Guardian Angel Mo Vaughn's spiritual impact on the Anaheim Angels may be more powerful than anything he does when he returns to the lineup

He walks into the Anaheim Angels' locker room on crutches.
Second day on the regular-season job, April 7, and Mo Vaughn is
on crutches. He is back from the hospital, where an MRI has
revealed that his left ankle is sprained, the bone is bruised,
the ligaments on the outside of the ankle have been stretched
and... hey, what's this?

His teammates are watching a car chase. The action spins across
two giant television screens in the middle of the large carpeted
room. A guy in a Chrysler LeBaron convertible, top up against the
unseasonably cold weather, is leading a string of California
Highway Patrol cruisers on a high-speed parade down the Pacific
Coast Highway. The chase is being covered by a helicopter from
Channel 9, KCAL, the live picture backed by appropriately
breathless commentary from an unseen anchor desk. The Angels'
players inject their own commentary.

"They're going to shoot his butt if he doesn't stop," one player
says.

"He's riding on the rims," another says. "Both tires are gone on
the right side. He can't go for too long like this."

"I don't know," a third voice says. "You can go a long way on
steel if you have to."

On his crutches, Vaughn clicks and clanks through the dialogue
to the far end of the room. His ankle is immobilized by a
strap-on plastic cast. He injured himself in the first half of
the first inning of Opening Night--Opening Night!--chasing a
high, meandering foul ball off the bat of Omar Vizquel of the
Cleveland Indians. Vaughn had it, had it, had it, then didn't
have it as he tumbled off the top step of the Indians' dugout,
missing the next five steps and landing with a thump, twisting
the ankle. He remained in the game, batting twice before leaving
in pain in the fifth inning. He will be put on the 15-day
disabled list. Cautiously he sits down at an empty locker,
placing the crutches at his side.

A trainer talks with him for a little while. Vaughn's father,
Leroy, comes and goes, picking up Mo's suitcase and garment bag
and taking them to the car. A circle of reporters forms.

"Did they watch a lot of car chases before games in Boston?"
someone asks.

Vaughn grunts. "O.J.," he says. "I think we saw O.J. somewhere."

The driver of the LeBaron finally surrenders, lying facedown in
the middle of a highway after his car has ground to a lop-sided
halt on a steep upgrade. The CHP officers, guns drawn, cuff him
and take him away. The anchor desk goes to commercials. The
Angels go out onto Edison Field for batting practice.

Mo Vaughn tries to make himself comfortable. New team. New life.
New beginning. California. He wanted to get going a little faster
than this.

"I'm frustrated," Vaughn says. "It's only been about 24 hours,
and I'm frustrated. Don't tell me about X-rays and MRIs. Get me
some ice. Let me get out there."

The next day he is off the crutches, but team orthopedist Lewis
Yocum says an injury such as Vaughn's might take six weeks to
heal. "The DL is 12 days more," Vaughn says impatiently. "If I'm
not ready in 12 days, I'll cut the whole damn foot off."

He has things to do, things to prove. That is his story. He was
party to one of the messiest divorces in baseball over the past
year. There are some strange pictures in the new sets of
bubblegum cards--Roger Clemens as a New York Yankee, Kevin Brown
as a Los Angeles Dodger, Albert Belle as a Baltimore Oriole--but
none as strange as Mo Vaughn glowering at an imaginary pitcher
from underneath a blue helmet with a winged red A on the front.

How could he? How could they? Mo not with the Red Sox any more?

On Nov. 25, 1998, Vaughn signed an $80 million contract to play
first base and bat third for the Angels for six years. He
switched teams, towns, coasts, leaving the only employer he'd
had since the Red Sox drafted him in the first round in 1989. He
became one of the most expensive characters in the entertainment
portfolio of The Walt Disney Co., which owns the Angels.
Disney's 25% stake in the team had cost it only $30 million two
years earlier.

"He was the one guy out there we really wanted," Anaheim general
manager Bill Bavasi says. "His baseball talent is obvious, but he
also is a bright guy, a well-spoken guy, a no-nonsense guy. He
brings us things we never had. There's a fire inside him."

"He's the piece we've needed," Angels manager Terry Collins says.
"He doesn't have to do anything more for us than he's already
done. He doesn't have to hit one more home run. He doesn't have
to get one more base hit. He just has to be Mo."

Even though it came at the end of a year of acrimony and missed
signals between Vaughn and Red Sox management, the move was
still startling. Vaughn seemed to be one of the few players left
in sports who had a chance to play in one place for an entire
career. He was an old-time baseball player in an old-time
baseball town. The idea that he had shifted to
California--California!--was as unsettling as if he had run off
with the platinum-haired secretary from the steno pool. He was
supposed to be solid and stolid, a 31-year-old character from
the Movietone News, not the latest SportsCenter highlight, a
last daguerreotype before the final fiber-optic takeover. He was
a local baseball Bunyan, a 6'1", 245-pound Casey at the Bat. Gone?

"I never thought it would happen," Red Sox designated hitter
Reggie Jefferson says. "My brain told me for a long time that it
would happen, but my heart always told me it wouldn't. This was
his place, his team."

The public face of the Red Sox was off to become the face on an
Angels gift-shop T-shirt ($23 for adults, $20 for children) that
reads THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW MO-LLENNIUM! He was off to a newly
purchased house on the Pacific Ocean at Newport Beach, where his
mother, Shirley, was doing the decorating, and the architect and
as many as 18 men were working in a fever so Mo would have a
place to sleep by April 1. He was off to the freeways and
Fatburgers, Carl Jr.'s and live sports on television at 4:30 on a
weekday afternoon. He was off to a place where skyrockets shoot
out of a synthetic mountain after home runs, a place where palm
trees lead the way to the parking lot. He was off, literally,
into the sunset.

"I still don't have those freeways down right," he says. "I have
to take five of them between my house and the ballpark. It's
confusing. They have more exits on the left out here than they do
on the right."

As in any divorce, there was a question of money. "We always had
a significant difference with him on value," Dan Duquette, the
Red Sox general manager, says. "Eighty million dollars. You can
do an awful lot with $80 million."

As in any divorce, there was a question of love. "The Angels just
blew me out of the water with their offer," Vaughn says. "They
showed me that they really wanted me. They showed respect I'd
never seen before."

As in any divorce, the neighbors talked. "I live on Cape Cod
during the off-season," Anaheim shortstop Gary DiSarcina, a
Massachusetts native, says. "So I was reading the papers as a fan
when everything was happening, but I also was reading as someone
who's been involved with this game. I could sort of read between
the lines. I could see a relationship that had run its course.
There is a miserableness that surrounds the Red Sox and their
fans, all of those years without a World Series, all of the
pressure. Mo was caught in the middle of it."

As in any divorce, there was animosity. The passions involved
were so strong that Vaughn had the move commemorated on his left
forearm. "I got the tattoo during the winter, in Rhode Island,"
Vaughn says. "After everything was done."

The blue ink against the dark skin is barely noticeable to the
naked eye. In the midst of a pattern of swirls and filigree, he
had the title of a Maya Angelou poem, Still I Rise, inscribed.
These are the first three stanzas.

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise....

As in any divorce, well, it seemed a shame.

He had a history. That was the thing. He was all Boston. He was
a civic monument set somewhere on the Freedom Trail, among the
Old North Church and the swan boats and a good pot of baked
beans. You hear stories all the time about black athletes who
cross Boston off their list of places to play, citing its
reputation for troubled race relations. Vaughn loved the city.
He had been going there all his life.

"I'd be there every Thanksgiving," he says. "That was the family
tradition: go to my aunt's house. I had relatives all around
Boston." Mo grew up in Norwalk, Conn., 3 1/2 hours away. He
would pile into the family car with Leroy, a high school
principal, and Shirley, a grammar-school teacher, and his two
older sisters, Catherine and Donna, and go to the home of
Shirley's sister, Loretta Peters, on Waverly Street in Roxbury,
a mostly black neighborhood of Boston. Mo would play baseball,
football, basketball a few blocks from Loretta's house, at
Franklin Field. The trips were magical.

"There would be two dinners," Shirley says. "On Thanksgiving the
adults would prepare the meal. The night before, though, the
kids would prepare a meal. Each kid would be given his own
Cornish hen to clean and cook and serve. The kids would churn
the butter, bake the bread. They were supposed to be like the
Pilgrims. There might have been 15, 20 kids some years. The only
problem was that when you were 18, you were supposed to move up
to the adults' table. Maurice and the cousins around his age
refused to do it. They were still eating at the kids' table when
they were 23, 24."

There were visits to cousins' homes in Brockton and other places
near Boston. There was a family cottage on the Cape, in North
Falmouth, to visit every summer. There were relatives on
Martha's Vineyard. Boston? When Mo was drafted by the Red Sox in
June 1989, after his junior year at Seton Hall, he was elated.
"I thought it was a sign," he says. "First of all, I was happy
to be drafted in the first round. I wasn't one of those diaper
dandies, those sure things. I didn't know where I'd be drafted.
I was proud that the Red Sox showed such confidence in me.
Second, it was Boston. It could have been anyplace, but it was a
place I knew."

He climbed the chain, from Double A New Britain to Triple A
Pawtucket to Boston. When he got there, first in 1991, then to
stay in '93, he became a Boston favorite. He was a big bopper in
a ballpark famous for big boppers, a lefthanded power hitter who
also hit for average. What was not to like? He was the Hit Dog.
His enthusiasm was obvious.

Leroy encouraged him to live close to the city and to become
active in the community. Make a home. The encouragement wasn't
necessary. Vaughn became one of the few Red Sox players to live
in the Boston area year-round. He rented in Braintree and
eventually bought a big house in Easton, where he installed an
indoor batting cage. He became involved. For each home run he
hit in 1998, he donated $1,000 to the St. Francis House, a
shelter for the homeless. He gave speeches at the Trotter
School, a middle school in Roxbury. He looked like a big ghetto
kid himself, with the oversized clothes, the oversized jewelry,
the shaved head and the oversized personality. He lit up rooms.
He delivered no-nonsense messages to kids who seldom had
listened. In 1994 he started his own foundation to help kids at
risk.

"He called me up," says Brian Wilson, a friend from Norwalk
since grammar school. "He said he was doing all these charitable
things for so many groups. He said he wanted to have his own
group, and he wanted to know if I could help him set it up and
run it. I was just getting out of graduate school and needed a
job, so I took him up on the offer."

Space was procured in the basement of a city building on Blue
Hill Avenue in Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in south
Boston. The Mo Vaughn Youth Development Program was established
to help kids in junior high and high school. This was not about
sports. This was an after-school educational program. Tutors were
enlisted. Catered dinners were served. Vans were secured to give
rides home. Life skills were taught.

"We talked it over: What didn't we learn in school that we should
have learned?" Wilson says. "Simple things like how to write a
check. How to get a credit card. We just gave a class on how to
find an apartment. Then we took the kids to a furniture store and
gave them imaginary money, $2,000 apiece, and told them to
furnish the apartment. We've been in business for five years, and
we'll have our first high school graduate this spring. She
received a full academic scholarship to Bridgewater State
College."

There was a black-tie gala every year to raise funds: Mo's Night
Out, held at the State House or a downtown hotel. There was a
charitable night at the circus, with Mo as the ringmaster.
Twenty percent of his endorsement income was funneled into the
foundation. No other active Boston athlete did as much. No other
active athlete was as linked to the city.

He was different. He was a local sports celebrity with roots.

The split between Vaughn and Red Sox management developed over
time. Maybe it started as far back as 1994 with the arrival of
Duquette as general manager. Painstakingly guarded in everything
he said and did, Duquette was the opposite of his flamboyant
first baseman. Maybe Duquette's lukewarm and unsuccessful
attempts to re-sign Clemens at the end of the '96 season--the
star pitcher took a bigger offer from the Toronto Blue Jays--was
the start. After Clemens left, Vaughn became the voice of the
clubhouse, the one who responded to all management moves. Maybe
the Red Sox didn't like having a clubhouse voice. Simple as that.

"They like their players all in a row," Vaughn says. "Well, you
look at all the great teams in baseball. The old Oakland A's.
The Yankees. They were filled with individuals, guys who weren't
afraid to speak out. You have all in a row, you have average."

Vaughn was not average. He was the champion of all lost causes.
Need a quote? Go to Mo. He was earnest and direct, established
eye contact, spoke with a James Earl Jones authority. He howled
when Mike Easler, his favorite batting coach, was fired in 1995.
He howled when Clemens was allowed to leave, when outfielder Mike
Greenwell was released in '96. He howled when manager Kevin
Kennedy was fired the same year.

"I've only played with four guys who, when they said something,
everyone else on the team listened," Boston first baseman Mike
Stanley, a 12-year veteran, says. "Don Mattingly, Nolan Ryan,
Roger Clemens and Mo. You just stopped and listened. It's a rare
thing in baseball."

At the same time Vaughn was talking, he was hitting. He was the
American League MVP in 1995, only his third full season in the
majors, with a .300 average, 39 home runs, 126 RBIs. After the
season the Red Sox signed him to a three-year contract worth
$18.6 million, avoiding arbitration. Vaughn was even better in
'96, with a .326 average, 44 home runs, 143 RBIs. He was a proven
All-Star.

In '97 he missed three weeks in June and July with torn cartilage
in his left knee, and his numbers were slightly down the rest of
the year. In the off-season the team began negotiations with him
for a new contract. After the '98 season he would be eligible,
for the first time, to become a free agent. The Red Sox offered
$62.5 million for five years. "I thought we were close to a
deal," Duquette says. "Then we signed Pedro Martinez. After that,
looking back, I don't know if we ever really were close again."

Martinez was a hard-throwing and talented young righthander who
had been acquired from the Montreal Expos in November 1997. When
the Red Sox signed him to a six-year, $75-million contract a
month later, they established a new pay structure. The team had
refused to pay that kind of money for Clemens, who had spent his
entire career with the Red Sox. Now the new guy would receive
it? Loyalty and modern economics seemed to be on opposite sides,
at least in Boston. At least to Vaughn.

The negotiations between Vaughn and the Red Sox became strained
diplomatic affairs. In the year that followed, Vaughn's last
season with the team, he openly opposed the people who paid his
salary. Those people--Duquette and team owner John
Harrington--were never as open as Vaughn but were certainly as
confrontational. It was a public catfight.

"You had to go see Mo every day," Boston Herald beat writer Tony
Massarotti says. "On any day he would pop off. The story got
tired, to tell the truth, but you had to go. He'd say anything.
He spoke from the heart."

Giving spice to the conflict was an incident on Jan. 9, 1998, at
2:15 a.m., when Vaughn was involved in a collision and arrested
for drunken driving. He was returning home alone from a night at
the Foxy Lady, a strip club in Providence, when his 1997 white
Ford pickup truck hit a disabled and empty 1986 Ford Escort in a
breakdown lane off Route 95 in Norwood, Mass. The truck flipped
but Vaughn suffered only a small cut on his back. State police
officers arrested him, they said, after he failed field sobriety
tests. Vaughn refused to submit to breath analysis.

On March 3, Vaughn was tried for drunken driving. He returned
from spring training, and his lawyer argued that at the time of
the accident Vaughn was overweight, recovering from knee surgery
and taking medication that affected his balance. After the jury
deliberated for 2 1/2 hours he was found not guilty and fined
$100 for driving outside the marked lanes.

It was still an embarrassing moment, and it made an issue of
Vaughn's bachelor lifestyle. Dancers at the Foxy Lady said he
was a regular. A fight with an alleged gang member in 1995 at
the Roxy nightclub in Boston was brought up again in newspaper
articles. How much did Vaughn usually drink? Did he have a
problem? Who were his friends? Though contrite--"I understand
the serious nature of the situation," he said in a paid ad
apologizing to his fans in the Herald and The Boston Globe--he
reacted strongly to a suggestion by Red Sox management that he
be evaluated for possible alcoholism and, if necessary, undergo
counseling. He was upset that instead of standing by him during
his difficulties the team held them over his head.

"If I've got to get an evaluation, then everyone's got
to--owners, general managers, other players and coaches too,"
Vaughn told reporters. "If that happens, then I'll have one."

He returned to spring training and hit three home runs in his
first game back. It was the start of a season of drama and
defiance. (IT'S WAR, the Herald shouted in one front-page
headline alluding to Vaughn and Red Sox management.) On Opening
Day at Fenway Park he hit a grand slam in the bottom of the
ninth inning to finish off a seven-run rally and a 9-7 win over
the Seattle Mariners. This sent the Red Sox on a run that ended
with their winning a wild-card spot in the playoffs.

"Reggie Jackson came to my son early in the year and said, 'Just
play baseball, don't worry, the Red Sox will sign you,'" Leroy
says. "Well, Reggie was wrong, but the advice was right. That
was what my son did."

Not exactly. "Every day the price goes up," Vaughn said at one
point during the season. "Get ready for the smear campaign,
coming to a theater near you," he said another time. "They say
my numbers are down," he said one other time. "What numbers are
they talking about? Nintendo or Sega? They're not talking about
what I'm doing on the baseball field."

There was an edge to everything that happened between the team
and its star player. Negotiations went nowhere. (They hardly took
place.) Vaughn and his parents and two agents read Globe
columnist Will McDonough for a line on management thinking.
McDonough, a friend of Harrington's, called Vaughn "Mo Money" and
characterized him as greedy. McDonough wrote the same type of
column he had written about Clemens during the pitcher's
negotiations with the team. Vaughn read the words and saw his
future. "I tried to prepare the people around me for what was
going to happen," he says. "I told them, 'When this thing goes
down, I'm probably going to be out of here.'"

"You could see the way it was going," Shirley says. "Leroy and I
would go on the road, and suddenly the team would tell us that
there weren't rooms for us at the team hotel. Or we'd go to the
games, and our tickets would be way up in the third deck
somewhere. That never had happened. Now it does? Is that a
coincidence?"

After Vaughn finished last season with a .337 average, 40 home
runs and 115 RBIs, the Red Sox had one last 15-day period of
exclusivity to sign him before he became a free agent. The team
never made an offer. Harrington told McDonough that Vaughn might
use any offer to leverage his value in the marketplace. The
market opened, and the Angels jumped to the front.

On Vaughn's first day of free agency the Anaheim front office
sent him a letter making a strong offer "to show we were
serious," according to Bavasi. Vaughn read the numbers and the
words and never looked anywhere else. Boston came back with an
offer--less guaranteed money, fewer years--that did not seem
serious. It even included a "character clause." After
negotiations raised the Angels' offer to $80 million over six
years, Vaughn accepted.

Duquette then chased free-agent outfielder Bernie Williams,
reportedly offering him $87.5 million for seven years, but
Williams re-signed with the Yankees. There was talk of Boston's
acquiring Belle or the Chicago White Sox' Frank Thomas, talk
about a number of other players, but in the end the only free
agent of note the Red Sox signed was second baseman Jose
Offerman, for $26 million over four years. Duquette was
criticized for overpaying.

"You look at it," Duquette says, "and the way Mo's contract is
set up, in 2003, his final season, he'll make $23 million. He'll
nearly make Jose Offerman's whole contract in one year. People
just move around in baseball now. The top pitchers never used to
go from one team to another. Now they all move. Brown, Clemens,
Randy Johnson. You look at Mark McGwire and Greg Vaughn, two
50-home-run hitters. They've both moved. It's different now.
That's the way it is."

Only one player, third baseman John Valentin, remains on the Red
Sox from their 1994 Opening Day roster, Duquette's first season.

"I was going for the ball, going all out," Vaughn says,
describing the fall down the stairs that left him on crutches
after his first game as an Angel. "That's the way you have to
play. I wasn't worried about getting hurt."

He admits that he was pumped, maybe too pumped. New team. New
life. New beginning. How could he not be pumped? An Air Force
flyover, led by a Stealth fighter, rattled the seats during the
national anthem. A riderless horse, a tribute to the Angels' late
owner, Gene Autry, circled the field. The smoke from the pregame
fireworks still hung in the air. The new guy wanted to catch
every ball possible.

He'd called a team meeting before the game, players only, to
preach the virtues of unity and hard work. He'd handed out
T-shirts bearing the legend TOGETHER WE CAN FLY. Funny thing. He
is being paid to speak out and speak up. His perceived vices are
now virtues.

The two Boston newspapers sent writers to cover his first day as
an Angel. Vaughn apologized to Dan Shaughnessy, the writer from
the Globe, for some nasty words he had directed at Shaughnessy
last season.

"So have you found a replacement for the Foxy Lady?" Shaughnessy
asked.

"Don't get me started again," Vaughn replied.

Vaughn says there are parts of Boston he will miss but parts he
won't miss. He says he finally is at peace.

"I'll miss the players, first of all," Vaughn says of the Red
Sox. "We went through a lot together. I'll always root for them.
I'll miss the fans in Boston. Even during the bad times they
supported me. I'll miss friends I made in the media. Every
player should play in a big-market, heavy-media situation at
least once. It focuses you. I'll miss the kids at the
foundation. I'm still going to be involved, but from out here. I
can't see them all the time. And I'll miss Jimy Williams, as a
manager and a man. He said it straight. He made me a better
player, showed me how to prepare for a game.

"I won't miss the brass. Hah. I won't miss--let's see if I can
say this right--not giving myself a chance to breathe." He hopes
he can fade into the fabric of the Los Angeles area, away from
the concentrated pressures, the "miserableness" of the past two
years.

The Angels, with Vaughn aboard, present a strong batting order.
The thought is that there will be no soft spot in the lineup for
opposing pitchers, that Vaughn will help Darin Erstad, Jim
Edmonds, Tim Salmon become even better hitters. If Anaheim's
pitching comes around, the team should be a contender in the West.

Meanwhile, every story about the Red Sox mentions how quiet the
team is, constructed in Duquette's image. Every story also
mentions the absence of Vaughn. "No one here can take the place
of Mo," Stanley says. Stanley, a lifelong catcher and designated
hitter, started the season at first base. He says he has three
first baseman's mitts. They are all black, with DOG 42 stitched
on the side. They were gifts from Vaughn.

In spring training, Stanley used Vaughn's old locker. "Nice
locker," he said, knocking on the side. "Good wood. I just hope
the reporters don't keep coming here. Mo was the guy who spoke
for the team, about everything. They're going to have to find
somebody else now. I hope it isn't me."

The Mo Vaughn Youth Development Program will remain in operation
in Boston. After he signed with the Angels, Vaughn held a picnic
for the kids at his house and explained why he was leaving. He
said, "It's like Dad has to go away to work," but he promised to
continue to be involved with them. He said that if they
graduated from high school, he would hold a party for them, at
Disneyland.

"He called me before he left," Boston mayor Tom Menino says. "A
good guy. He was as active as anyone in sports has been in the
city. Most of these guys, they want $25,000 to eat lunch with
somebody. Mo showed up at things."

Shirley says she has filled the house in Newport Beach with
furniture from Bloomingdale's, "every bit of it shipped here
from the East Coast." She likes to decorate. When Mo was a
little boy, she says, Leroy brought home "two 79-cent ashtrays,
orange and yellow," and she wound up redecorating their whole
house around those two ashtrays.

There are no plans to sell the old house in Easton, but who
knows? Vaughn might want to stay in California. He also has a
penthouse in Providence. "Right near the Foxy Lady," his mother
says with a smile. "No one ever found out about that. Not with
all the publicity."

Shirley and Leroy went to all of Mo's games during spring
training. They are retired now, living in Midlothian, Va., but
they take pride in the fact that they have seen virtually every
home game their son has played on any level, in any sport. They
will travel across the country to every Angels home stand this
year.

Shirley made the plans during the spring. She went crazy calling
the airlines for the best coach fares. Prices seem to change
every day, every hour. Who can make sense of all this? Her son
called her in the midst of her research. She said she didn't have
time for him. He made her explain why. She told him about the
flights.

"Coach?" he said. "You mean you're going to fly coach, back and
forth, all those times?"

"Well, I'm not paying first class," she said. "Do you know how
much that costs?"

"Mom...."

"Yes?"

"I make a million dollars a month. I'm not letting you and my
father fly coach."

Shirley said she would check with Leroy. Leroy said all right, he
didn't want to make a fuss. You have to do what you have to do.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

New team. New life. New beginning. The Vaughns of Midlothian,
Va., are flying first class to watch their son play baseball this
year. For the Anaheim Angels.

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATION BY JAY BEVENOUR

COLOR PHOTO: V.J. LOVERO LEROY (WITH SHIRLEY) URGED MO TO LIVE CLOSE TO BOSTON AND BE ACTIVE IN THE COMMUNITY

Vaughnted Offense

Last season, while no Angels player drove in 100 runs, Mo Vaughn
had one of the best offensive years in baseball history as a
member of the Red Sox: .337, 40 home runs, 115 runs batted in and
205 hits. No Angel has even hit .300 with 30 home runs, 100 RBIs
and 200 hits in the same year. Here's where Vaughn's 1998
performance would have placed him among Anaheim's alltime
single-season leaders.

BATTING AVERAGE HOME RUNS

Rod Carew, 1983 .339 Mo Vaughn, 1998 40
Mo Vaughn, 1998 .337 Reggie Jackson, 1982 39
Rod Carew, 1980 .331 Bobby Bonds, 1977 37
Tim Salmon, 1995 .330 Leon Wagner, 1962 37
Alex Johnson, 1970 .329 Don Baylor, 1979 36

RUNS BATTED IN HITS

Don Baylor, 1979 139 Mo Vaughn, 1998 205
Tim Salmon, 1997 129 Alex Johnson, 1970 202
Wally Joyner, 1987 117 Garret Anderson, 1997 189
Bobby Bonds, 1977 115 Carney Lansford, 1979 188
Mo Vaughn, 1998 115 Two tied at 186

SAYS BAVASI: "MO WAS THE ONE GUY OUT THERE WE REALLY WANTED.
THERE'S A FIRE INSIDE HIM"

LOYALTY AND ECONOMICS SEEMED TO BE ON OPPOSITE SIDES, AT LEAST
IN BOSTON. AT LEAST TO MO

FUNNY THING. MO IS BEING PAID TO SPEAK OUT AND SPEAK UP. HIS
PERCEIVED VICES ARE NOW VIRTUES