Angels Help Fisher Get Better : Baseball: Seattle gets 14 hits and wins, 8-0, giving the Mariner pitcher his first victory since 1988.

Brian Fisher could always throw, but it took him many painful years to learn how to pitch.

That lesson paid off Wednesday night, when the Seattle Mariner right-hander pitched seven shutout innings in an 8-0 victory over the Angels before 19,896 at Anaheim Stadium, earning his first major league victory since Aug. 9, 1988.

“I can’t tell you how good this feels,” said Fisher (1-0), who gave up three hits and struck out one. “From where I was in 1988 until now, it’s been a big gap.”

Fisher’s promise faded when his fastball waned, its velocity gone after two operations on his right knee, one on his left and another on his right shoulder. A product of the Atlanta Brave farm system, he was released by the Pittsburgh Pirates and again by the Houston Astros before eventually being traded to the Mariners in a minor league deal this spring.

“I’m not even close to the same power I had when I was younger,” he said. “I had to learn how to pitch. Hopefully, I can stay in the same mode I’m in now. . . . When you’re injured and you know in your mind what you want your body to do and your body just can’t do it, it’s frustrating. You can’t explain it to anyone unless you’ve been there. You’ve got to find a way to make an adjustment. It took awhile for me to do that.

“I wanted my fastball back so bad, but I had to realize, hey, it ain’t going to come back to where I want it to be. That’s not to say I didn’t throw hard tonight, but I had to make some adjustments and change speeds.”

He made that adjustment successfully Wednesday. While he limited the Angels to four singles--they have gone 23 consecutive innings without an extra-base hit--the Mariners got 14 hits off Bert Blyleven (4-5), Chuck Crim, Mark Eichhorn and Steve Frey.

Former Angel Lance Parrish singled during Seattle’s three-run second inning and tripled in the eighth, his first triple since April 17, 1989, while with the Angels. Ken Griffey Jr. and Tino Martinez added homers in the ninth against Frey, matching the most runs Frey has yielded in a relief appearance this season.

“We just didn’t do many things right tonight,” interim Manager John Wathan said. “This is one ballgame we can forget about. . . . Regardless of what happened for them offensively, we’ve still got to swing the bats, and we didn’t.”

Fisher had a lot to do with that.

“Not by any means was he overpowering, but they made some good plays behind him and he kept us off balance,” Angel catcher Ron Tingley said. “We’ve had two bad games in a row, and we don’t want to make that a habit.”

Blyleven pitched “OK,” according to Wathan. Blyleven was victimized by weak defensive plays--Junior Felix lost Jay Buhner’s single in the twilight sky in the second inning, putting runners on first and third for Parrish’s RBIsingle--and Gary DiSarcina’s error on Omar Vizquel’s hopper enabled Shane Turner to score the second run.

But Blyleven planted the seeds for the Mariners’ two-run sixth, giving up a single to Buhner and walking Parrish. Both scored on Vizquel’s single to center against Crim, runs that were charged to Blyleven. He has given up 46 hits and 31 earned runs over 29 innings in his last seven starts, raising his earned-run average to 5.43. He left the clubhouse without speaking to reporters, but Parrish thought Blyleven’s problems included missing with his breaking ball.

“I really wanted to have an opportunity to get behind the plate tonight because I had some ideas on how to pitch to these guys,” Parrish said of his former teammates. “Everything worked out well.”

Especially for Fisher. “When I first came here, they gave me the ball and then they inserted me into the rotation and that gave me confidence,” he said. “Sometimes it just takes someone having a little confidence in you.”