Taking a look around the Southern California sports scene:
• During the final five minutes of the Kings’ 4-0 victory over the New Jersey Devils in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final on Monday at Staples Center, these eyes were focused on action behind the play, waiting for the Devils to take out their embarrassment with some goonish activity. Yet nothing happened. It is wrong to go as far as saying the Devils had quit, because no hockey players get to the Stanley Cup Final if they’re quitters, but that was one team that accepted its fate with surprising placidity.
• If the Kings do win the Cup (and “if” seems like the wrong word, doesn’t it?), the Forum somehow has to be part of the celebration. Making the Forum’s Inglewood streets of Manchester or Prairie part of the parade route seems unfeasible, but something needs to take place at the arena that was the Kings’ home from 1967-99.
• And how cool would it be if the Kings wore the “Forum Blue and Gold” uniforms for Game 4 on Wednesday night?
• Sitting with former Kings owner Bruce McNall at the game Monday was motivational guru Tony Robbins. Robbins is no late-comer to Kings hockey, having been around the team a lot in the early ’90s.
• Sitting together for a few moments of Monday’s game were Gretzky, Mark Messier and Luc Robitaille. That’s a decent trio of forwards. They scored 2,256 NHL goals.
• Here is another dominating Southern California team, but one you might not know: Cypress College’s softball team. Cypress two weeks ago won its third consecutive California Community Colleges Athletic Association softball championship as the Chargers’ Tiffany Fox was named the championship tournament’s most valuable player. It was the 23rd consecutive season that Cypress coach Brad Pickler has led the Chargers to the CCCAA softball final four.
• Mark Trumbo’s insertion into the cleanup slot in the Angels order is a natural. It’s sensible that Manager Mike Scioscia does not want to place too much pressure on the 26-year-old, given the new fielding assignments Trumbo has received this year, at third base and in right field. But Trumbo is proving he can handle anything, and he is playing just fine in right field.
• A couple of weeks ago on an Angels radio broadcast, ex-Angel pitcher and current radio analyst Mark Langston said, “Mike Trout will become the greatest young player in the history of the game.” After a few seconds of silence, broadcast partner Terry Smith got Langston to admit Langston got a tad over-excited. Trout does do things that bring out the hyperbole in many of us.
• Angels closer Ernesto Frieri preceded a recent TV postgame interview by joking, “Don’t make fun of my English.” Kudos to the kid from Colombia for giving English his best effort – Vladimir Guerrero used a Spanish/English translator for all of his six years with the Angels. English with a Latino inflection is very familiar and easily understood just about everywhere in Southern California these days.
• Pregame activity in the Angel Stadium parking lot seems a bit more festive and looser this baseball season. It’s not close to the freewheeling tailgate scene in the Qualcomm Stadium lot at San Diego Chargers home games, which are fun and casual except for that one home game a year when the Raiders and their following invade the place and restrictive “Raider Rules” have to be invoked to maintain calm. But it is more of a relaxed atmosphere in the lot at Angel Stadium these days.
• Pedro Borbon, who passed away Monday, was best known for his relief pitching years with the Cincinnati Reds in the 1970s, but he broke in with the Angels, making his major league debut with the Angels in 1969. After that season, Borbon and the late Jim McGlothlin were the main figures the Angels traded to the Reds to get Alex Johnson, who won the 1970 American League batting championship. Borbon’s name also is part of a memorable joke in the movie “Airplane!” (Ted Striker’s inner dialogue, “Pinch-hitting for Pedro Borbon, Manny Mota … Mota … Mota …”).
• Another Angel from the distant past who passed away, pretty much unnoticed – Don Mincher, who died this past March 4. Mincher was the principle acquisition in the trade that sent 1964 Cy Young winner Dean Chance to the Minnesota Twins before the 1967 season. Mincher, a first baseman, led the ’67 Angels in home runs with 25, which was quite a lot for an Angels player of that era and he played in the ’67 All-Star Game at Anaheim Stadium.
• Mincher also is the answer to this trivia question: Who is the only player to represent the Seattle Pilots in an MLB All-Star Game? The Pilots were in Seattle for only the 1969 season before becoming the Milwaukee Brewers.
• Of all the major-sports mock drafts that precede the drafts, the Major League Baseball mock drafts are the most useless. It is too difficult to predict how MLB teams project high school prospect’s ” sign-ability” – whether that potential prospect is completely locked into going to college baseball or whether a specific signing bonus will be enough to lure the high school player immediately to professional baseball.
• The Lakers’ Andrew Bynum should be spending much of his summer working on a left-handed jump hook in the key. A weak-hand jump hook is a devastating weapon for a low-post player, an impossible-to-block shot that gives the defensive player one more big concern. Nobody wants to hear that Bynum plans on improving his outside shot.
Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregister.com
