When spring training rolls around, it will be one dozen years since the Angels last appeared in a postseason game and two dozen years since they won their first and only World Series championship. If baseball were scripted, two of the Angels’ World Series heroes would take charge of the team and make it a winner again.
As it turns out, two of those champions are taking charge of a team next year. Not the Angels, though.
Troy Percival has been hired to manage the new Long Beach team in the independent Pioneer League. Percival, the closer who recorded the final out in the 2002 World Series, said his hitting coach would be Troy Glaus, the 2002 World Series most valuable player.
“I made sure that he could hit fungoes,” Percival said, “because I can’t.”
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When we talked the other day, Percival wore a T-shirt with a cartoon image of a bull, with the word “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 last 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.
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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 said. “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.”
Nice as this all sounds, it is curious that a four-time All-Star with college and professional coaching experience is not working for the Angels.
He said he likes the ability to run an independent league team however he wants. He said the Angels never have offered him a job. And, he said, he has declined offers from other teams — he wouldn’t say which ones — to become a major league bullpen coach.
“Running the minor league pitching sounds more intriguing to me than being a bullpen coach in the big leagues,” he said.
In 2023, the Angels invited select former players to shadow the major league team and provide feedback to management. Percival was not part of that group, but he did spend time at the fall instructional league, checking in with pitching prospects and pitching coaches — in part, he said, because he had been charged with assessing whether those coaches might be “willing to reduce the footprint of analytics.”
Percival said he appreciates technology but has heard from minor league coaches — he didn’t say which organizations employed them — that claimed they were restricted in proposing mechanical adjustments to pitchers. He acknowledges he has “kind of fought” analytics-based approaches and still raves about the veteran Angels pitching instructors — including the late, great Howie Gershberg — that turned him from a catcher into a closer.
He said he shared his opinions with the Angels, did not call for any firings, and returned home. He was stung by a subsequent story in the Athletic that noted the Angels’ dismissal of two pitching instructors and reported that Percival’s influence “played at least a factor in the Angels’ decision to oust them.”
Said 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. Far from it.
“I bleed Angels,” Percival said.
The Angels have baseball’s longest playoff drought and have finished in last place in back-to-back seasons. He said he thought the Angels should have traded Shohei Ohtani and maybe even Mike Trout to stockpile prospects and rebuild in earnest.
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“It’s a faster process than this,” Percival said, “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 must break Percival’s heart to see his team descend back into persistent mediocrity.
“There’s been times, yeah,” he said. “You want it to get back to where it was at.”
He’s rooting for that. In the meantime, he’s got a winner to put together, just up the road.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
