Not long after former Boston Red Sox slugger Mo Vaughn signed a six-year, $80-million contract with the Anaheim Angels for the 1999 baseball season, the Connecticut native began pining for the Northeast.
Southern California fans were too laid-back, Vaughn said. They lacked that intense, live-and-die-with-the-home-team attitude that so motivates players in Boston's Fenway Park and New York's Yankee Stadium.
After three years in what seemed like baseball purgatory to him, Vaughn got his wish when the Angels traded him last winter to the New York Mets, who have been one of baseball's biggest disappointments this season and are in last place in the National League East.
In Vaughn's wake, Southern California fans are in baseball heaven. The Angels and the Los Angeles Dodgers have never made the playoffs in the same season, and the success of the teams has Southern California baseball fans dreaming of a Freeway World Series in October.
The Dodgers and San Francisco Giants will resume one of baseball's most bitter rivalries in nearly sold-out Dodger Stadium tonight when they begin a four-game series that could determine the NL's wild-card team. The Dodgers trail the Giants by one game with 13 games left.
And the Angels, enjoying what could be their finest season, tonight will open a four-game series against the Oakland Athletics in Network Associates Coliseum that could determine the American League West championship. The Angels hold a one-game lead over the A's after Sunday's games. They each have 13 games remaining.
"What was Mo doing? Was he talking in his sleep, or what?" said Tom Lasorda, the Dodgers' senior vice president and their manager from 1976 to '96. "How can Mo make statements like that? Without a doubt, he's off-base, because what we have going on right now is tremendous. Look at the Giants, A's, us and the Angels. That's four teams playing tremendous baseball. This is what we've always wished for."
The Dodgers, who moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958, have not reached the playoffs since 1996, and they have not won a postseason game since winning the World Series in 1988. The Angels, born in 1961, have not made the playoffs since 1986, when they were one strike away from going to the World Series before their playoff collapse against the Red Sox.
This season, both teams had to sweat out the possibility of their dream seasons being wiped out by a players' strike that was averted with an eleventh-hour contract agreement Aug. 30.
