Frank Russo is a baseball collector who doesn’t collect bats, balls, uniforms or autographs.

A 53-year-old resident of East Brunswick, N.J., Russo collects obituaries and death certificates of major league baseball players. He keeps track of their causes of death, and when he can find them, he takes pictures of their gravesites.

And if all of that is not unusual enough, he is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR for short) who does not consider himself a sabermetrician and has no use for sabermetrics or whatever the new-age metrics are called, you know, the ones I have no use for (the SABR guys despise me, Russo said, which is ok with me).

Russo has written a book, “Bury My Heart at Cooperstown,” subtitled “Salacious, Sad and Surreal Deaths in the History of Baseball,” and he maintains a Web site, TheDeadBallEra.com, “where every player is safe at home” and which he dedicates to “deceased major league ball players.”

The site has fascinating stuff, which you can’t get anywhere else.

It has sections on murders, suicides, beer drinkers and hell raisers, accidents, obituary listings, necrology by location, grave site listings, grave photo archives and death certificates. Those headings make their sections obvious. But how about “bad to the bone?” What might be found there?

Four lists of owners, managers and players:

Headhunters: Don Drysdale, Burleigh Grimes, Sal Maglie, Carl Mays, Van Lingle Mungo, Whit Wyatt, Early Wynn

Hotheads and Bad Asses: Johnny Allen, The Cleveland Spiders, Ty Cobb, Lefty Grove, Joe Medwick, John McGraw, The Old Orioles

Cheapskates: Ed Barrow, Charles Comiskey, Charlie Ebbets, Chrlie Finley, Clark Griffith,Connie Mack, Frank Navin, Branch Rickey, George Weiss

Notorious: Cap Anson, The Black Sox, Hal Chase, Jim Devlin, Andrew Freedman, Chick Gandil, Chris Von Der Ahe

Most of those names are familiar to veteran baseball fans. Some may require some research. In one instance, Russo provides the research: the Mays/Chapman incident.

In the only fatal on-field incident in Major League Baseball history, Russo recalls, the New York Yankees’ Carl Mays hit Ray Chapman of Cleveland with a pitch in 1920, killing him.

“About five years ago,” Russo related in a telephone interview last week, “people started coming to my Web site for genealogy. Carl Mays’ cousin gave me new family information. Mays never got over the death of Chapman. He gave me all this wonderful research.

“That’s when I thought maybe I should post death certificates along with obituaries. I started doing that.”

Russo, who was a radio broadcaster for 14 years, most recently in Toms River, N.J., said he has death certificates stored in filing cabinets, and he has death certificates stored electronically in his computer files.
“I probably spent $3,000 on death certificates the past year,” he said. “I have 750 certificates ready to go up. I have thousands.

“Finding missing players is fun. I went back to 1873 to get some of the early National Association players. We just found a player who played for the Brooklyn Atlantics in 1875. William Rexter got in one game and had four at-bats. He played outfield and had one chance, one out. He’s buried in Staten Island.”

Death certificates of New York Yankees’ players are “near and dear to me because I’m a Yankee fan,” Russo said. “I picked up Thurman Munson this year. Thurman is pretty special.”

Russo has death certificates of other notable Yankees. Some of them contain interesting data. Lou Gehrig’s, for example, Russo revealed, says under occupation that he was a baseball player and a parole commissioner. “He was working for the parole board at the time,” Russo said.

Then there is Joe DiMaggio’s death certificate. It lists his occupation as public relations. Maybe that referred to his post-career role in bank and coffee commercials.

How does a man embark on a career of collecting death certificates and obituaries and keeping close track of dead baseball players? When I recently learned of Russo’s passion – it is not a hobby because he does not work and lives on disability – it reminded me of a very funny movie I saw years ago.

“Harold and Maude” is a dark comedy that tells of a young man’s intrigue with death. He constantly attends funerals, where he encounters and develops a relationship with an elderly woman with a similar interest.

Russo was not yet 10 years old when he became intrigued with dead baseball players.

“I was going to military school in 1968 and on this day I had just finished guard duty,” Russo recounted. “I put my weapon away. It was right before mess, and I had a choice of wanting dinner or hanging out at the library and going to dinner after I went to the library to cool off.

“At the library I saw this huge baseball encyclopedia and opened it. The first player I came to was Eddie Plank. He was 50 when he died. He stuck with me. I said I’m going to find out why these players died so early.”

Plank, whose 326 victories rank ninth all-time among pitchers who reached 300 wins post-1900, made another influential appearance in Russo’s life.

“In the mid-1990s,” he said, “I went to the cemetery next to Gettysburg battlefield, where Plank is buried. This caretaker said you should write a book about Plank. I said maybe.”

Russo wrote a book, though not solely about Plank, and he created his Web site. “It took me six months to build the site,” he said. “I started gathering stuff. I went to the local library and looked at the Times microfilm. I spent probably $1,000 on obituaries. I had to go through painstaking research.”

His life became a little easier in 1998 in an otherwise difficult year, he said.

“The Yankees were having a great run,” he recalled; “I was having one of the worst years of my life. I lost my job, my fiancé left me for my best friend. I was sitting around figuring out my next move. I had all this information. That’s when I got my first computer.”

With his computer, Russo has compiled lists of 47 murders and 119 suicides of baseball figures, mostly players but some others as well.

Among Russo’s list of those are Eddie Gaedel, the 3-foot-7 midget, who walked as a pinch-hitter for Bill Veeck’s St. Louis Browns in 1951; Angels’ outfielder Lyman Bostock, who was fatally shot when the shooter mistakenly thought he was dating his estranged wife; Luke Easter, who was shot by two robbers during a payroll robbery, and Ivan Calderon, who was shot during an apparent underworld hit.

Far more players have ended their lives themselves than have had others end them, Russo’s research found.

The most notable suicide might well have been Donnie Moore’s, three years after he gave up a 1986 post-season home run when the Angels were one out from the World Series. Moore’s fatal act, after he shot his wife, who survived, was linked to the home run, but Moore apparently had many more problems off the field.

In a variety of suicide measures, Hugh Casey shot himself in the neck with a shotgun, Doug Ault shot himself in the head with a shotgun, Carlos Bernier hanged himself, Don Wilson used carbon monoxide and Pea Ridge Day “slit his throat with a hunting knife after an operation failed to restore his pitching arm.”

Umpire Ron Luciano killed himself with carbon monoxide, and sports writer Sy Sanborn fatally shot himself.

The obituaries are all there, from Gene Autry to Phil and William Wrigley.

Occasionally, Russo discovers developments beyond an obituary or a death certificate. He cited the death of infielder Danny O’Connell as one example.

“His obituary said he was in an automobile accident,” Russo related. “One day I was going to take a picture of his grave in Montclair, N.J. I had just finished taking the photo of the grave, and as I walked down I noticed a woman walking up to his grave. She comes back down, and I said I didn’t mean to scare you. She said she was Veronica O’Connell, his wife. We had a nice conversation. She told me he died of a coronary occlusion and was dead before he hit the telephone pole.”

One group Russo has put in his book but not on his Web site is the one he has lumped under the title “Clapp for Your Heroes.”  “I have a large list of players who died from syphilis,” he said.

The list includes 38 players and executives, their deaths dating from 1897 (Charley Radbourn at age 42) to 1951 (Adam Comorosky at age 45). Radbourn known as Old Hoss, compiled a 309-194 record from 1880 through 1891, and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1939.

Syphilis, however, was not the leading cause of death, Russo said. He found that the leading cause in the early years of the game, from 1871 to about 1910, was tuberculosis and second was kidney disease.

The last player to die from tuberculosis, Russo said, was Mike Chartak, an outfielder, who began his career with the Yankees in 1940 and batted .243 over four years. He died in 1967.

DYING AMONG THE LIVING

How much beer does someone have to drink to kill himself at the age of 37? Friends of Brian Traxler, ever so briefly a major league first baseman, have said that his alcohol of choice was beer.

Traxler died in 2004. Frank Russo, who passionately tracks the deaths of baseball players, doesn’t include Traxler on his Web site list of “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” because Traxler didn’t play in the majors long enough and was little known.

But Russo minces no words. “Brian Traxler drank himself to death,” he said.

Russo is not a baseball player himself and hasn’t sat around the clubhouse or the bar drinking with players. His research, however, puts him in good position to know about baseball and alcohol.

“They’ve never done anything about drinking in baseball,” he said. “The number of players who died from complications of drinking or cirrhosis of the liver is amazing.”

Russo collects death certificates and is in better position than most to know causes of death. Death certificates list the cause of death.

“All these players who died from drinking, it’s amazing,” he said. “I don’t get it. Players used to drink before games to loosen up. Alcohol was like a performance-enhancer. There’s this culture of alcoholism.”

Traxler was selected by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1988 draft. Two years later he got his chance to play for the Dodgers but lasted only one start at first base, two other games at the position and nine games and 11 at-bats over-all before being sent back to the minors, never to breathe major league air again.

Thus, Russo had no reason to add him to this list:

Mike Donlin, Leo Durocher, Charlie Faust, Bob Fothergill, Jimmie Foxx, King Kelly, Rabbit Maranville, Bugs Raymond, Babe Ruth, Al Schact, Germany Schaefer, Rube Waddell, Paul Waner, Hack Wilson.

There are some Hall of Famers on that list, but Traxler isn’t one of them. The only list he made was Russo’s necrology list.

MORENO THE MARKETING MAN

Arte Moreno knows he isn’t fooling anyone in southern California by rebranding his team with the name Los Angeles.

“I’m a marketing guy that pictured them as a small-market team,” Moreno said of the team he bought in 2003 that was known as the Anaheim Angels.

A little background:

In the early 1990, when club owners first began discussing revenue sharing, they had a meeting in Koehler, Wis. For two days the owners divided into two caucuses – large-market clubs and small-market clubs.

When the caucuses broke for lunch the first day, reporters watched as the owners emerged from their respective conference rooms. When I saw Jackie Autry come out of the small-market room, I was stunned. When, I asked myself, did the Angels, whom Gene and Jackie Autry owned, become a small-market team?

Apparently based on revenue, Autry was in the right room, as incredible as that seemed. The Angels played in an area awash in wealth but had done a poor job capitalizing on it. Moreno, succeeding the Autrys and Disney, wasn’t about to make their mistake and squander the opportunity he had to enhance the team’s revenue.

If it meant hijacking the Dodgers’ name and geography, so be it.

“I just felt it was part of the region,” Moreno said by telephone from his home in Phoenix, responding too late to have his explanation included in last week’s column about the Angels and the Dodgers.

“What are you telling the other owners when you send Disney a revenue check? I’m trying to take this brand and remarket it into a bigger market. I’m in the metroplex. There are plenty of fans for everyone.

“I was trying to do something financially. I wanted to get back to where we could push this franchise ahead. We needed to remarket the team. We needed increased revenue to be able to compete. We came in with a seven-year plan. We’ve had an opportunity to increase our brand to younger fans.”

The Angels’ $125 million signing of Josh Hamilton is what prompted people to think it was a move to try to counter the lavish spending the Dodgers have undertaken the past five months to improve their team and their post-season chances next season.

Moreno, however, said he wasn’t interested in knocking down the Dodgers. “Why would we want to do that?” he asked. “We both benefit if both of us are doing well.”

“When you look at all the competition and the beach,” he added, “there are a lot of factors we deal with. The last few years we didn’t make the playoffs. We felt we had to make some adjustments.”

As for his over-all marketing plan and revenue pursuit, Moreno said, “I won’t try to tell you I haven’t tried to push north, but I’ve always tried to push east and south.”

As a Yankees’ fan, I realized I might be headed for a frustrating season when I became dismayed at my favorite team’s failures to sign Jeff Keppinger and Nate Schierholtz. That admission is not intended as an insult to Keppinger or Schierholtz; they are both solid players and deserve the millions they earned from the White Sox and Cubs, respectively. But the very possibility that they would have been pegged to start for the Yankees in 2013 is a frightening prospect.

I have grown up loving the Yankees second only to my family (well, my parents will read this column, so I have to write as much). Derek Jeter was the knight in shining, pinstriped armor in my bedtime stories; the crack of a bat sawn into pieces by Mariano Rivera’s cutter was my lullaby; and my veins still throb and pulse with the Bronx Bomber beat.

I was born in 1994, the same year that the playoffs were cancelled due to the players’ strike, and since then, the Yankees have qualified for the postseason in 17 out of 18 seasons, with the only blight their still-impressive 89-win 2008 campaign. In 15 of those years, the team won at least 92 games. In that span, it won World Series numbers 23 through 27. Put those figures together, and I am entirely unfamiliar with Yankee struggles or even Yankee mediocrity. Sure, the team has only had one victory parade in the last decade, with more divisional series losses than World Series appearances in that time, but the expectation of a title is always present, and the Yankees have consistently contended for as long as I have followed them.

Which is why I’m so concerned about next season: if my fear that the 2013 version of the Yankees is the worst since the strike season is accurate, I won’t know how to react.

The worries started last October when the Yankees were pushed to five games by an inexperienced, overachieving Baltimore team and utterly eviscerated by the Tigers. Before the Alex Rodriguez drama and seemingly-endless procession of strikeouts at the hands of Tiger starters, it felt like a last gasp from a dying team. Strong starting pitching by the trio of C.C. Sabathia, Hiroki Kuroda, and Andy Pettitte coupled with Raul Ibanez’s heroics to stave off the upstart Orioles, and when Ibanez homered again in Game 1 against Detroit to send the contest to extra innings, I believed. I allowed myself to believe that these late-game comebacks foretold a magical run to one last title for the players I had grown up watching.

But there was Rivera throwing out not the final closing strike as he has countless times but the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 of the ALDS. There was Pettitte pitching valiantly in his injury-riddled comeback season. And then, a mere three innings after Ibanez had once again etched his name into Yankee lore with the shot into the bleachers off Tigers’ closer Jose Valverde, the greatest calamity of all:

O captain! My captain! Our shortstop’s year is done.

He fell when ranging to his left, and now the Tigers won.

His ankle torn, his face forlorn, fans try to keep from weeping.

The Yanks’ mystique now looks so bleak as Father Time comes creeping.

But O Pettitte, Mo, and Jeter,

O the heroes of my youth,

Will soon be lost to history

Like Mantle, Lou, and Ruth.

Jeter recently vowed that he will play on Opening Day; Rivera also aims to return from his injury. Having to watch both players writhe in pain, one on the warning track during batting practice before an unimportant game in Kansas City, one on his familiar turf between second and third in the infield dirt at Yankee Stadium, was the first time I had to confront their baseball mortality, though.

This task was made especially difficult because I don’t know what the Yankees look like without Jeter stroking opposite-field singles and making jump throws from deep short. I don’t know what they really look like without Rivera jogging in from the bullpen, “Enter Sandman” blaring and fans exhaling because they feel comfortable that the lead is safe. When Jeter and Rivera eventually depart the Bronx with a first-ballot ticket to Cooperstown, not only will they leave the Yankees wanting for players capable of replacing their production, but they will leave an entire generation of fans unsure of what comes next.

With the focus still on next season, emphasizing the demise of the old guard is the lack of new blood in pinstripes. I don’t blame general manager Brian Cashman, for the pickings this winter were meager; of the top free agent batters, none were particularly appealing options. In Curtis Granderson, the Yankees already have their own version of Josh Hamilton as a home run hitter with a propensity for flailing at two-strike pitches in the dirt. Michael Bourn is fast and a great fielder; so is Brett Gardner, who also has the advantage of youth. B.J. Upton hit – or, to be more accurate, didn’t hit – his way to a sub-.300 on-base percentage in 2012 in his latest failure to live up to his impressive potential. The list goes on.

But while the Dodgers continue to spend as if gold had been discovered in Chavez Ravine, the so-called Evil Empire was unwilling even to top the Pirates’ offer to Russell Martin. The Pirates! In direct contrast to the Yankees, they haven’t had a winning season since my birth, and it was only a few years ago that they appeared to be a virtual farm club for competent teams, sending the likes of Xavier Nady, Jason Bay, and Nate McLouth east. Somehow, though, they managed to leave the Yankees devoid of an everyday starter at catcher.

I’m not so naïve in my fandom that I don’t realize that all this complaining sounds rather snobbish. After all, the Yankees still outspend 28 other ballclubs, and lacking an above-average player at only one or two positions is an enviable spot in which to be in December (cue nodding from Astros’ fans). Yet I can’t help it; I have grown accustomed to the luxury of Cashman being able to entice All-Star free agents with an extra zero in contract offers, which led to such unequaled success as documented above.

Even taking into consideration the Steinbrenners’ desire to dip under the $189 million luxury tax threshold in 2014, this offseason has been rather quiet and uneventful for the Yankees. Before the 2009 season, Cashman responded to missing out on the playoffs for the first time in over a decade by signing Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, and A.J. Burnett and trading for Nick Swisher. After winning the World Series that year, New York reloaded by acquiring Granderson and Javier Vazquez via trade. The next year saw Martin and Rafael Soriano added to the roster.

Since Giants’ catcher Buster Posey caught the final strike to end the last World Series, though, the Yankees have focused predominantly on resigning their own free agents – Kuroda, Pettitte, Rivera, and Ichiro Suzuki all signing new deals – and have added only one player of consequence, Kevin Youkilis.

Next season, instead of a possible run at 100 wins, pinstriped playoff heroics, and championship champagne, I fear I’ll be stuck rooting for an aging roster – Youkilis, at 33, is the youngest player signed this offseason, and half of the Yankees’ 2012 lineup is closer in age to Jamie Moyer than Bryce Harper – mired in mediocrity.

All the while, the competition in the AL East has improved. The Blue Jays have rightly received many of the headlines for poaching Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, and Mark Buehrle from the floundering Marlins and reeling in their biggest prize, Cy Young winner R.A. Dickey, from the Mets. While I temper my expectations for the return on these deals – Dickey could struggle with a full season in his new tough division, Johnson is injury-prone, and Buehrle no longer has ace potential – there is no denying that Toronto’s new rotation is superior to last year’s run-hemorrhaging outfit.

In addition to the return of a healthy Evan Longoria, the Rays will receive a boost from new bat Wil Myers and can simply reach into their treasure trove of talented young pitchers to replace James Shields. It seems improbable that the Red Sox could be as woeful as they were last year, and at the very least, their potential struggles absent Bobby Valentine and the beer-and-fried-chicken crew are much less enjoyable from a schadenfreude perspective.

Also less enjoyable will be this year’s Yankees, whose chief culprits are the two thirdbasemen. Youkilis may hear his share of Bronx boobirds as bitterness carries over from his years bashing Yankee pitching and skirmishing with Joba Chamberlain as a member of the hated Red Sox. Rodriguez, out for at least half the season due to hip surgery, may need that time off for fans to forgive his pitiful playoff performance, or he could use it to hone his womanizing technique by flirting with more bikini models (yes, I for one am still a tad resentful).

Combine all these problems – unavoidable symptoms of mortality on the part of Jeter and Rivera, offseason inaction, a roster in desperate need of Ponce de Leon’s fabled fountain of youth, and just a plain lack of excitement surrounding this team – and my fear of 2013 being the worst Yankee season of my lifetime doesn’t seem so farfetched. Perhaps – hopefully – I’m wrong, and a pennant chase will be in New York’s grasp come October.

But if not, and if Rivera is unfamiliarly human in his return from injury, and Jeter unable to stave off his decline for another year, and the rotation thin and aging, and Youkilis hated in his new stomping grounds, then I might just have to suffer for a season or two until the Steinbrenners decide that it’s acceptable to spend money again. At least Mets’ fans can keep me company in my misery.

Stan Kasten, president of the Los Angeles Dodgers, declared no interest in or concern for the geographical fiction Arte Moreno concocted eight years ago. That was when Moreno hijacked his neighbor’s name and anointed his team as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

When I recently asked Kasten, who assumed his role when a new ownership group took control of the Dodgers earlier this year, how he felt about the Angels’ name, he dismissed the matter.

“If I had a list of a thousand things to do,” he responded, “that would be a thousand and one.”

Finding the name intellectually offensive from the day Moreno announced it, I bring it up now because of recent developments. If the name the Angels have usurped were legitimate, Major League Baseball could promote one of the highlights of the coming season as the battle for Los Angeles. The Angels and the Dodgers have certainly spent a lot of time and money creating that picture.

The Angels, however, don’t play in Los Angeles. They play 30 miles to the south in Anaheim, their home since 1966 when they moved there from Los Angeles, where they played for the first five years of their existence.

In 2005, after owning the Angels for 20 months and watching them play in Anaheim, Moreno hit upon a clever marketing ploy. Capitalizing on the proximity of the metropolis to the north, he rebranded his team as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. He added “Anaheim” to the name only to satisfy terms of the stadium lease.

The city of Anaheim unsuccessfully challenged the name change in court. News organizations, including the Associated Press and The New York Times, meekly accepted the team’s contrived name, ignoring the geographical absurdity.

Fans initially resented the snub but eventually resigned themselves to what had become reality. They have not turned on the Angels as a result. In fact, they drew more than 3 million fans last season for the 10th consecutive year, though the attendance of 3,061,770 was the lowest in nine years.

The 2012 total, however, was more likely a reflection of the fans’ disappointment with the team’s play. The Angels disappointed themselves, not only failing to challenge for the American League West title but also falling four games short of a wild-card spot in the playoffs.

That finish wasn’t what the Angels’ owner and officials had in mind a year ago when they lured slugging first baseman Albert Pujols west with a $240 million contract and added C.J. Wilson to the starting rotation with a $77.5 million contract.

Disappointed but not discouraged, the Angels have acted aggressively this off-season. They gave Josh Hamilton $125 million to team with Pujols in the middle of the lineup and with rookie sensation Mike Trout in the outfield. They rebuilt their starting rotation. They fortified their relief corps.

When they finished last season, Zack Greinke was in their rotation, but he opted for free agency and moved 30 miles to the north, where a pot of gold awaited. The Dodgers snagged him with a $147 million offer.

The Angels would like to have retained the 29-year-old Greinke – who wouldn’t – but not for $24.5 million a season. As aggressive as the Angels have been, they have not conducted their business on the economic level on which the Dodgers have operated the past five months.

The Dodgers have 21 players signed for next season at a total of $213 million. The Angels have 12 players signed for a total of $127 million with no additional financially grandiose signings in sight.

This payroll business represents a new development in southern California. For the last nine years, the Angels have opened the season with a higher payroll than the Dodgers. For seven of those years, the Angels also ended the season with higher payrolls.

When next season begins, the Dodgers will be ahead of not only the Angels but also everybody else, having added in the last five months Greinke, Hanley Ramirez, Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, Nick Punto, Skip Schumaker, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Yasiel Puig.

The Dodgers have collected such a stunning array of expensive talent that it is easy to figure that the Angels’ expensive signing of Hamilton was a reaction to the Dodgers’ feverish activity.

Not so, Moreno has said. He didn’t say it to me because he didn’t respond to an interview request, but he told reporters at the Hamilton news conference that the Dodgers were not a factor.

General Manager Jerry Dipoto echoed that position.

“Obviously, our goal last season was to play on, but we didn’t achieve it,” he said in a telephone interview. “We wanted to improve, and we did what we thought we had to do to improve. The primary concern of Arte was to put the best team on the field that we can. We feel we’re in position to be competitive now.”

Reading or hearing Moreno’s remarks at the Hamilton news conference, one might not be convinced that he wasn’t thinking about the Dodgers when he authorized the Hamilton expenditure.

“The Dodgers, Merry Christmas,” the owner said. “I personally can hardly wait to play them.”

“Think about how much fun it’s going to be,” he added. “Dodger fans and Angel fans get to argue about whose team is better, who’s stronger, who’s weaker. … Do you know how much fun it’s going to be?”

Without Hamilton in his lineup, Moreno would not likely be making those comments so I think it’s reasonable to say there is some sort of link between the Dodgers and the Hamilton signing. On the other hand, the Angels could argue that they signed Hamilton as the best way of improving the team with the Athletics and the Rangers more important to aim at.

Hamilton was the piece de resistance for the Angels in their off-season pursuits, but he hasn’t been their only acquisition. They signed a free-agent starting pitcher, Joe Blanton, and traded for two other starters, Tommy Hanson from Atlanta and Jason Vargas from Seattle. The signing of Hamilton gave the Angels an extra hitter, and they traded first baseman Kendrys Morales for Vargas.

The newcomers will make up three-fifths of the rotation. They will join Jered Weaver and Wilson.

For the bullpen, Dipoto signed Ryan Madson, who is expected to be the closer, and Sean Burnett.

Based on their results, the Angels seem to feel it was more important to make their big expenditure on hitting (Hamilton) than on pitching (Greinke). Only time will tell if they were right.

After the Angels signed Hamilton, a New York Daily News columnist wrote, “It’s official now: Arte Moreno is the new George Steinbrenner, as determined to make the biggest splash as he is to win a championship.”

I don’t know where the columnist was throughout Steinbrenner’s tenure as owner of the Yankees, but he apparently didn’t grasp Steinbrenner’s modus operandi. Moreno has shown he couldn’t play in Steinbrenner’s league. Having his choice of Hamilton and Greinke to pursue, Moreno chose Hamilton. Steinbrenner would have pursued and signed both.

NO RELIEF AS GENERAL MANAGER

Jerry Dipoto has a clear recollection of the start of his front-office career.

“I retired March 5 and was working in the front office with Colorado March 6,” Dipoto related.

He was talking about the spring of 2001 and the bulging disc in his neck that forced his retirement from his eight-year career as a major league relief pitcher.

The 44-year-old Dipoto is in his second year as the Angels’ general manager. He is one of only three general managers who were major league players. Billy Beane of Oakland and Ruben Amaro Jr. of Philadelphia are the others.

“It’s something I always had an interest in doing,” Dipoto said of his front-office career. Most players who want to stay in baseball after their playing careers prefer to stay in uniform and become coaches. Then there is the minority of players who opt for scouting and player development, working in or for the front office.

“I had a curiosity about how things are put together,” Dipoto said. “I’ve always been fascinated by how a roster is put together. My time in Colorado gave me an opportunity to learn that. I’ve learned a lot from a lot of individuals.”

Dipoto worked for the Rockies, the Red Sox and the Diamondbacks, becoming Arizona’s interim general manager for the latter half of the 2010 season. He mentioned John Hart, Joe McIlvaine, Bob Gebhard, Dan O’Dowd and Theo Epstein as general managers from whom he has learned.

Years ago the general manager’s job was a pretty secure assignment. In recent years, however, as payrolls have escalated, the job has become volatile.

When I mentioned that change to Dipoto, he said, “My last job was volatile. The life of a middle reliever can be volatile.”

A KAZMIR COMEBACK

When the New York Mets traded Scott Kazmir, their young pitcher with great promise, to Tampa Bay in July 2004, fans were outraged and the news media ridiculed the Mets for giving away a pitcher who they believed was certain to become a major league star.

Kazmir was 20 years old and still in the minors when the Mets traded him. It didn’t help the Mets that the primary player they received in return, pitcher Victor Zambrano, was a disappointment in his two and a half years with the team.

But what about Kazmir? He has not had the career critics of the trade expected.

He pitched decently for Tampa Bay for five seasons, compiling a 45-34 record with an earned run average around 3.50 in the last four of those seasons and leading the American League in strikeouts with 239 in one of them. However, in 20 starts in 2009, he struggled with a 5.92 e.r.a. and was traded to the Angels.

A 9-15 record and 5.94 e.r.a. in 2010 basically ended Kazmir’s major league career. He started once in 2011, pitched an inning and two-thirds and was released.

Last season Kazmir pitched in the non-affiliated Atlantic League and this winter is pitching in Puerto Rico. He is gone but not forgotten. The Cleveland Indians have signed the left-hander, who will be 29 next month, to a minor league contract and invited him to spring training.