Strange Experience in a Familiar Place

Behind him, the game-winning home run ball was still rattling around in the left-field seats.

Around him, teammates retreated to the dugout with heads hung low.

But as fireworks popped overhead, Jim Abbott remained on the mound, calling for another ball from home plate umpire Derryl Cousins. Lost in the moment, Abbott was in a temporary fog, not yet realizing that he had lost again, 3-2, for the fourth time in five appearances in that new gray-and-black uniform.

“I didn’t know the game was over,” Abbott glumly acknowledged from his corner locker stall.

“I guess I’m used to being on the home team.”

So much was different for Abbott on Wednesday night at Anaheim Stadium.

So much was the same.

He was cheered as he walked from the bullpen to the mound in the first inning--a standing ovation that lasted a full minute.

He pitched with grit and with verve, yielding just three singles and a 120-foot double beyond the the diving reach of his second baseman through eight innings.

And, of course, he pitched with buzzard’s luck--down, 2-0, entering the ninth inning because his team had managed one single through eight. One of the runs was unearned. The other scored on that 120-footer that eked its way out of the infield.

Same old Abbott, same old sadistic Big A.

The kid never did get any support in this place.

But everything else Wednesday night looked and felt wrong for Abbott. Wrong dugout. Wrong work clothes. Wrong opponent.

Wrong pitch to Tim Salmon with no outs in the bottom of the ninth.

In his first Anaheim appearance as a non-member of the Angels, Abbott threw a cut fastball that failed to cut its full swath--and Salmon delivered his second game-breaking home run in three games. The first was against Roger Clemens. This one was against Abbott. Someone remind Salmon that he is a rookie and this is the last week of April. Angel rookies aren’t supposed to take the league’s best and the brightest deep in the late innings of tied games, but now the Angels have two, Salmon and J.T. Snow, and they’ve spent a good month trading tee shots.

Snow is an Angel today because Abbott is not and the first baseman’s first three weeks out of the chute had done much to dilute the electricity expected of Abbott’s homecoming. In March, Angel fans, and erstwhile Angel fans, circled this date on their calendars and prepared the bedsheet invective. Is that Dump Whitey! with one or two exclamation points?

But the trade was working out, J.T. covering nicely for Russ Springer and Jerry Nielsen--now launching missiles in Vancouver as we speak--so the fans’ mood was more upbeat than surly as Abbott strode to the mound.

Thanks for the memories, their ovation seemed to say, and--would you believe it?--thanks for the first baseman, too.

Abbott shook hands with Snow before Tuesday’s series opener and wished him well. Twenty-four hours later, the primary components of the most emotionally wrenching Angel trade in 20 years were face to face and head to head, Abbott breaking Snow’s bat in the second inning, Snow breaking Abbott’s heart in the fourth.

Snow’s deep single into the gap in right-center set the stage for the Angels’ first two runs. Salmon would score on Rene Gonzales’ seeing-eye double and Snow would come around on Danny Tartabull’s errant relay back into the infield and Abbott, again, would take a 2-0 deficit into the ninth inning.

The surprise of the night was that the Yankees tied it and gave Abbott the chance to win it. Tartabull’s two-out, two-run double gave Abbott the bottom half of the ninth inning, but it was a second chance that would last all of two pitches.

Minutes after Salmon ended it and the meaning of defeat had sunk in with Abbott, he interrupted a somber group interview session to, ostensibly, ice his left arm. But once he ducked into the trainer’s room, out of sight, expletives and garbage cans began to ring off the walls. A Yankee coach shut the door to muffle the noise, but Abbott’s anguished screams could still be heard across the clubhouse.

“He’s one hard-luck S.O.B.,” said Reggie Jackson, the former Angel turned special adviser to George Steinbrenner.

“But he’ll shake it. He’s too good. He’s a big talent with a big heart, a real class individual. It’ll get turned around.”

Jackson was alluding to Abbott’s 1-4 start--the Yankees scoring two runs or fewer in three of the defeats. The fourth cut the deepest, coming in front of family, friends and former teammates.

“Bittersweet is a good way to describe it,” Abbott said after re-emerging from the rearranged trainer’s room. “I had a lot of fun pitching tonight and I’ll take a lot of good memories away from this night.

“But, obviously, the home run will be the lingering memory.”

Emotionally, both up and down, this game ranked at the top of Abbott’s professional list.

“It’s going to take me a long time to get over the last part of it,” he said. “Everybody knows what I think about the fans here and Gene Autry. But it’s hard to lose like that. It’s hard to be 1-4.”

From the other side of the clubhouse, Jackson was predicting 18 victories from Abbott and wishing “we had a whole staff like him.”

“This was not a bad game for us,” Jackson said, trying to sound chipper. “We came back in the ninth against a good pitcher. We got beat. We didn’t lose.”

Judging from the faraway look in his eyes, Abbott would have to differ.