Angels in the wings. (Here Below).AS BASEBALL 2002 vanishes into the record books, we have a confession A Confession is a short work on questions of religion by Leo Tolstoy. It was first distributed in Russia in 1882. Consisting of autobiographical notes on the development of the author's belief, A Confession to make about the heroes of the year, the Anaheim Angels. Up until they started beating up on the Yankees and Giants, we couldn't name one player on the team! How could such a thing happen to us? It was inevitable: 1. How could we keep up with a team whose box scores (coming from California) never appeared in our morning newspaper? 2. After baseball went from two eight-team leagues with 400 players to 30 teams in six divisions with 750 players, we could no longer put in the study time on personalities. 3. With so many games on TV being played in the middle of the night, we were not going to give up any prime sleeping hours to watch Barry Bonds Barry Lamar Bonds (born July 24 1964 in Riverside, California) is a left fielder for the San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball. He is the son of former major league All-Star Bobby Bonds, the godson of Hall of Famer Willie Mays, and a distant cousin of Hall of Famer Reggie being walked all night. (Dogs should be walked, not big sluggers.) But a weird thing happened in the fall. Two wild-card teams made it to the World Series, and suddenly we had a championship series between the no-name Angels of Anaheim and the eight Giants and a Bonds of San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden . We turned on our TV expecting boredom... and found ourselves touched by an Angel--a gashouse gang Gashouse Gang boisterous Cardinals ballclub of the 1930s. [Am. Sports: Shankle, 167] See : Highspiritedness of them. They had crooked crook·ed adj. 1. Having or marked by bends, curves, or angles. 2. Informal Dishonest or unscrupulous; fraudulent. crook legs, dubious arms, dirty uniforms, and unfamiliar names, but... boy, could they play baseball! And they did it the old-fashioned way. They ran out everything, got their uniforms dirty sliding and diving, and up at the plate they reinvented clutch hitting--working the pitchers for walks and hitting all kinds of singles and doubles to come from behind again and again. The Giants had a big, bad, and bold Bonds, but the Angels owned the winning bond--a thing called team play. Everyone pitched in for the kill. Look at some of their names--Eckstein, Salmon, Erstad, Spiezio, Anderson, and Glaus. Not an all-star or potential Hall of Famer anywhere, but every one of them a ballplayer, a team that played the game the way John McGraw Noun 1. John McGraw - United States baseball player and manager (1873-1934) John Joseph McGraw, McGraw taught it before Hillerich & Bradsby began fashioning Louisville Sluggers for Babe Ruth. RELATED ARTICLE: ECKSTEIN, THE COMPLETE PACKAGE As a shortstop, Dave Eckstein never rated with Rodriguez, Jeter, Tejada, Vizquez, or Garciaparra... until the World Series, when all of a sudden he became Honus Wagner |
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