Preparing for the best part of 2006

True Believers don’t deal with four seasons. We recognize only two: the baseball season and the off-season. Last month, thank God, marked the end of the off-season. The millionaires who play major league baseball are presently gathered in Florida and Arizona to complain about minor aches and pains as they address 2006 in the tribal rite called spring training. There, they are being psychoanalyzed and asked endless inane questions by reporters trying to find something even remotely newsworthy for six weeks of daily reports that precede the opening of the season.

Meanwhile, the people ? like me ? whose undemanding loyalty makes millionaires of the players must spend our own spring training in quiet determination to jettison our off-season bad habits in time for opening day the first week in April.

For Newport-Mesa Angels fans, this means keeping focused on baseball rather than mucking around in the Angels’ identity crisis and the unfilled need for a slugger to follow Vladimir Guerrero in the lineup to make sure he gets some pitches to hit.

We will open the 2006 season and close it dragging the baggage of owner Arte Moreno’s insistence ? and the concurrence of the court ? that he’s entitled to the big bucks that he is convinced must grow out of the Angels’ name identification with Los Angeles. And so this season and henceforth, we will be the LAAs. Get used to it.

As for signing a slugger, Arte seems to feel that need was created by bored sports writers. So he didn’t buy one. Sluggers, that is, not sports writers, who are historically bound to the home team. This clearly wasn’t due to any lack of money. Besides winning a half-billion dollar TV contract, the Angels were so overwhelmed with season ticket applicants that they cut off the sale at 30,000 seats so some walk-ups could buy tickets.

So we’re heading into the season looking to old hands and rookies for power and bearing a name that sounds like a perfume.

Since these are matters True Believers can’t do anything about, our spring training is necessarily devoted to problems more under our control. Here is a partial list of mine: