Let’s assemble the best possible Angels team by letter of the alphabet to begin a player’s last name. Today is P. 57 men whose last name started with “57” played major league baseball in an Angels uniform.
C – Lance Parrish
1B – Albert Pujols
2B – Cliff Pennington
3B – Tony Phillips
SS – Freddie Patek
OF – Albie Pearson
OF – Gary Pettis
OF – Luis Polonia
DH – Vada Pinson
The best of this thin lot is the underrated Lance Parrish, the motel madman Tony Phillips, the glove of Gary Pettis, the girlfriends of Luis Polonia and Albie Pearson.
You can read about how great the late Albie Pearson IN MY ESSAY FROM EARLIER THIS WEEK.
Pujols had an OPS+ of 108 over ten seasons with the Angels. He played in 1,181games for the Angels (of a possible 1,518 games in that span – while originally contracted for 1,620 games, the 2020 lockdown took 102 of those games away). He was paid $221,030,000 for that (2020 he received 37% of his salary and the Dodgers paid about $700,000 of his 2021 salary after he was released). So “The Machine” was compensated $187,154.95 to be eight percent better than a league average player. Try as I might, there was no better option here for 1B than the Elder Albatross. But any day, any time, anywhere, especially in Southern California, remember this formula:
Albie P > Albert P
SP – Matt Palmer
SP – Joel Pineiro
SP – Felix Peña
RP – Troy Percival
RP – Blake Parker
Percy the great is what matters most here although Blake Parker was excellent and squeaked onto this list past Yusmeiro Petit, wow what a front-office fumble that was.
When it comes to magic though, Percy’s final out of the 2002 World Series might actually be in second place to the combined no-hitter that Felix Peña took over and won in 2019 wearing the jersey number 45.
