{"id":297378,"date":"2025-11-20T16:17:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T16:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/297378\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T16:17:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T16:17:11","slug":"former-angel-troy-percival-trying-to-build-a-winner-in-long-beach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/297378\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Angel Troy Percival trying to build a winner in Long Beach"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When spring training rolls around, it will be one dozen years since the Angels<\/a> last appeared in a postseason game and two dozen years since they won their first and only World Series championship<\/a>. If baseball were scripted, two of the Angels\u2019 World Series heroes would take charge of the team and make it a winner again.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, two of those champions are taking charge of a team next year. Not the Angels, though.<\/p>\n

Troy Percival has been hired to manage the new Long Beach team<\/a> 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<\/a>, the 2002 World Series most valuable player.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made sure that he could hit fungoes,\u201d Percival said, \u201cbecause I can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we talked the other day, Percival wore a T-shirt with a cartoon image of a bull, with the word \u201cPEN\u2019\u2019 stenciled on it. Once a reliever, always a reliever. <\/p>\n

The Pioneer League extends into Idaho, Montana and Utah, and Percival managed the Idaho Falls team<\/a> for the past two summers. He decided that was too many years too far from his Riverside home, and from his family.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 where he and his father built the clubhouse<\/a> \u2014 at 8 a.m. the next day. Then Long Beach called about managing and, well, so much for that year off.<\/p>\n

The UCR and Long Beach schedules would conflict only if UCR makes the playoffs \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Over the past two years, the Pioneer League has expanded into California<\/a>. The Long Beach team plans to play at Blair Field and launch next spring, joined by a new Modesto team<\/a> managed by another former Angel, J.T. Snow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re going to see kids that are hungry, that make barely enough money to live on, and they play baseball the right way,\u201d Percival said. \u201cI think you\u2019re going to get a lot of people that want to come watch kids play their butts off, knowing they\u2019re not making millions and millions of dollars. But they all have the dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 he wouldn\u2019t say which ones \u2014 to become a major league bullpen coach.<\/p>\n

\u201cRunning the minor league pitching sounds more intriguing to me than being a bullpen coach in the big leagues,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 in part, he said, because he had been charged with assessing whether those coaches might be \u201cwilling to reduce the footprint of analytics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Former <\/p>\n

Former Angels pitcher Troy Percival prepares to throw the first pitch during the 20th anniversary celebration of the their World Series title at Angel Stadium in June 2022.<\/p>\n

(Wally Skalij \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Percival said he appreciates technology but has heard from minor league coaches \u2014 he didn\u2019t say which organizations employed them \u2014 that claimed they were restricted in proposing mechanical adjustments to pitchers. He acknowledges he has \u201ckind of fought\u201d analytics-based approaches and still raves about the veteran Angels pitching instructors \u2014 including the late, great Howie Gershberg \u2014 that turned him from a catcher into a closer.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in The Athletic that noted the Angels\u2019 dismissal of two pitching instructors and reported that Percival\u2019s influence \u201cplayed at least a factor in the Angels\u2019 decision to oust them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Said Percival: \u201cI\u2019m the henchman? OK, I\u2019ll wear it. But I said, that\u2019s it, no more instructional league, none of that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that he has turned in his halo. Far from it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI bleed Angels,\u201d Percival said.<\/p>\n

The Angels have baseball\u2019s longest playoff drought<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a faster process than this,\u201d Percival said, \u201cthan just to keep putting Band-Aids, hoping to get to the 90(-win) mark and slip into the playoffs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Percival and Glaus \u2014 and Garret Anderson and Darin Erstad and Tim Salmon and John Lackey and Jarrod Washburn \u2014 represented a homegrown core that lifted the Angels from persistent mediocrity into champions<\/a>. It must break Percival\u2019s heart to see his team descend back into persistent mediocrity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s been times, yeah,\u201d he said. \u201cYou want it to get back to where it was at.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s rooting for that. In the meantime, he\u2019s got a winner to put together, just up the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When spring training rolls around, it will be one dozen years since the Angels last appeared in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[17598,170352,64,63,4034,3181,170351,170356,170353,170354,170358,22930,170355,170357,591,85,3018,170350,25667],"class_list":["post-297378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-angels","tag-angels-world-series-hero","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-baseball","tag-coach","tag-dozen-year","tag-former-angel-troy-percival","tag-idaho-falls-team","tag-independent-pioneer-league","tag-instructor","tag-long-beach","tag-major-league-team","tag-minor-league-system","tag-mlb","tag-sports","tag-team","tag-troy-percival","tag-winner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}