Boskie Gets Lead, Then Fights Familiar Feeling

Sometime around 8:30 Saturday night, it seeped into Shawn Boskie’s psyche: Wasn’t it an eight-run lead that got me in so much trouble in the first place?

On April 15, Boskie failed to protect a 9-1 lead in a game the Angels eventually lost to Seattle, 11-10. As a result, he ended up in the bullpen for more than a month. And Saturday night, after the Angels had scored a season-high eight runs in the third inning against Baltimore, Boskie was fighting off an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu.

There was just a twinge when Bill Ripken started the fifth with a double to left and when Jeffrey Hammonds drove in Ripken with the softest line-drive single in history. The seeds of doubt began to sprout when Roberto Alomar lunged at an outside pitch and rolled a double down the left-field line. And the been-there-done-that blues were blaring when he unleashed a wild pitch that enabled Hammonds to score.

“To be honest, I battled that a bit,” he said, smiling. “There was definitely some anxiety there.”

But Boskie, who improved his record to 7-1 with the 8-3 victory over Baltimore and now has the fifth-best winning percentage in baseball (.875), shook off the bad vibrations, as well as the monkey on his back. He retired Rafael Palmeiro--who came into the game hitting .500 against him--on a run-scoring grounder to first and got Bobby Bonilla to pop out to center to end the fifth inning with an 8-3 lead.

Then he settled back into his recent groove--he has given up only five earned runs in his last 19 1/3 innings--and worked a 1-2-3 sixth. He gave up another leadoff double to Ripken before retiring three in a row in the seventh and gave up only a twoout single to Cal Ripken in the eighth before giving way to Mike James.

“In April, he might have let those things get to him and that [fifth] inning might have snowballed,” Manager Marcel Lachemann said, “but he settled right back in and reeled off some quick outs. He showed the ability to calm himself down and make good pitches.”

On May 5, Boskie picked up his first victory in eight starts when he filled in for Mark Langston, who had injured his knee running before the game. He gave up only one run in 5 1/3 innings of the Angels’ 5-1 victory over Minnesota but Lachemann reassigned him to the bullpen.

After the game, pitching coach Chuck Hernandez told Boskie he had figured out the key to his woes as a starter: “We’re just not going to tell you when you’re starting so you don’t have too much time to think about it.”

It may have been intended as a joke, but Boskie took it to heart and he says he now pitches every inning of every game with the mind-set of a reliever, which has freed him from what he calls “a funk of preparedness.”

“I’ve tried to retain that aggressiveness of a reliever,” he said, “trying to take an aggressive approach to the strike zone with the first hitter of every inning and not start thinking about how I was going to get into the seventh or eighth. So far, it’s worked.”

Also working wonders is his improved off-speed curve, a pitch that has allowed him to set up left-handers for inside fastballs. He struck out five Orioles Saturday, all left-handed hitters.

“Left-handed hitters are batting only .200 against me so far this year,” Boskie said, “which is about 140 points worse than they have most of my career. That’s had a lot to do with whatever success I’ve had.”

But let’s don’t underestimate his rescue from the evil Cult of Preparedness. It’s amazing how blowing an eight-run advantage can turn a guy’s season around.