ANAHEIM — Bill Stoneman didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to find a manager for the Angels back in November of 1999.
Two weeks? Stoneman wasn’t a guy to panic, so no problem, right? He’d been hired to clean up a scary mess after Halloween as the Angels’ GM. It had been a season of turmoil.
Sound familiar? How bad had it been?
“Awful,” Stoneman recalled.
Stoneman remembered a handsome young man of 40, a former catcher, walking through his office door that November who made it all seem everything would be just fine.