A Healthy Lugo Has Eye on Angels’ Starting Rotation

Angel pitcher Urbano Lugo already knows how he’ll be spending his time after baseball season is over. He’ll be playing baseball.

“When we finish here, I’ll go back and take about two weeks’ rest, then start over again in Venezuela,” Lugo said. “All year, I play ball. I love it.”

This winter, though, Lugo will be a little more cautious about just how many fastballs and forkballs he throws in Caracas. It was there last winter that he felt a twinge of pain in his pitching elbow. He didn’t know it then, but that twinge would lead to elbow surgery that ruined any chance he might have had at challenging for a spot in the Angels’ starting rotation this spring.

And make no mistake about it. There was a spot available.

You don’t have to search long and hard to find the most glaring weakness in the leaders of the American League West. Manager Gene Mauch has done just about everything but hold tryouts in La Palma Park to find a fifth partner for the firm starting four of Candelaria, McCaskill, Sutton and Witt.

Rookie Ray Chadwick? He’s 0-4 with a 7.40 earned-run average. Jim Slaton? Last seen mopping up in Detroit. Vern Ruhle? Not exceptional. Ron Romanick? Ask Mike Port. Mike Cook and Willie Fraser? Aren’t they guards for the Knicks?

A healthy Urbano Lugo may have been the solution. Angel pitching coach Marcel Lachemann said Lugo certainly would have been given the opportunity.

“If he had come into spring training healthy, he would have figured very prominently in our plans,” Lachemann said. “He would have had a good chance to make the staff. Whether it would have been as a starter or reliever, I don’t know.”

But Lugo had surgery to remove bone chips in his elbow in January, and his spring training came early in summer. After nursing his right arm back to health with the Angels’ Triple-A affiliate in Edmonton, he rejoined the Angels on Sept. 1. Two weeks later, he was on the mound in Comiskey Park in Chicago, making his first major league start in more than a year.

Lugo has four victories in the majors. Three--including the first of his career--have come against the White Sox. So Mauch was not altogether surprised when Lugo went out Monday and pitched 6 innings and allowed just four hits to get his first victory of 1986. And, according to Mauch, he did it all with one pitch.

“There was not a pitch that they hit or even so much as swung at other than a fastball,” Mauch said. “He was throwing the forkball, but they wouldn’t touch it. He was standing out there with one pitch, and he still got into the seventh inning.”

Mauch said Lugo is a good breaking ball away from being a complete pitcher. “And he and Lachemann are already working on it.”

In the meantime, Lugo will get another start this Saturday in Anaheim Stadium. The opponent? The White Sox.

“The White Sox and Kansas City were two clubs he pitched extremely well against last year,” Mauch said. “We waited until we got around to those clubs because we thought he’d be more comfortable.

“Before long, we should be able to run him out there anytime, against anybody.”