The 100 Greatest Angels - #55, Carney Lansford

#55 Carney Lansford, 3B

Career Stats

I started to look up Carney's stats for this short tribute and was overcome once again with rage and anger over his being traded. It is 2:30 a.m. and the jugular in my neck is pounding over a trade made 25 years ago. Carney was a great Angel Rookie in 1977, put up a fabulous sophomore 1978 and was a core contributor of the 1979 Division winning team and I am gonna go puke thinking about what might have been.

Fortunately, Rob McMillin looks back without anger:

Carney Lansford was a third-round draftee for the Angels out of Wilcox High in Santa Clara. Progressing rapidly through the Angels' system, he hit 32 home runs between high-A Quad City and AA El Paso in 1976 and 1977. By the time he was 21, he was the Angels' starting third baseman, supplanting Dave Chalk. Coming in third in the Rookie of the Year voting in 1978, the next year he pasted 19 homers and drove in 79 runs in the Angels' run to their first division win, despite primarily batting second in the order.

Lansford spent three seasons with the Angels, who subsequently sent him to the Red Sox in December, 1980 in the disastrous Rick Burleson/Butch Hobson trade. Lansford spent two years with Boston, who traded him back to Oakland and the AL West in December 1982, where he spent another decade harrassing the Angels: in a career 444 at bats against his former club, he hit .300, his fifth highest career average against (the others being Cleveland, Detroit, Oakland, and Seattle).

Read Rob everyday at his Angel/Dodger 6-4-2 L.A. Baseball Blog.