Without His Best Pitch, Burns Still Keeps Angels Off Balance

Oakland reliever Todd Burns helped beat the Angels Saturday with his second- and third-best pitches.

Although he usually uses a forkball to set up hitters, Burns had to be resourceful when he entered the game with the A’s leading, 4-3, in the sixth inning.

Because his forkball, usually his best pitch, “just wasn’t working,” he said he relied on curveballs and sliders, but even those pitches weren’t always working for him.

“I was throwing the curve and the slider almost the whole time,” Burns said. “I wasn’t overpowering them by any means.

“It seemed like I would throw one good slider and then one (bad) one. Then I would throw a good curve, then a (bad) one.”

Still, Burns pitched four innings of scoreless relief, giving up one hit, in an 8-3 victory before 53,036 fans at Anaheim Stadium.

In doing so, the right-hander got his eighth save and lowered his earned-run average to 2.10.

Burns, who grew up in Norwalk, struck out one, walked one and gave the Angels fits with his mixture of curveballs, sliders and occasional forkballs.

Burns said he threw only “three or four” forkballs Saturday.

“And one of them was for a hit,” he said. “I wasn’t real consistent all the time with my breaking stuff. I kept them off-balance with my curve and slider. I just wanted to keep the ball down low.”

The Angels’ only hit off Burns came with one out in the eighth, when Wally Joyner lined a single to center field.

“Last year, I threw him a forkball like that and he hit it out of the park,” Burns said. “It shows I’m making progress.”

Joyner put Burns in his only tough situation of the game. After his hit, Joyner moved to second base--farther than any of his teammates did against Burns--on a wild pitch.

Burns then walked Tony Armas but caught Chili Davis looking at a third strike and got Lance Parrish to ground into a force-out.

Burns said he was surprised that Oakland Manager Tony La Russa left him in for four innings.

“I’ve had a bad shoulder the last few days,” he said. “But I was getting a lot of one- and two-pitch outs, so I didn’t throw many pitches.”

Burns was both a reliever and a starter in the minors, but was primarily a starter last season with the A’s. He started in 14 of his 17 games, going 8-2 with a 3.16 ERA.

This season, he returned to the bullpen. He has a 6-2 record with 39 strikeouts and 16 walks in 77 innings.

He can live with either role.

“It really doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s one of those things a pitcher can get carried away with. But if it helps the team, they (coaches) can do what they want with me.”

The victory, the second in a three-game series against the Angels, gave the A’s a two-game lead in the American League West.

But Burns downplayed the importance of the series.

“It’s not getting to the point where every day is a must-win situation,” he said. “We always try to win at least two games in a series. But things could turn around and go wrong (in the third game) and we only have a one-game lead.”

Burns said he didn’t feel any extra pressure pitching in an important series. Nor was he nervous playing in front of his parents, Jim and Anna, who drove down from Norwalk to see the game. His wife, Andrea, flew in from Oakland.

“To me, it’s the same here as it is back East, where no one knows me,” Burns said. “And the hitter sure doesn’t care if my parents are here.”

No, he’s too busy worrying about curves and sliders.