By John Klima
Staff Writer

One of his players was engaged in a playful discussion in the final days of the regular season. The champagne had already been ordered for the celebration upon capturing the American League West, but you can’t spray it until you earn it.

“Today is always just another game,” said the player, whose name shall be protected so that his boss doesn’t think he questions the system.

I laughed. Baseball players can smell a party a mile away.

The ballplayer shrugged. He pointed to Manager Mike Scioscia’s office and began to laugh.

“He’s got us brainwashed,” the ballplayer said.

If giving up a piece of individuality for the cohesion of the clubhouse, the framework of an organization and the mandate of a manager is what it takes to play in the World Series, then any player who wants a ring will gladly trade an ounce of ego for a slice of winner’s share.

You can argue that this has been Scioscia’s finest season as a manager. He’s won with kids and role players, and he’s won with veterans. He’s plugged holes with the depth the farm system gave him, and he’s taught these younger players how they need to play with the mental sophistication that he demands. This is a fine balance the Angels have attained. They haven’t fallen into the trap that kills other organizations, which play who they have paid, not who is best for a given role.

He’s manipulated his pitching staff, made changes when changes needed to be made and found ways to maximize his roster. He stays with veterans because he feels veterans deserve that respect. But he’s also stayed with younger players. There’s a reason why Scioscia needs to own this clubhouse. It’s so he can move his players around as he wishes, avoiding the conflict that often accompanies such moves. The result is another 90-victory season, and the third American League West title in the last five years.

Garret Anderson’s second-half surge was the missing link, because you need two power bats to win in the American League. But how many teams would win, as the Angels have, with a young leadoff hitter, such as Reggie Willits, who moved into the role when Chone Figgins could not? How many would win with not one, but two, young catchers in Mike Napoli, and more recently, Jeff Mathis? Two of his five starters, Jered Weaver and Joe Saunders, are in their second seasons. Up the middle, Mathis, second baseman Howie Kendrick, and Willits have little combined big league experience.

This roster affords flexibility, but Scioscia’s ability to move his pieces across the board gives the Angels an unusual advantage. There’s no set sequence. Count the managers in the game who can do that. It’s a very short list.

“That depth has saved us,” Scioscia said. “I think that’s a statement for the whole organization, not so much for what I’ve done. This has been an abnormal year for what you would expect from a contending team. The only thing that saved us is the young talent from this organization. It’s been groomed and ready to fill roles up here.”

But there is an element of training once most players come to the big leagues. Scioscia has done this while winning. That’s incredibly hard to do at the big league level. It can only be done if the foundation is there.

“Mike is one of those guys who can teach physical and mental mechanics,” his former bench coach, Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon observed.

The Angels defy the modern model because Scioscia’s organization gives him his kind of players. Mental tools are as important as physical tools. This is the ability to play the game the correct way. A tactician is only as good as his troops, and if the players aren’t trained to compete mentally as well as physically, then ability alone will only carry them so far.

Baseball is littered with careers like these that have splintered like broken bats, of promising players whose physical ability should have ensured success, but whose lack of awareness, whose poor aptitude for adjusting, whose inability to put baseball first over money, off-the-field distractions, and fame cost them a chance to find out what they might have been.

That kind of young player doesn’t exist with the Angels, and if it does, he still has to put his team above his ability, or he will be gone. The Angels are well known for cleaning house when a major league player fails these values. But they will also do it to a minor league player whose maturity and decision-making on and off the field restricts their ability to fit Scioscia’s needs at the major league level. Ask Bobby Jenks.

You’ll never get Scioscia to take credit, and in that way, he greatly deviates from Tom Lasorda, his former manager. Lasorda would praise players, but call attention to himself in the process. Scioscia prides himself on being, as some have called it, vanilla. That, too, is a diversion.

“I think our staff has done an incredible job evaluating,” Scioacia said. “We’ve got some depth, but we’d have to move it around and use it to maximize it. I can’t remember a year where we’ve had to look at so many different options and lineups. If you told me that Maicer Izturis would be hitting fifth for us and we’d be in the position that we are, I’d have to question it. But it’s where we are and it’s worked. It’s one thing to get creative with a painting when you have red and blue. We have a painting and the organization has given us a whole spectrum of colors with which to get creative.”

That’s an interesting choice of word selection, noticing the difference between red and blue. The ancestry of the Angels cannot be found in Anaheim nor in Los Angeles. It can be found in Brooklyn.

The current Dodgers have virtually no connection to Branch Rickey, who invented these concepts when he was general manager of the Cardinals, and fine-tuned them in Brooklyn. When Rickey was fired he left behind a generation of Rickey men - scouts, coaches, managers and instructors, who molded the Dodgers into something that they would never quite be again – a young team not afraid to play to win.

Jeff Kent, whose vent this week was directed at the Dodgers’ young talent, might be a loner. But the loners are often the most perceptive. His observations that his younger teammates aren’t entirely prepared to win run against what it meant to be a Rickey man.

That was something Lasorda adhered to and Scioscia maintains. You can afford young players a small window to learn. But there must be performance and progress. The goal is to win in a constant state of transition.

That was the way Rickey built his teams. Scioscia’s baseball bloodlines can be traced to that thought, right down to the late Cuban scout Reggie Otero, who signed him. Otero was a Rickey man throughout.

Rickey liked to do it cheap, but above all, he believed in the sum total of a player – brains, maturity, passion, gamesmanship – as a factor in how much you could get out of his physical tools, a trait that has all but vanished from the modern business of mechanical baseball. Walk into Scioscia’s room and this is the way the game used to be played, the way it should be played.

“If a guy’s not ready to come up and play here, he’s not going to come up here, physically or mentally,” Scioscia said. “It’s the whole package. Some guys mentally are still growing, and these guys here certainly are, but physically their talent is so great that they’re able to come up here and do what we need them to do. I think the philosophy we brought over when we started in 2000 has taken hold throughout the entire minor league system. To be honest, when we got here, the minor leaguers were already structured well. We just enhanced that with some things that we knew were important to us and we needed to get to that next level. It’s alive and well.”

So too, are the Angels. Here in the modern game, baseball front offices are run increasingly by baseball people who aren’t baseball people. They are mathematicians. Fewer of them used to be players. That doesn’t mean a non-player can’t develop a baseball mind. But it does mean that it requires patience and diligence, ethics that modernists believe a machine can eschew. Arte Moreno has let his baseball men be baseball men, and in the process, he has created a throwback of a franchise. Much of that is tied to letting Scioscia exert his authority. In that way, he is Lasorda. Don’t cross him. Leave the body. Take the cannoli.

“I don’t even know the contracts, I couldn’t tell you the salaries in there,” Scioscia said, gesturing to his clubhouse. “I think with those blinders, it lets you pick the guys who are right for the right role. We’ve seen some big contracts walk out the door.”

Brainwashed? Ballplayers always think they’re right, but look at the end result. If it takes a brainwashing for a champagne splash, most teams would take that in the time it takes to pop the cork.