When spring coaching rolls round, it will likely be one dozen years for the reason that Angels final appeared in a postseason sport and two dozen years since they received their first and solely World Sequence championship. If baseball have been scripted, two of the Angels’ World Sequence heroes would take cost of the staff and make it a winner once more.
Because it seems, two of these champions are taking cost of a staff subsequent yr. Not the Angels, although.
Troy Percival has been employed to handle the brand new Lengthy Seashore staff within the unbiased Pioneer League. Percival, the nearer who recorded the ultimate out within the 2002 World Sequence, stated his hitting coach could be Troy Glaus, the 2002 World Sequence most useful participant.
“I made sure that he could hit fungoes,” Percival stated, “because I can’t.”
After we talked the opposite day, Percival wore a T-shirt with a cartoon picture of a bull, with the phrase “PEN’’ stenciled on it. Once a reliever, always a reliever.
The Pioneer League extends into Idaho, Montana and Utah, and Percival managed the Idaho Falls team for the past two summers. He decided that was too many years too far from his Riverside home, and from his family.
He thought he would take a year off from coaching. Then Justin Johnson, who succeeded Percival as the UC Riverside head coach, called to ask whether he might be interested in returning to his old college team to work with the pitchers. So, when the Idaho Falls season ended on a Sunday night in Oakland two months ago, Percival walked into the UCR baseball building — where he and his father built the clubhouse — at 8 a.m. the next day. Then Long Beach called about managing and, well, so much for that year off.
The UCR and Long Beach schedules would conflict only if UCR makes the playoffs — and that, as baseball people like to say, would be a good problem to have. In any case, Percival said, the Long Beach job comes first.
It’s a good job. In independent leagues, teams find their own players, rather than major league teams acquiring and assigning them. When he arrived in Idaho Falls, Percival said, he searched for talent by watching videos on YouTube.
Over the past two years, the Pioneer League has expanded into California. The Long Beach team plans to play at Blair Field and launch next spring, joined by a new Modesto team managed by another former Angel, J.T. Snow.
Percival said a core of his Idaho Falls players plan to follow him to Long Beach, and he said pitching coach Jerome Williams (another former Angel) expects to bring some players with him from the Yuba City team.
If you’re playing for very little money and the hope of performing well enough that a major league team signs you into its minor league system, why not do it in Southern California, where you just might have friends or family members to provide you with free housing?
“You’re going to see kids that are hungry, that make barely enough money to live on, and they play baseball the right way,” Percival stated. “I think you’re going to get a lot of people that want to come watch kids play their butts off, knowing they’re not making millions and millions of dollars. But they all have the dream.”
Good as this all sounds, it’s curious {that a} four-time All-Star with school {and professional} teaching expertise just isn’t working for the Angels.
He stated he likes the power to run an unbiased league staff nevertheless he desires. He stated the Angels by no means have supplied him a job. And, he stated, he has declined provides from different groups — he wouldn’t say which of them — to turn into a significant league bullpen coach.
“Running the minor league pitching sounds more intriguing to me than being a bullpen coach in the big leagues,” he stated.
In 2023, the Angels invited choose former gamers to shadow the foremost league staff and supply suggestions to administration. Percival was not a part of that group, however he did spend time on the fall educational league, checking in with pitching prospects and pitching coaches — partially, he stated, as a result of he had been charged with assessing whether or not these coaches is perhaps “willing to reduce the footprint of analytics.”
Former Angels pitcher Troy Percival prepares to throw the primary pitch through the twentieth anniversary celebration of the their World Sequence title at Angel Stadium in June 2022.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Instances)
Percival stated he appreciates know-how however has heard from minor league coaches — he didn’t say which organizations employed them — that claimed they have been restricted in proposing mechanical changes to pitchers. He acknowledges he has “kind of fought” analytics-based approaches and nonetheless raves in regards to the veteran Angels pitching instructors — together with the late, nice Howie Gershberg — that turned him from a catcher into a more in-depth.
He stated he shared his opinions with the Angels, didn’t name for any firings, and returned house. He was stung by a subsequent story in The Athletic that famous the Angels’ dismissal of two pitching instructors and reported that Percival’s affect “played at least a factor in the Angels’ decision to oust them.”
Mentioned Percival: “I’m the henchman? OK, I’ll wear it. But I said, that’s it, no more instructional league, none of that stuff.”
Not that he has turned in his halo. Removed from it.
“I bleed Angels,” Percival stated.
The Angels have baseball’s longest playoff drought and have completed in final place in back-to-back seasons. He stated he thought the Angels ought to have traded Shohei Ohtani and perhaps even Mike Trout to stockpile prospects and rebuild in earnest.
“It’s a faster process than this,” Percival stated, “than just to keep putting Band-Aids, hoping to get to the 90(-win) mark and slip into the playoffs.”
Percival and Glaus — and Garret Anderson and Darin Erstad and Tim Salmon and John Lackey and Jarrod Washburn — represented a homegrown core that lifted the Angels from persistent mediocrity into champions. It should break Percival’s coronary heart to see his staff descend again into persistent mediocrity.
“There’s been times, yeah,” he stated. “You want it to get back to where it was at.”
He’s rooting for that. Within the meantime, he’s bought a winner to place collectively, simply up the street.
