JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

Thoughts between newscasts . . .

I laid the 2001 baseball season to rest last week. Twice.

Unfortunately, the Anaheim Angels -- whom I blindly adopted some 30 years

ago and have not had the good sense to abandon, even in the face of

serious and long-standing fan abuse -- laid the season to rest much

earlier. In Kansas City, in August. The Angels went there full of bravura

and very much in the wild card race and quietly died. They’ve been on

life support ever since, and I sat with them twice last week, just before

the plug was pulled. It wasn’t much fun. Even the hot dogs seemed cold.

The Angels did give it one last surge of effort against Seattle on

Wednesday. They were beaten, finally, by their inability to bunt the

baseball, two quite extraordinary fielding plays by Seattle and one

extraordinarily bad decision by an umpire. Vintage Angels. On Thursday

they succumbed quietly to Oakland, and I bade them goodbye and didn’t

return. I will wait for a rebirth next spring, which I always do.

Is it different for me this year as we kiss off the baseball season?

Have the stark events of the past month pushed something as inordinately

unimportant as baseball outside my vision, replaced by concerns that

deeply matter? No, not really, because I learned somewhere, probably a

long time ago, that if I immerse myself totally in things that really

matter, my perspective and critical judgment become badly warped. That’s

why Congress should be very careful about the freedoms it gives up in the

heat of crisis. And it’s why I will look forward to baseball spring

training in March.

I don’t recommend this for anyone else, but it works -- without guilt

-- for me. All my life, I’ve been invested in a variety of socially

unimportant things that can be discarded when and if necessary but offer

a kind of emotional balance in good times or bad. They take nothing away

from the energy and determination to deal with a crisis while helping to

provide me a clearer head with which to address it.

That’s why soldiers shoot craps on the deck of a ship that is carrying

them into combat. It’s why each branch of the military service had

baseball and football teams that played before raucous, partisan troops

throughout World War II. And it’s also why Billy Graham, moments after

delivering an impassioned sermon to thousands of people, once stopped by

his car where his driver and I were waiting for him and listening to a

baseball game and asked, with obvious interest, “What’s the score?”

No matter how unimportant the activity is, you have to be involved if

this is to work. You have to care. So I won’t put baseball away

completely after attending services for the Angels. I’ll watch the

playoffs and World Series, but not with the intensity of having one’s own

team involved. And I’ll wait till spring, which offers a kind of

continuity and immortality under any circumstances and at any age.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .

One of the few principles I seldom violate in the name of expediency

is using this space to respond to critical letter writers. It seems

patently unfair for me always to have the last word in such a debate. So

except in instances where there has been wrong information that needs to

be corrected, I figure the critics should be able to have their say and

the readers can then choose up sides. And clearly, I am saying this now

because I am about to bend that principle. But only sort of.

I seemed to rile up a lot of people with my columns on the Home Ranch

project, which is pretty much to be expected with such a hot button

issue. But since I’ve led off this column with baseball talk, I’d like to

express regret for the analogy I used involving the Toledo Mud Hens.

Clearly people who are not familiar with the Mud Hens took this as a

slur on the Home Ranch opponents -- which couldn’t be farther from the

truth. I grew up two hours from Toledo, and over the years both saw the

Mud Hens play and followed their fortunes. This is a fine and thoroughly

respectable Triple-A team I recommend to any of you passing through

Toledo. I used the analogy simply to illustrate what I saw as a

considerable disparity in resources between the Yankees and the Mud Hens

-- in a column not meant as a treatise on the project, itself, but rather

offering my subjective reactions to what I saw, heard and felt at the

hearings.

Another matter that needs to be corrected was called to my attention

by Planning Commissioner Bruce Garlich. I wrote that he became a believer

in the Segerstrom traffic projections after many hours of poring over

studies and talking with Segerstrom traffic consultants. Says Garlich in

a note to me: “In fact, I met with Costa Mesa city traffic engineers Raja

Sethuraman and Peter Naghavi, whom I mentioned by name -- not Segerstrom

traffic consultants. The distinction is noteworthy.”

Finally, I received a handwritten card the other day from our

congressman, Chris Cox. He included a highlighted column in which I

suggested he was accessible when he wants to trash Democrats but not when

we would like his views on such matters as the El Toro airport dispute or

the Recreational Protection Waters Act -- introduced by Rep. Jim Saxton

(R-N.J.) -- that would allow boaters to dump sewage into our harbors.

Cox wrote: “I’d been meaning to drop you a note about the Saxton bill

when Sept. 11 intervened. I hadn’t heard of it before you wrote but of

course oppose changing our designation. On Aug. 22, I was on vacation

with my family. Hope this helps.”

Indeed it does. Now that we’ve disposed of the Saxton bill, we can

move along to exploring his views on El Toro. I’ll keep you posted.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.