Angels Fans

Friends, Romans, Angels fans. Lend me your ears. We come to bury your team, not praise it. It is time. We wish we could report that Angel Stadium remains the happiest place on earth, even though that other place with all the mouse ears is just down the street. The Angels' once magic kingdom is still trying. Generally, the fans are happy, doing their silly wave and still buying tickets, although more empty seats appeared as soon as the Yankees left town. Generally, the announcers are happy.

The afternoon was disorienting enough for the Angels, who, while suffering a 5-3 loss to New York, put up with chants of "Let's go, Yankees!" in their home stadium and ear-splitting ovations after each of New York slugger Mark Teixeira's two home runs. The Angels are used to boisterous Yankees fans in Anaheim, but Sunday's crowd was so pro-New York that some Angels probably walked out of the stadium looking for the No. 4 train to Manhattan. Then things became truly bizarre in the eighth inning, when, after Nick Swisher's home run put the Yankees up 5-3, fans in the right-field pavilion showered Angels right fielder Torii Hunter with $1 bills.

You didn't have to see Alex Rodriguez's sixth-inning drive off Angels right-hander Ervin Santana to know where it would end up Saturday night. All you had to do was hear it. The New York Yankees slugger crushed a fastball well beyond the wall in left-center field, the violent collision of bat and baseball producing a sound that pierced Angel Stadium like a thunderbolt. Rodriguez tossed his bat toward the first-base dugout and didn't even bother to track the ball's flight. There was no doubt about this two-run shot, which snapped a tie and lifted the Yankees to a 3-2 victory over the Angels.

The past few days it has sounded as if fans choosing to go to Dodger Stadium deserved medals for bravery. It has a ridiculous sound to it, doesn't it? But a medal will be given Saturday to a baseball fan, Daniel Foster choosing to receive the Silver Star in a ceremony before the game with Toronto at Angel Stadium. Foster, a 22-year-old Army specialist, served 14 months in Iraq before deploying to Afghanistan, and while some might conclude he still doesn't have enough training to take on Dodger Stadium, he explains, "I'm an Angels fan. "And here's hoping the Angels kick their butts," he says, and probably not a good idea to argue.

There are 160 games to go in the Angels' season, and one thing already seems clear. Their fans will need to up the valium dosage. This isn't a baseball team. It's a nightly root canal. It offers great expectations and delivers great headaches. They won't come off the road for their home opener until Friday. By then — gauging from the first two games in Kansas City against a Royals team unlikely to ever be compared to the 1927 Yankees — they will have already established a record pace for causing nervous breakdowns among their faithful.

Go ahead Angels fans, take your best shot. Unhappy with the way the team has played this season? So is the general manager. "It's been frustrating," said Tony Reagins, who just happens to be the general manager. "We haven't performed to the level that we're capable of performing in virtually every area. " Convinced there's a lot of work to do this winter to fix things? So is the general manager. "Playing this type of baseball is definitely not something that we're going to settle for," Reagins said.

Fernando Rodney did the seemingly impossible Friday night. He made Angels fans miss Brian Fuentes . Bobby Abreu hit a solo home run in the 14th inning to give the Angels a 4-3 walk-off win over the Seattle Mariners, the Angels' second straight overtime victory following Wednesday's 16-inning win over Cleveland. But the 3-hour 55-minute game would have been over an hour and a half earlier had Rodney done his job. Many fans cheered the Aug. 27 trade of Fuentes, the much-maligned closer, to Minnesota.

For the first three months of the season, there would be a collective groan punctuated by boos every time the bullpen door swung open and Brian Fuentes entered a game. You'd expect this for a visiting closer, but these were Fuentes' hometown fans, in Angel Stadium. It wasn't just that Fuentes was ineffective, his earned-run average a bloated 6.23 on June 20 with three blown saves in his first 13 chances. It was that style of his. With an unorthodox sidearm delivery, a less-than-imposing 90-mph fastball and a reliance on off-speed pitches and deception, Fuentes doesn't look like a closer.

Vladimir Guerrero received a brief but rousing standing ovation before his first at-bat as a Texas Ranger in Angel Stadium on Tuesday night, which came as no surprise to the club for which he starred for the last six years. "Vlad left some big footprints here on the field and with the fans," Angels Manager Mike Scioscia said. "Any ovation he gets will be well-deserved." Guerrero, who stepped out of the box to doff his cap before hitting a single to center field in the first inning, helped the Angels win five American League West titles in six years in Anaheim.

Among the reasons Mike Scioscia gave Tuesday for sticking with Brian Fuentes as his closer despite the left-hander's Monday night meltdown is that "it's a little premature to make wholesale changes," the Angels manager said. Who said anything about wholesale changes? Most Angels fans would be satisfied with one seemingly simple switch — make hard-throwing right-hander Fernando Rodney the closer and Fuentes a setup man or left-handed relief specialist. Rodney is clearly the team's best reliever, with a 3-0 record and 2.87 earned-run average in 16 games, a fastball that has been clocked as high as 98 mph and an excellent changeup.