The not-yet-dead Texas Rangers are trying to prevent the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim from winning the American League West crown, something the Halos can achieve as early as tonight at the Big A with a win against their Lone Star state rival.
It makes one wonder who players from the old Dallas-Ft. Worth
Rangers of the American Association are rooting for. They were the Angels' Triple-A ballclub when Los Angeles made its major league debut in 1961, also being affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies.
Judging from the Angels' caps worn by the chaps pictured above, there's no question where the loyalties lie among the Statesville Owls of 1961. Forty-eight years after the Angels' North Carolina farm club ended its inaugural season with a playoff loss
to rival Lexington, players from the Owls reunited Friday at the franchise's Tempe, Arizona, minor league facilities.
A former Orange County resident brought them all together.
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Stephen C. Smith, who moved earlier this year from Irvine to Cape Canaveral, Florida, is a lifelong Angels fan who for years has covered and blogged about the players winding their way through the minor leagues at FutureAngels.com.
His research led him to Bill Moose, a Statesville historian, columnist and college teacher who pored through local newspaper archives and sent Smith seven pages of notes about the '61 Owls. That led Smith to two years of research of his own tracking down 12 surviving members of that team.
He arranged the reunion in Phoenix, partly because it's a major airline hub, partly because of the Angels minor league facilities are in Tempe and mostly because he received much assistance from a resident there, Roland Hemond, who was the Angels' first farm director before becoming the general manager of the White Sox
and Orioles. He's now a special assistant to the president of the Arizona
Diamondbacks.
Friday morning, the Owls were introduced to young players receiving
instruction. They later shared stories with the farm hands. That
evening, they met with Hemond and shared an informal dinner at a local
hotel.
On Saturday, most Owls had to leave for home, but a few
remained behind to accept Hemond's offer to attend a Diamondbacks game
at Chase Field. They were given a tour of the executive suites, then
sat with Hemond in field level seats behind the visitors dugout.
“In the
fourth inning,” Smith writes on FutureAngels, “they were shown on the video board and introduced as the
1961 Statesville Owls–but got booed a little for wearing Angels caps!”
Smith, who was still cheering over the reunion getting pulled off at all, could not help but think to today's Angels' farm club.
“To give you an idea of the scale of this accomplishment, if Tom
Kotchman's 2009 Pioneer League champion Orem Owlz were to hold a
reunion 48 years later,” Smith notes, “it would be in the year 2057.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.