After Rocky Start, Angels’ Harvey Set for Big Year : Baseball: Reliever has recorded 10 saves in 12 opportunities, putting him on a pace to better last season’s 25 saves.

It was only a twinge, a momentary pain that creased his elbow when he threw a forkball. It soon passed and he hasn’t felt it again since that early June day in the bullpen in Kansas City, but it reminded Angel right-hander Bryan Harvey how tenuous a grip he has on his major league career.

“I was pretty scared,” Harvey said. “You never know what can happen. I was throwing and I threw two forkballs, and there it was. I walked around for a while and threw four fastballs, and it was all right. I saw the doctor the next morning, and he said I might have just strained it. I took two days off and I haven’t had any problems after that.

“It makes you think how quick it can go.”

Harvey’s season is going well after a rocky start, and the 27-year-old reliever is determined to put behind him the wildness that plagued him last season and intruded again this spring.

“Talent-wise, he was always there,” Angel bullpen coach Joe Coleman said.

Coleman was the club’s minor league pitching instructor when the unheralded, undrafted Tennessean attended an Angel tryout camp and inspired raves for his arm but dismay about his technique.

“When he gets out there, it doesn’t really look it, but he’s very intense inside. If somebody gets a hit or a walk, he sometimes fights himself. We kept pounding it into him this season that he can’t let them beat him, that he’s got to slow everything down and go at his own pace.”

Harvey recorded his 10th save in 12 opportunities last week, putting him slightly ahead of the pace he kept last season in earning 25 saves. He has also improved his ratio of walks to strikeouts, having walked 18 and struck out 37 in 31 1/3 innings this season; he had 41 walks and 78 strikeouts in 55 innings last season.

“I think I’m ahead of last year as far as cutting down on walks (goes),” said Harvey, who had 17 saves in 1988 as a rookie. “I keep telling myself that you only hurt yourself by putting guys on base. You’ve got to make them earn their way on.”

After pitching a scoreless ninth inning Wednesday, Harvey lowered his earned-run average to 2.97, down from a high of 6.48 on April 29. As the Angels open a 10-game, three-city trip tonight in Cleveland, Harvey’s ERA is second among relievers to Mark Eichhorn’s 1.64.

But to Harvey, this means less than knowing that of the six runners he has inherited this season, none has scored. “What difference is my ERA if I come in and there’s two men on base and we lose the lead?” he said. “If I let those men score, it doesn’t hurt my ERA, but that would mean I’m not doing my job. “

His statistics and performance weren’t impressive early in the season, and Eichhorn was called upon to play Harvey’s old role of the right-hander who comes in to face two batters or three and clinch a victory. After eight appearances covering 8 1/3 innings through April 29, Harvey had allowed 12 hits, six earned runs, nine walks and had struck out 10.

“I was struggling, and he was throwing the ball well,” Harvey said, without rancor, about Eichhorn. “It was great that we had somebody to pick us up. Now there are more guys in the bullpen starting to throw well.

“I wasn’t worried (about being eclipsed by Eichhorn). If you do your job, you’re going to get to pitch in those pressure situations. They’re not going to keep putting me in there in the ninth inning if I’m not getting ‘em out.”

Harvey started getting people out more consistently after Coleman and pitching coach Marcel Lacheman suggested that he make an adjustment in his delivery. In his 25 innings since that high-water mark in his ERA, Harvey has allowed six earned runs, walked nine and struck out 27.

Four of the walks came June 15 in Detroit, when he walked the bases full and walked in the decisive run in a 10-inning, 2-1 Tiger victory. And there was the wild pitch he threw while trying intentionally to walk Toronto’s Fred McGriff, which enabled the Blue Jays to take the Angels into extra innings on May 24, a game the Angels eventually pulled out. These aberrations aside, Harvey has been effective in the clutch.

“He was opening up (his hands) even before he started to go through his delivery,” said Coleman, who was instrumental in transforming Harvey from a starter into a reliever at Quad City in 1985. “We closed it down and changed his grip on his forkball. . . . He wasn’t relaxing, sitting back and saying, ‘Here, hit it.’ He was saying, ‘I’m going to throw this fastball 112 m.p.h.,’ instead of saying, ‘I want you to hit it because I’ve got good enough stuff to beat you with.’ Other than that game in Detroit, he’s had good outings since.”

Not that they’re always easy outings. But if he’s emotional, it’s because he thrives on pressure, not because he’s worried about whether his arm might betray him.

“I’m nervous every time I go out there,” he said. “I throw a couple of pitches and then I settle in. . . . You know you’ve got a job in front of you. The tying run might be on second or third and you have to work hard. I get excited in situations like that. There’s a lot of ups and downs, but if you can’t handle the bad times as (well) as the good times, you’re not going to last long.”