Angels Fans Once Again Fall Victim to The Curse : Baseball: For old-timers, jinxed team’s 9-1 loss to Seattle in a one-game title playoff Monday is deja vu.

Mario Impemba, finishing his first season as a California Angels broadcaster, saw it happen: the Angels flying as high as the Hindenburg until they smelled smoke.

“Everyone tells me you gotta learn--it’s The Curse,” Impemba said last week. “I don’t buy it. I’m holding out.”

But the Angels’ sudden ending for 1995 had the look of the old jinx to shell-shocked old-timers.

Dominating their division for most of the season, the Angels went into a spin, pulled out of it, then finally crashed and burned Monday in Seattle: They lost a one-game playoff for the American League Western Division title, 9-1, to the Mariners.

It was just another tease-and-torture treatment for the Angels and their fans.

“An Angels fan is always saying, ‘I know they’re going to choke,’ ” said Paul Rubalcaba of Redlands. A former season-ticket holder, Rubalcaba tried hard, but failed, to ignore the Angels this season.

“They can’t forget the past. That’s their problem, and I think that’s the fans’ problem too.”

How can they forget? After 18 seasons, they finally won a division title in 1979, only to be stomped by the Baltimore Orioles in the playoffs.

In 1982, they won another division title and were a game away from the pennant with three playoff games remaining. They lost all three.

In 1986, there was a ghastly replay: one strike away from the pennant but losing.

And now 1995.

After recovering from an epic losing spiral and forcing a playoff, the Angels were only a run behind in the seventh inning and fighting off a bases-loaded Mariners’ rally.

With two out, Luis Sojo, a former Angel, hit a broken-bat ground ball down the first-base line that looked like it might be the inning-ending out. But it skidded past the Angels’ fine-fielding first baseman, J.T. Snow, for a double.

All three runners scored, and so did Sojo after pitcher Mark Langston, another excellent fielder, made a wild relay throw to the plate.

The thunderbolt utterly collapsed the Angels, who allowed eight runs in two innings.

“You just can’t ever relax,” said Glen Dickey, of Encino, who describes himself as an Angels fan with “internal injuries.

“When things are going good, you just don’t trust it,” he said.

Not only fans believe in The Curse.

Late in the 1978 season, then-General Manager Buzzie Bavasi summoned a Catholic priest to sprinkle holy water at home plate in Anaheim Stadium.

“It worked,” he recalled. “We won in ’79.”

So why didn’t his son Bill, the Angels’ present general manager, try it?

“The way they’re playing, they’d have had to bring in the Pope,” said Bavasi the elder.

Fear of The Curse drove Angels owner Jackie Autry to cancel an interview with The Times in late September. Musing about the season, Autry’s secretary explained, might jinx the already skidding team.

“We still think we’ll win,” Autry’s secretary said bravely last week.

Gene Autry, who had ached for a winner since creating the team in 1961, agreed early this season to sell to the Walt Disney Co. His players, who so revered Autry that they voted him a uniform number so they could retire it, had one final season to make good a 35-year-old promise to “win one for the cowboy.”

With a roster of young, unproven players, the Angels were expected to do poorly. But the team began hitting ferociously, at times the highest-scoring squad in the league. Four Angels went to the All-Star Game.

Jim Abbott, who was the most popular Angel before being traded in 1992, was brought back to the team in July, causing general rejoicing.

On Aug. 10, with the end of the season in sight, the Angels were 11 games ahead and cruising. It appeared likely that the league’s Most Valuable Player, Rookie of the Year, Manager of the Year and Executive of the Year were going to be Angels.

Even doom-wary Angels fans were beginning to sense a Hollywood ending, with Gene riding into the sunset wearing a World Series ring.

Then on Sept. 10, the Angels lost a game so bizarre it unsettled both the team and its fans.

Slipping but still six games in the lead, the Angels were playing the worst team in the majors, the Minnesota Twins, and leading, 7-2, when everything fell apart.

The impotent Twins began scoring runs seemingly at will; nine Angels pitchers couldn’t stop them. But the Twins’ winning run in the 10th inning seemed to be dished up by The Curse. They scored on a hit batter, a fielder’s choice, a botched tag and a wild infield throw. Forty-two players were used in the game. By then the Twins had run out of substitutes and were using an outfielder at second base.

What was going on here? Veteran Angels fans knew. Rubalcaba wasn’t even there and he knew.

“I listened to the game on radio, and I said, ‘Oh, man!’ ” That familiar feeling set in, he said--the certainty that even though you’re still ahead, you haven’t got a chance. When misfortunes multiply, they become omens, he said. You remember them all.

What are you supposed to think when a team bus runs off the road, injures 12 of its passengers and puts your manager in the hospital for weeks (Buck Rodgers, 1992)?

Or when your All-Star outfielder is shot to death by a man who was aiming at someone else (Lyman Bostock, 1978)?

Or when a promising, 25-year-old rookie pitcher suddenly dies of a brain tumor (Dick Wantz, 1965)?

Or when Angels are one after another maimed or killed in traffic accidents (Minnie Rojas, 1970; Chico Ruiz, 1972; Bruce Heinbechner, 1974; Mike Miley, 1977)?

You see an omen, and you duck and cover, Rubalcaba says.

“This is hard for the average Angels fan to take,” Buzzie Bavasi said last week as the Angels had their back against the wall. “But it’s a terrible blow to Gene [Autry]. With Gene, finishing second never meant anything.”

Major league owners are expected to approve Disney’s takeover of the Angels at their meeting this month. From then on it will be “Win one for the mouse.”

But after the takeover, will The Curse persist? Rubalcaba thinks it will.

“Look at the Rams,” who lost miserably in Anaheim but are suddenly winners in St. Louis after moving there this season.

“Maybe it’s the Anaheim Stadium Curse.”