TEMPE, Ari. -- Having spent the bulk of his career in the bushes pitching for teams as distant as Taipei -- literally, about as far from the major leagues as possible -- Angels reliever Ben Weber wasn't quite prepared for his winter as a World Series champion. For one thing, he made the mistake of keeping his phone number listed.

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"You can't imagine,'' he said. "I usually get maybe five phone calls a day, but this winter I was getting 50-60 calls a day. And on hectic days, I got 70 to 80. It was crazy. People I didn't even know would call up and ask, 'Could you send me a baseball?' Or, 'If I sent you a baseball, would you sign it?'

"I was signing a dozen to five dozen baseballs a day. Most of the time people would just leave them on my doorstep. I'd wake up and go get the paper in the morning and there would be a carton of baseballs for me to sign. I didn't know who they were from, but I would sign them and leave them there for the person to pick up.''

No other active major leaguer had played more career games without reaching the postseason than Tim Salmon. Then he played in the World Series and over the winter he received invitations to meet sailors on the U.S.S. Nimitz and fly with Blue Angels pilots.

"Oh yeah, I threw up (on the flight),'' the Anaheim outfielder said. "I think those guys are proud of being able to make you throw up. But I don't think my guy tried very hard. He didn't have to.''

Scott Spiezio has played for years in a metal band called Sandfrog. The band hasn't released a c.d., and its Web site normally received 400 hits a month. Then he hit a home run that began a rally that would send the Angels to the world championship and less than three months later Sandfrog was in recording studios and playing a concert in front of a thousand screaming fans.

	Scott Spiezio, right, was one of the many heroes for the Angels last season.

"We had 40,000 hits on (Sandfrog's) Web site after we won the World Series,'' he said. "It totally overloaded our bandwidth. Our web service bill went from $30 a month to $1,400.''

Jarrod Washburn grew up in a Wisconsin town so small that it doesn't get the Fox signal to pull in the Packers games. The town used to have a billboard that proclaimed itself the home of "Jarrod Washburn, Professional baseball player,'' apparently hedging its bets on his career. Then he won the World Series and the town not only updated the sign to reflect this new success, he met someone who introduced him to someone else who introduced him to someone else who owns a luxury box at Lambeau Field.

And because of that connection, Washburn received the ultimate reward for winning the World Series. Who cares about flying with the Blue Angels or performing on stage? Washburn got to go to a Packers game.

"That's way better than what happened to anybody else.''

	"	I thought for sure that being world champions, there would be a lot more media at spring training. But when we got here, it was the same three reporters as last year. And I thought, 'That's great.' All that attention isn't necessary. "
		— Ben Weber, Angels relief pitcher

As rewarding and exciting as the winter was for Anaheim, a funny thing happened when they arrived in Tempe for spring training. They went right back to being the largely ignored Angels. Oh, there were a few more reporters around for awhile this spring and a few hundred extra fans show up each morning to watch them work out. But no player wrote a book claiming he was drunk during the Game 6 rally. The owner didn't criticize David Eckstein for canoodling early into the morning with Hollywood starlets. The team is still for sale.

The biggest news so far may have been the announcement that August 17 is Rally Monkey Bobblehead Night.

"I thought for sure that being world champions, there would be a lot more media at spring training,'' Weber said. "But when we got here, it was the same three reporters as last year. And I thought, 'That's great.' All that attention isn't necessary.

"I think having it low-key is what you want because then the other teams aren't thinking about how they want to kick your ass.''

This defending world champion stuff is all new to the Angels, but it isn't to manager Mke Scioscia. He won the World Series with the Dodgers in 1981 and 1988, and he remembers what manager Tommy Lasorda told them the next spring.

"Tommy wanted to reinforce the idea that what we just accomplished would make it even tougher for us,'' Scioscia said. "Because every team will approach you differently as defending world champions.

"The next year is another challenge ahead of you and you know it may be even harder. But you don't focus on that. You focus on what you can do as a team and I'm very confident we'll do that.''

	Jarrod Washburn topped the Angels with 18 victories in 2002.

If the attention surrounding the Angels is similar to last year, so are the Angels themselves. The team returns virtually intact from last year's World Series team, with the notable difference that Game 7 winner John Lackey and extraordinary reliever Francisco Rodriguez will be with Anaheim the entire season. The Angels may have gotten hot at the exact right time last year, but they also outscored opponents by more runs (207) than any other team in the majors. There is a good reason they knocked off the Yankees, Twins and Giants and they'll likely fight Oakland for the AL West title this season.

"We did lose a couple guys, but we're in pretty good shape,'' Spiezio said. "We still have most of the same players and we still all feel the same chemistry, and that was the key for us last year.''

There is one significant difference to the Angels this spring. Last year, Weber remembers standing in the outfield last spring and listening to stories about how the team was cursed because its stadium was supposedly built on an Indian burial ground (it wasn't). Donnie Moore, the team bus crash, the 1995 collapse -- all the tragedies and failures of the past 40 years were brought up as if the team was doomed to lose.

They aren't talking about that this spring.

It's funny. For four decades you're the Chicago Cubs of the American League and then you win 11 important games in October and suddenly you're finding cartons of baseballs to autograph on your doorstep, you're getting invited to record a track on a c.d. and naval flyers are inviting you to go for a flight.

Why, it's such a swift, gravity-defying, dizzying rise that it's no wonder that even an Angel might lose his lunch.

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com.