I wish I could be an Angels fan.

It’s not like the club won’t allow it. But you can’t really have an emotional connection with a team three decades into a lifetime of following baseball.

I remember when the idea that the Angels might be the best team in the Los Angeles market, or all of Southern California (including San Diego), was ludicrous. Laughable. The Angels, remember, won nothing for nearly the first two decades of their existence. They were a bad club, year after year after year, the sorry alternative to the Dodgers when it came to seeing big-league ball in the Los Angeles market.

But since the middle 1980s, they have been as good as the Dodgers, and Padres, and for the past two decades, they clearly have been better. It was a long time coming in accepting that reality, but it is irrefutable now.

Take this season’s Angels team, for instance.

This is a team with not much of anything. They hardly hit. They don’t score much. They lost their cleanup hitter, Kendrys Morales, to a broken ankle in a random/stupid celebration at home plate more than a year ago. They have about two elite pitchers and invented a bullpen.

Yet there they are, contending for an Americal League West division title again.

From the distance of Abu Dhabi, what this looks like is Mike Scioscia and the front office making something out of nothing.

During Scioscia’s managerial career, the Angels have been a pitching team, a slugging team, a speed-and-defense team. The manager and the club look at what they have and deal with it. Like a well-run club does.

Often, in recent years, they run out a bunch of little guys like Erick Aybar, Maicer Izturis, Reggie Willits and Alberto Callaspo, guys who play numerous positions, none of them really well, and they somehow win a lot of low-scoring games. You know, like an intelligent, well-run, fundamentally sound team does.

Here is the lineup out of tonight’s game:

Izturis 3b, Aybar ss, Hunter rf, Abreu dh, Wells lf, Kendrick 2b, Trumbo 1b, Bourjos cf, Wilson c.

Does that look like a crew who might be about 10 games over .500? Little guys at the top. Three backside-of-their-careers guys in the 3-4-5 slots, a Phenom Who Never Quite Made It in Kendrick, a first baseman not even Angels fans knew existed, a year ago, in the 7 hole, the hot rookie with no pop in the 8 spot, and a catcher who isn’t as good as Jeff Mathis hitting 9.

I give the Angels great credit for being competitive nearly every year, and particularly since Scioscia showed up. You know, the guy who played all but a few games of his career with the Dodgers, who let him molder as a Triple A manager and told him he had no future in the organization, before he jumped to Anaheim.

The Angels have played .550 ball in nearly 2,000 games with Scioscia as their manager and finished first or second in their division eight times in his first 11 seasons and are headed for another high finish.

They won the World Series in 2002, came within a blown call of taking a 2-0 lead in the 2005 American League Championship Series, took the Yankees to six games in the 2009 ALC, won 100 games in 2008 …

The Dodgers haven’t won a World Series since 1988; the Padres never have won one.)

And now they are winning, again, with Jared Weaver, Dan Haren, Jordan Walden, Mark Trumbo, a nice defense and nobody aside from Bobby Abreu who seems to be able to take a walk.

Certainly, it helps the Angels that they play in baseball’s only four-team division, and that the Rangers, Athletics and Mariners are likely to be mediocre-to-bad in a given year. But the Dodgers also play in a craptastic division (Padres, Giants, Rockies, Diamondbacks), and they haven’t done nearly as much.

It helps that the Angels have a fair chunk of money to spend, but usually they have some solid big-leaguers coming up from their own system, so they don’t have to spend crazy money, like the Red Sox and Yankees. Though they do make the occasional expensive mistake (Vernon Wells).

I admire this franchise. I’d like to care about them on an emotional level, but I never will, aside from moments like the 2002 postseason, when I had been around the club a lot from start to championship finish and was happy to see them beat back Barry Bonds’ Giants.

The rest of the time … my appreciation of the Angels is thoroughly clinical. Like looking at any well-run entity or well-executed business plan. I nod and say, “There is an organization that knows what it is doing” and wonder if that ever will be the case again for the guys in blue a few miles north.