turned down the
opportunity to play professionally and did the next best thing in 1950s; he
bought a team.
In the 1950s Autry had been a minority owner of the
minor-league Hollywood Stars. In 1960, when Major League Baseball announced
plans to add an expansion team in Los
Angeles, Autry expressed an interest in acquiring the
radio broadcast rights to the team's games. Baseball executives were so
impressed by his approach that he was persuaded to become the owner of the
franchise rather than simply its broadcast partner. The team, initially called
the Los Angeles Angels (which came from the Pacific Coast League team which
played from 1903-1957) upon its 1961 debut, moved to suburban Anaheim in 1966,
and was renamed the California Angels, then the Anaheim Angels from 1997 until
2005, when it became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Autry served as vice
president of the American League from 1983-1998. In 1995 he sold a quarter
share of the team to The Walt Disney Company and a controlling interest the following
year, with the remaining share to be transferred after his death. Earlier, in
1982, he sold Los Angeles
television station KTLA for $245 million. He also sold several radio
stations he owned, including KSFO, KMPC in Los Angeles,
KOGO in San Diego,
and other stations in the Golden West radio network.
Autry passed away at the age of 91 in 1998 and this patch
was worn by the players throughout the 1999 season.
The #26 was actually retired in 1992 as the Angels and the Anaheim community had
called Autry the 26th member of the team. Even though he wasn’t
alive during the World Series run of 2002, the media expressed great accolades
toward Autry for his work with the team, with MLB and most important the
community he had fell in love with who fell in love with him so many decades
ago.
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