Moore Uses His Slider to End Athletics’ Slide

It’s not likely that anyone in the Oakland Athletics’ front office dared even consider a scenario that included Jose Canseco’s and Mark McGwire’s simultaneous tenure on the disabled list when they signed free-agent pitcher Mike Moore this winter. But it’s beginning to look like $3.9 million well spent.

The team that would be the 1927 Yankees may have to make like the 1965 Dodgers for a while if it intends to win that World Series championship it covets. The A’s version of Murderers’ Row looks more like petty thieves these days without their big guns, but the starting pitchers are doing their best Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale imitations.

Thursday afternoon at Anaheim Stadium, it was Moore’s turn and the tall right-hander responded with a three-hit shutout for eight innings as Oakland beat the Angels, 5-0.

It was the kind of performance General Manager Sandy Alderson had in mind when he signed the former Mariner to a three-year deal and--more important to the A’s--a marked departure from Moore’s debut in Oakland green and gold. Moore made his first start Saturday against Chicago and yielded nine hits, five runs and seven walks in 5 1/3 innings of a 7-4 A’s loss.

“You saw the kind of pitcher he was all spring and then you saw the situation Saturday,” A’s Manager Tony La Russa said. “Mike was obviously real excited (Saturday). It was just a matter of being himself.”

It’s kind of hard to imagine Mike Moore being really excited. On the surface anyway, this is not an excitable boy. He’s willing to admit that it’s possible he was a tad too pumped up for his Oakland coming-out party, but he wasn’t exactly hyperventilating.

“I wasn’t nervous (Saturday), I just had better stuff today,” Moore said. “I guess there’s a possibility I was trying to do a little too much in the first game. I was overthrowing a little.”

Thursday, he was just over-achieving. Lance Parrish lined a single to left in the second. Jack Howell singled to right in the second and Glenn Hoffman blooped a single to left in the eighth. Howell was the only Angel runner to reach second base.

“I’d like to think this was the real Mike Moore today,” he said. “I struggled a little bit with location of my fastball early, but my breaking ball picked me up.”

That’s putting it mildly. Moore’s slider not only picked him up, it slammed the Angels down. He struck out seven, and all but one were left-handed batters who chased low-and-inside sliders all day.

“Mike threw a lot of nasty sliders in real good locations,” said Dave Duncan, the A’s pitching coach. “He used the inside part of the plate very well. He established the slider for strikes early, was ahead in the count a lot and got them to chase some sliders that were just below the strike zone.”

Moore, who was 65-96 with a 4.38 earned-run average in parts of seven seasons with Seattle, finished up last year with a 5-3 record in his last 12 starts. The A’s figured he would have been at least 8-0 during that span if he were pitching for Oakland. His ERA was 2.38, he struck out 91 batters in 90 2/3 innings and had five complete games and two shutouts during the streak.

Moore appeared to be on his way to his first shutout and complete game with the A’s Thursday, but La Russa decided to remove him after the eighth because Moore had thrown 119 pitches and ace reliever Dennis Eckersley “needed an inning of work.”

“A shutout would have been nice, but we’ve got the best bullpen in the business and a long way to go,” Moore said. “I felt pretty good, but I had thrown quite a few pitches.”

The great majority of them were of the quality variety and that’s just what the A’s need at the moment.

“It was an important win in a lot of ways,” La Russa said. “It stopped a two-game (losing) streak, and if you’re going to have a good year, you can’t have extended losing streaks. And it picked us up when we needed it.”

Moore said he didn’t feel any added pressure to pitch well because of the absence of Canseco and McGwire, but Duncan, for one, is willing to admit that the pitching staff may have to carry an added burden for a while.

“I don’t think we can throw shutouts every day,” he said, “but, over the course of the year, if anybody can lose two key offensive players and overcome it with quality pitching, then we’re that team.”

Dave Stewart, Bob Welch and Storm Davis won 54 games last year, more than any other trio of starters in the league. Of course, they benefited from the Bash Bros. offense that averaged almost five runs a game for Stewart and Welch and more than five for Davis.

Moore figures to make the A’s rotation even more formidable and he won’t be complaining about the missing links in Oakland’s offensive chain. The A’s lineup looks pretty good to him the way it is.

After all, Seattle scored an average of just 3 1/2 runs a game behind him last year.