Teddy Higuera Applies the Brakes to Two Skids

Meet the Milwaukee Brewers, living, breathing, tobacco-chewing evidence of the law of gravity. What goes up does indeed come down, sometimes with a resounding thud.

Friday night, Brewer Manager Tom Trebelhorn handed the ball to left-hander Teddy Higuera and asked him to put the brakes on his team’s latest skid. This is what Higuera was expected to do in 1987. Such expectations were created in 1986, when he went 20-11 with 207 strikeouts and finished second in the voting for the American League Cy Young award.

But Higuera’s season thus far has mirrored that of the Brewers. Both started with a flash, then began sinking toward dark and dreary depths.

April’s 13-game winning streak seems a distant memory for the Brewers. Milwaukee entered Friday’s game having lost 8 of its last 11 games and its last five road games. Higuera’s season has been just as streaky. He opened with four straight victories, and people began making the inevitable comparisons to a Dodger left-hander who had a whole mania named after him. Well, his full name is Teodoro Valenzuela Higuera. What was next? Teddy Fever?

But by late June, the Brewers had fallen to the middle of the pack in the American League East, and Higuera had slumped to 5-7. Trebelhorn’s stopper suddenly stopped winning, and nobody could quite figure out why.

“He came out of the chute 4-0 and pitched some pretty good baseball,” Trebelhorn said. “You have last year to look at and ’85 (15-8 with a 3.90 earned-run average) to look at, then all of a sudden . . . It’s still a puzzle.”

But Higuera may have taken a step toward solving the puzzle with Friday night’s 6-4 complete-game victory over the Angels at Anaheim Stadium. It was his first complete game since May 24 and the first time he’s put together two straight wins since he opened the season 4-0. And it left Trebelhorn feeling decidedly better about the status of the man who has created such high expectations for himself.

“We’ve had some problems with him finishing up games,” Trebelhorn said. “He did that for us so much last year, we got to where we expected that from him.”

Higuera gave up two unearned runs in the first inning and a run-scoring double to Brian Downing in the second before settling down and enabling the Brewers to get back in the game. The Angels’ only other run came in the ninth, when George Hendrick cleared the left-field wall with a little assistance from left fielder Rob Deer’s glove.

Like Valenzuela during his mania days, Higuera has some problems with English. Once an interpreter was found, the pride of Los Mochis High School in Sinaloa, Mexico, said to reporters that it was unusual for him to start as slowly as he did against the Angels.

“But by the fifth or sixth inning, I was feeling very strong,” he said. “Very comfortable.”

And that made Trebelhorn much more at ease, too.