These Spare Parts Don’t Need Fixing

Who needs a stuffed Rally Monkey when you have David Eckstein, a living, breathing, nonstop Rally Man?

Who needs a made-up talisman when you have a ferocious munchkin who refuses to see what he can’t do and keeps doing things he’s not supposed to do?

Eckstein tied Thursday’s Angel game against Oakland with an infield single, a searing whack that caromed off the opposing pitcher as if it were an eight ball headed into the corner pocket. This was a pitcher who, Eckstein admitted cheerily, “embarrassed me last week.”

And who needs star closer Troy Percival when you have a 31-year-old rookie named Brendan Donnelly? Donnelly keeps getting recalled from Salt Lake City and getting sent back down. He has retired 28 of the last 31 major league batters he’s faced and 15 of those struck out. He didn’t pitch Thursday because he’d worked the four previous games. But he wanted to.

So Scot Shields and Ben Weber cleaned up after Ramon Ortiz this time. Shields, 27, also started this season in Salt Lake City. He got the win against Oakland by pitching 2 2/3 innings and not giving up a run of his own (he did throw a wild pitch that let one in, but that was charged to Ortiz).

With the Angels having scrambled from behind for the win (the 30th time they’ve come from behind to win), some of the 31,653 fans may have wished that Percival were off the disabled list and ready to close. He will be soon enough. And the Angels do need him.

But it’s time we start believing in all the other Angels. Weber could hardly wait to sprint to the mound and close out this 5-4 triumph.

“How can this not be fun?” Weber said. “Give me the ball.”

It’s fun when Weber can coax pinch-hitter David Justice into a timid groundout to second baseman Benji Gil, frustrate Terrence Long into a weak groundout to first baseman Scott Spiezio and induce Miguel Tejada to sharply ground out to Eckstein.

Yes, everything comes back to Eckstein.

“He is our catalyst,” Weber said.

“He’s defeated all odds,” Darin Erstad said.

After the game, Eckstein chronicled his five at-bats. One out, four singles. A run scored. A run batted in.

He took bad swings during the first at-bat, when he led off the first inning, he said. He wound up lining out to the shortstop, but it took Cory Lidle eight pitches to nudge the pesky Eckstein into making that out.

“My second time, [Lidle] had me at 2-2,” Eckstein said. “He’s trying to get a fastball past me inside. I hit it where they weren’t. I can’t take credit for that hit. It wasn’t me.”

But it was, of course. It was Eckstein, fighting to make contact on that inside pitch because everybody tries to pitch him inside, convinced he can’t hit the inside pitch.

On this homestand, six games against Seattle and Oakland, both playoff teams the last two years, Eckstein went 11 for 21 with six RBIs. He hit the inside pitches. And the outside pitches. The balls and the strikes. The Angels won five of the six games.

Eckstein’s third at-bat Thursday was huge. It was in the fifth inning. The A’s had just hit Ortiz for three runs. With one out, Jose Molina on first and an 0-2 count, Eckstein singled.

“He came with two fastballs, then tried to get me on a split finger,” Eckstein said. “I hit it pretty hard.”

He would score on Tim Salmon’s two-run single.

The Angels were down, 4-2, when they came up in the sixth. They scored a run and Oakland brought in Chad Bradford in place of Lidle.

“Bradford had eaten me up in Oakland last week,” Eckstein said. “He got me to pop up. He got me to ground out. So this was a good challenge for me. The angle he throws from, it should be good for me. He threw me a fastball, outside, then a slider for a strike and another fastball, inside. I stayed on it.”

Eckstein crunched it so hard that even though the ball didn’t leave the infield, ricocheting in the direction of the second baseman, Eckstein was dusting himself off at first while the ball was still spinning.

Orlando Palmeiro scored on the infield single to tie it, 4-4. The crowd was splitting ears with noise.

In the bottom of the eighth, Eckstein singled again, on an inside fastball. He was forced out by Erstad, but Eckstein’s hard slide at second helped get Erstad safely to first. And Erstad would score the winning run on a Garret Anderson hit.

Because Eckstein is only 5 feet 8 and doesn’t have much power and isn’t the fastest guy on the stopwatch, no one ever much wanted him.

He’s a 27-year-old dervish who swings so frantically in the warmup area that it seems certain his arms will fly off. Doubters keep waiting for Eckstein to fail, for major league pitching to befuddle him, for his size to make it hard to field his position.

“The experts look for that one outstanding thing,” Percival said. “Eck’s thing is that he does everything right. It’s easy to overlook that.”

Eckstein is a lot like the Angels in that way. The baseball world keeps waiting for the Angels to fail, to fall out of contention, to be pretenders.

Oakland traded for Chicago White Sox second baseman Ray Durham after this game. There will be frustrated Angel fans who wonder why General Manager Bill Stoneman hasn’t done something to make the Angels better.

But maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe what the Angels have is enough. Maybe what they have can’t be made any better by somebody else’s discard. Maybe, like Eckstein, the Angels are finding their level. At the top.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.