Forty-one years of Los Angeles/California/Anaheim Angel baseball previous, in all futility, calamity, and transdimensional disaster, danced along the ball's arc from the moment it cracked off Kenny Lofton's bat on a flight to Darin Erstad's glove. "Under it, Erstad near the track," hollered Jon Miller, into an ESPN Radio microphone, through Edison Field's cheering and ThunderStixing, "and the Angels ... are the champions of the world!"
So which curse was broken at last?
When Tim Salmon - the most senior Angel, the most immediately identifiable batter in the lineup (Salmon at the plate resembles a man trying not to burn off his rump roast as he haunches into a scalding hot bath) - hoisted the World Series trophy over his head on the field, his face looking as you'd imagine Sylvester after he finally got away with having Tweety for dinner, which one among the spirits dancing led them cast out and banished forever from the Angels' house?
Two constants among baseball's many are the hanging curve and the dangling curse. One, timed right and met well, gets hit for the kind of home run that causes weapons inspectors to ask whether a certain type of warhead went unaccounted on the checklist. The other, timed right and presented well, gets adopted into intractable faith. A baseball team passes season after decade of shortfall, perhaps occasionally getting up the mountaintop, getting a loving look at the Promised Land, and getting a swift Providential kick in the pants to the jagged rocks below. Bad pitch? Prize-losing error? Boneheaded manager? Basepath putz? The team is not futile, it is cursed. Has to be.
Boston Red Sox fans have spent close to a century forging a religion that had only an implicit name until Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy hung it up in bold print, with his charming book, The Curse of the Bambino. The defining act: Babe Ruth, sold to the New York Yankees for a musical, two years after the last known Red Sox World Series win.
Chicago Cub fans have spent over half a century wrestling with the Curse of Billy Goat's Tavern. The defining act: The tavern owner's goat, barred from his customary place in Wrigley Field's bleachers, after the last known Cub pennant in 1945. Nothing but a couple of division titles and a wild card appearance since. And the Cubs haven't won a World Series since the
Roosevelt Administration - Theodore's.
Another columnist, Terry Pluto of the Akron Beacon-Journal, put the dour fatalism of Cleveland Indian fans onto the astral plane with The Curse of Rocky Colavito. The defining act: Trading the popular, run productive, young enough, power hitting outfielder to the Detroit Tigers, for the not-that-run-productive, not-that-young, singles-hitting, former American League batting champion, Harvey Kuenn. Pennant contenders since the 1940s, a World Champion in 1948, and a pennant winner in 1954, the Tribe dropped out of contention for three decades to come, rebuilt for American League Central dominance in the 1990s, two pennants but no World Series title since.
(Harvey Kuenn wasn't exactly unimpacted. After being dealt away from the Indians, Kuenn had the dubious distinction of being the last out in two of Sandy Koufax's four no-hitters, including Koufax's 1965 perfect game. He later became the only manager ever to lead the Milwaukee Brewers to the World Series; Harvey's Wallbangers, as the slugging club was
nicknamed, lost in seven to the St. Louis Cardinals.)
Angel watchers - fans, chroniclers, players - have asked not whether the team was cursed for its first forty-one seasons; they have asked which curse among the many was the one, the whammy of whammies, the spell that did the heaviest lifting in moving the Angels into the Phantom Zone as configured by Tales Calculated To Drive You MAD. Yes, the players, too. Leo Cardenas, elder shortstop, thinking a drive through the cemetery might drive the evil spirits from his bats. Gary Gaetti, end-of-the-line third baseman, believing the ballpark haunted by witches. Chuck Finley, pitcher, contemplating a sage burning in the clubhouse.
Now, it is time to confess, Angel fans. For even one millisecond, you were tempted to say it. As every one of those 41 insane in the brain years of Angel baseball danced their last dance from Lofton's bat to Erstad's glove, you saw his face, that singular, lean dark face, the most devilish Angel of them all, smiling that once-famous smile that was half neon cool and half mocking, as if he were saying, "I knew they'd regret getting rid of me. That team couldn't barter their way to the Big Dance's lobby, never mind close the deal, until I died for their sins."
He had been purged from the Angels in 1964; he died at age 64 in the eleventh month of 2001; the Angels ran, gunned, and stunned their way to their first World Series conquest ever, getting the monkey off their back by putting a monkey on their back (and anywhere else he could be hung), eleven months after their first superstar's battle with bladder cancer and other
maladies ended in a fatal heart attack.
The Curse of Bo Belinsky?
Yes, Virginia, there was a Bo Belinsky. He was a lean New Jersey street rat, hustling his way through a few thousand pool halls, perhaps (or perhaps not quite) that many women, a few hundred minor league towns, then liberated from the Baltimore Orioles' respected farm system for 1962. He held out for more than the rookie salary audaciously, let the beat writers buff and polish his randy image, then reeled off four straight wins to start his major league life. The fourth of them was a real jewel: a no-hit, no-run game, against the Orioles, in Dodger Stadium. (Oops. Make that Chavez Ravine, as the Angels insisted on calling the place during their home games. Yes, children, the Angels played there then, awaiting their own playpen's
construction.) That gave Belinsky his licence to graduate from rakish playboy to the most off-the-chart among the Hollywood night crawlers.
Baseball and playboys were about as alien to each other as an olive and a dry martini. But Belinsky hung it up in plain sight, for one and all to see, all but bragging about his hyperactive Hollywood nightlife and bedtimes, and he couldn't have cared less who knew how much. A virgin in southern California came to mean any lovely who hadn't slept with Bo Belinsky. He was baseball's Elvis with a far broader wit and flair, a far more unaccountable spirit, and a pitching repertoire that might have carried him to a distinguished career but for the Hollywood hell raising that drained first the talent and then the substance.
Then, in August 1964, in a Washington hotel room (alas, I am old enough to remember: there used to be a baseball team there), Belinsky's ticket to ride the Sunset Strip was punched out when he punched out elder sportswriter Braven Dyer, at around three a.m. What remains in dispute: whether Dyer rang Belinsky demanding his own story on Belinsky's pending retirement - Belinsky, badly racked in a game before the Washington trip, gave a crying-in-his-martini interview to an AP writer who recorded, correctly, that it was overspilling frustration over a tough loss, and that Belinsky didn't really mean he was quitting. Or, whether Dyer had actually written such a story with Belinsky demanding its kill. And, did Dyer go to Belinsky's room spoiling for a fight? What is not in dispute: Dyer went to the room, the writer and the pitcher had some angry words, and the pitcher belted the writer upside the head openhanded.
The Angels sent him to their Hawaii minor league affiliate to finish out the season, then traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies for 1965. So much for the Eighth Amendment. Not much of a pitcher after 1964, Belinsky bounced from the Phillies to somewhere between the minors and four other major league teams until 1970. He lived on what remained of his glamour capital,
marrying twice and failing twice at both (the first, a Playboy Playmate of the Year; the second, a Weyerhaeuser paper heiress), living on borrowed booze, time and friends, until what was left of the once-dazzling party hound dissipated in the frozen truth of a brown paper bag under a bridge for his roof.
Then, he cleaned himself out, completely. He went back to Hawaii, a place he loved, and became an alcohol rehabilitation counselor. Then, he returned to the mainland and settled in Las Vegas. He became a born-again Christian without becoming a proselytising pain in the arse about it, from most reports. He worked as a customer relations representative for an automotive group. ("Can you imagine," he said to a later interviewer, "finding Jesus Christ in Las Vegas?") He had lost none of his mocking wit but he delivered it now at his own expense ("I've gotten more mileage out of winning only 28 games in the majors than most guys who've won 300"), and without trying to heighten a self image built on a luminous artifice.
Belinsky could still laugh about the old times, their fragility, and his own, but this time he snuffed the suggestions of self-pity and amplified the perspective he once seemed to fear would swallow him alive if he dared hold onto it, the scattered times he found it. (His only known failure since cleaning himself up: his inability to reconcile with his three estranged children.) "You can't beat the piper, Babe," he once told Pat Jordan, the pitcher turned journalist, while he still had some borrowed time and friends to live on and hadn't yet landed under the bridge. "I never thought I could. But I'll tell you who I do feel sorry for. I feel sorry for all those poor bastards who never heard the music." The song didn't remain the same, and Belinsky finally found a music of depth, rejecting the superficial music of style, remaking and remodeling himself without entirely composting the offbeat charm that once helped make his name.
Banished from Hollywood Babylon in '64; and dead at 64. (As if those who saw him back in the day expected him to make it to 44.) Mortal coil shuffled off in the eleventh month, the team he put on the map reaching the Promised Land eleven months later.
The Curse of Bo Belinsky? Is that all there was?
» Jeff Kallman is a journalist living in Huntington Beach, California.
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Copyright © 2003 by Jeff Kallman. Posted February 21, 2003.
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