Kings & Angels

No, not the next Dan Brown novel. This is a fair warning for those just getting to know me. I will rant about sports on occasion.

It’s been a thing for about as long as I can remember. As a kid growing up in Kansas City I was devoted to my A’s and Chiefs, learned to love those lovable losing Cubs in Chicago, and in high school my mother got seriously frustrated at times with my sour moods after my high school football or basketball teams lost. (Our high school football teams lost A LOT…)

These days I’m following my beloved Angels and Kings here in Los Angeles. This leads to certain highs and lows, as any sports fan will tell you.

While the Kings have been playing pretty well in the shortened NHL season, grabbing the #5 playoff seed in the West, as the defending Stanley Cup champions (last year’s playoffs were very exciting and made me very happy!) we’re expecting the best from them. Last night was Game One against St. Louis and it was thrilling, right up until the end. I was standing by for the whole game with The Joyous Vuvuzela of Victory, which gets blown every time the Kings score. (The dog and cat don’t like it. The long-suffering wife probably doesn’t like it either but she loves me so she’s stuck she cuts me some slack.) The Kings were down 1-0 for most of the game but pulled the goalie and tied it with less than a minute to go, sending the game to sudden death overtime.

Then in OT my favorite player, goalie Johnathan Quick, made a completely boneheaded move and we lost. (I’m sure you can find a video of it on You Tube – or on this Friday’s “Not Top Ten” on ESPN. It might unseat Sanchez’s “Butt Fumble” as The Worst Of The Worst.) I used words my mother would not have approved of. The Joyous Vuvuzela of Victory wept. It took a while for me to realize that Quick was the reason we were still in that game to begin with (if he hadn’t been hot all night in goal we would have been down 0-5 or so at the end of the first period) and he’ll come through next time.

Talk about highs and lows!

And then there’s the Angels. Last year we picked up a few huge superstar free agents and were supposed to dominate the league. Instead we rarely got out of first gear, had a couple of outstanding performances from certain players, but then missed the playoffs. Again. This year we picked up another superstar free agent and were everyone’s pick to be the first team to go 162-0. (Well, close, at least.) In March I even got to go to three days of spring training in Phoenix with my son. It was glorious and wonderful. This whole year was going to be glorious and wonderful, and the Angels were going to dominate and spend October winning the World Series again!

Instead we’ve pretty much sucked all year with lousy starting pitching, a worse bullpen, anemic hitting, and an almost complete inability to hit with runners in scoring position. This occasionally leaves me feeling a little blue, which might be good if I were a Dodgers fan, but I’m not.

In thinking about what might be causing the Angels’ performance problems, I have a couple of working theories. (Mind you, I’m a tech geek with a degree in physics, I’m not superstitious at all, don’t believe in sympathetic or any other kind of magic, and I fully realize that my theories are total BS. But they’re fun.)

First, the long-suffering wife has correctly pointed out that prior to last season we got rid of two of our favorite TV announcers, Rex Hudler and Steve Physioc. They’re now working for the Kansas City Royals, who are doing surprisingly well, while we have stumbled and stuttered. So maybe it’s not us, maybe it’s Rex and Steve…

Second, I really admire our current announcers for their professionalism in the face of the team failing to meet expectations and under performing so badly. If we were a really lousy team (trust me, really lousy Angels teams have existed over the years) it would be easier to accept.  But Victor Rojas and Mark Gubicza always stay calm, where I would be screaming, ranting, and wondering on the air how these guys can make the mistakes they do. So maybe it’s Victor & Guby’s fault. Maybe they need to be more like Bob Uecker in “Major League” when we don’t play up to our potential, venting a bit, pissing and moaning.

Maybe it’s like in “Bull Durham”, where the manager needs to throw some equipment and scare a few people in order to get their attention. I know that’s not Mike Scioscia’s style – you can’t tell from Mike’s expression if the Angels are ahead by ten or losing by ten. But maybe that reputation for always maintaining an even strain would make the impact of such a tantrum all the more potent.

Or maybe I just watch too many baseball movies. (That’s the craziest theory of all – we all know that there’s just no such thing as too many baseball movies!)