McDowell Gets Behind, but Doesn’t Get Down

It won’t be easy for Angel fans to watch Jack McDowell this season.

The best advice might be to just cover your eyes until the seventh inning, then look up at the scoreboard and hope for the best.

McDowell will pitch a lot of innings. He’ll give up plenty of runs. But if form holds, he’ll win a good share of his games.

The Angels hope the whole thing will have a little “Cosby Kids” effect to it. As in, “if you’re not careful, you might learn something too.”

It might be tough for fans to watch a pitcher get touched for four runs in the early innings. But the Angels want their pitchers to see his survival instincts, his ability to escape just before the game gets away completely and push on to the later innings.

“When he’s getting beat around early, he’ll still battle and he’ll still compete,” Angels General Manager Bill Bavasi. “We had a guy go out the other night that didn’t do that [Allen Watson]. He got behind early and just stopped competing.

“Young pitchers can see this guy and learn from that. They can learn that, ‘You know what? They might get four runs on me in the third, but I can stick around and win.’ ”

Any education is purely coincidental.

“My focus is going out there and winning games,” McDowell said. “If somebody picks up something from the way I go about things, great.”

At 32, in his 10th year in the majors, McDowell is not quite old enough to be a guru. His arm is still worth more than his brain, which in baseball is a good thing.

But there might come a day when he calls the new kids over to his locker for a little school session, the way Charlie Hough did when McDowell was coming up. And McDowell has demonstrated that he knows the value of an education.

If he had been eager to spend all of his time pitching, he very well could have been on the mound for the Boston Red Sox at Edison Field on Monday night instead of the Angel dugout.

Boston drafted him in the 20th round in 1984, but he decided to play at Stanford.

“It’s one of those things where Stanford guys weren’t signing,” McDowell said. “They weren’t signing as juniors, and guys that were going to go to Stanford weren’t signing professionally.”

Even with that Stanford background--and the skills that made him the No. 4 overall pick by the Chicago White Sox in the 1987 draft--McDowell knew enough to know that he didn’t know it all.

So he soaked up everything Hough had to say to him.

Hough was at the tail end of a 25-year career when he played for the White Sox in 1991 and 1992, McDowell’s second and third full seasons.

You see McDowell’s surly on-the-mound demeanor and think there’s nothing he could have learned from the harmless-looking Hough.

But no one pitches in the big leagues for a quarter of a century without knowing something about perseverance.

“All the years he pitched in Texas,” McDowell said, “people would come down. In the heat, he would outlast them.

“You’re giving the team a better chance to win if you’re in the game. No matter if you’re getting knocked around that day or not, especially in this league. If you’re not absolutely on top of your game, you’re going to be giving up some runs.

“That’s just part of the deal. You can kind of gauge everyone’s success off how well they do getting knocked around, how well you bounce back from that. It’s not always easy to keep your confidence when things aren’t going well, still maintain your game.”

Doug Drabek was that type of pitcher for Terry Collins when he was managing the Houston Astros. Now he has McDowell, and you’d better have someone like him in the American League, in which the scores will be high even in non-expansion years.

McDowell himself isn’t sure if his stick-around-and-wait-for-the-teammates-to-start-hitting approach would work in the National League. But in the AL, he knows that a four-run deficit early on means nothing.

He surrendered four in the third inning of his first start with the Angels on Friday, but stuck around until the seventh, allowing one more run in a 6-2 loss to his team of the previous two seasons, the Cleveland Indians.

There will be more lines likes seven innings, eight hits, five earned runs, two walks and five strikeouts. Some of those lines will also list him as the winning pitcher.

McDowell has won more games than any American League pitcher in the 1990s, even though he started only six games in an injury-shortened ‘97, and he hasn’t posted an earned-run average of less than 3.93 since 1995. But he hasn’t had a losing record since his rookie season in 1988.

“I think he’s just one of those tough guys that can go out and win, 2-1, and he can win, 11-9,” Bavasi said.

Most of all, he’s just one of those guys who can win.