BASEBALL / DAILY REPORT : ANGELS : Snow’s Dive Robs Fielder

First baseman J.T. Snow sat with a huge ice pack encasing his bruised right bicep, wondering what might have happened if Cecil Fielder’s hard-hit, bad-hop grounder in the ninth inning Sunday had missed him and gone into right field.

Snow flung himself into the ball’s path, keeping it on the infield and enabling second baseman Rod Correia to hustle over and throw out the slow-footed Fielder for the inning’s second out. Correia dove at the ball and flipped it to pitcher Joe Grahe, who beat Fielder to the bag.

“I had no idea where the ball was,” Snow said. “I was down on the ground and the next thing I know Rod’s right there. That saved the game right there.”

Said Correia: “I just knew who was running. I knew Cecil wasn’t fast, to put it mildly. The ball just hit something and exploded on (Snow). I grabbed it, dove and threw it all in one motion.”

Alan Trammell then grounded out to end the game with runners on second and third.

“You make your own breaks,” Manager Marcel Lachemann said. “You don’t just sit there and hope something good happens.”

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Sparky Anderson had these words of advice for Lachemann:

“Enjoy the good times and learn to live with the bad. And remember that we tell our children that if you do the best you can, you’ve done a good job. And you have to live it yourself.”

Slumps can be rough, Anderson said, but you simply have to fight through them.

“I’ve lost 13 in a row, 10 in a row,” Anderson said. “(Lachemann) is going to suffer. The game is just that way. It’s a great game, but it’s the cruelest game in the world. No one feels sorry for you. When you’re going bad, they just want to trample you.”

And Anderson had this to say about midseason manager firings: “When a new guy takes over, like clockwork, the team will win the first two or three. But if a team is losing for a reason, that reason will come back. The players kick themselves in the butt to show it’s not their fault. And then, whammo, they’re back to their old ways.”