Manager Reaches Next Stage

It was the ultimate vindication for Mike Scioscia, for an Angel manager in the postseason.

Four days after he threatened to be swallowed by the same demons of controversy that engulfed Gene Mauch when the Angels last went to the playoffs 16 years ago and have haunted the franchise ever since, it all came up golden for the manager Saturday, including the champagne.

How sweet.

How silly that ultimate interpretation, Scioscia implied after his fearless and frolicking Angels demolished the New York Yankees again, 9-5, and eliminated the masters of the October universe from the postseason tournament.

In another battering of another Yankee starting pitcher, an eight-run fifth inning was decisive, as were several Scioscia decisions that might have generated controversy again.

If instead they helped uncork nearly two decades of emotions for the Angels and their reborn partisans, if instead they thrust the Angels into the American League championship series and created a World Series scenario without the Yankees for the first time since 1997, Scioscia refused to categorize the success of those decisions as vindication or redemption for his much-debated decision to keep Troy Percival in the bullpen as the Yankees were scoring the decisive runs in Game 1.

Percival, of course, came back to save Games 2 and 3, and there he was in the ninth-inning shadows of Game 4, pumping 95-mph fastballs to the dazed Yankees, wrapping up the Angels’ first victory in a postseason series, and there he was as well amid the champagne of the clubhouse, dismissing the critics much as his team had dismissed the Yankees.

“Let ‘em second-guess all they want,” he said. “The manager makes the decisions and we live with them. He’s taken us to where we’ve never been before.”

On Saturday, the decisions represented business as usual for Scioscia.

Second baseman Adam Kennedy, for instance, may have delivered a home run, double, single and sacrifice fly in the stunning Game 3 victory Friday night, but wasn’t left-hander David Wells starting for the Yankees on Saturday and didn’t the right-handed-hitting Benji Gil represent a better matchup to Scioscia’s thinking even though Gil was one for 17 against Wells and even though Scioscia had said in the spring that Kennedy had become an everyday player?

Well, that everyday situation has taken on the same look of a platoon that the designated-hitter position has, and as Gil went to second base Saturday, the right-handed-hitting Shawn Wooten again replaced Brad Fullmer as the DH.

The bottom line was that Gil and Wooten each had three hits, including two each as 13 batters went to the plate in the fifth-inning barrage that began with a game-tying home run by Wooten.

Wooten went six for nine in the series, a .667 average that provided a resounding complement to Gil’s .800 average and Kennedy’s .500.

“As a manager,” Scioscia said, “you try to put players in the best position to succeed. No one is happy when they don’t play, and I wouldn’t expect it or want it to be different, but sacrifice is as important to a team’s success as accomplishment. I thought it was an easy call today.”

He referred to the Kennedy/Gil decision. For Kennedy, seventh in the AL in hitting at .312 and coming off that big performance in Game 3, he seemed to wish that it hadn’t been such an easy call.

After exchanging a long embrace with Gil in the soggy clubhouse, Kennedy said:

“It’s not in a player to be happy when he doesn’t play, but you accept it, there’s no other choice. Benji and I have become so close that we’ve helped each other try to understand the way it is.”

So, as Gil and Wooten produced four of the 10 hits in that remarkable fifth inning and six of the Angels’ 14 overall, there was Scioscia calling for a hit-and-run that David Eckstein turned to magic during that fifth-inning barrage. And there he was refusing to apply a quick hook to Jarrod Washburn, working on three days’ rest, who threw 44 pitches in the first two innings but went on to give up only two runs in five. And there he was showing faith again in the 20-year-old Francisco Rodriguez, who responded with 1 2/3 innings of scoreless (although somewhat shaky) relief, striking out three while walking two with a wild pitch.

It all worked, and now the Angels have 102 wins this year and Derek Jeter is saying no one will beat them if they continue to play the way they have been. That certainly is a more dramatic reflection of the manager’s impact than any Game 4 decision, because it all started in the spring when Scioscia and his staff convinced the players that they needed to embrace a situational approach at the plate and aggressiveness on the bases, and now, seven months later, they turned it into a nonstop embarrassment of the Yankees.

“These guys have taken it and rode with it, but I don’t really think we put in anything that wasn’t there,” Scioscia said, meaning he has a roster of grit.

“To beat a team as great as the Yankees shows the depth of our club and that it wasn’t intimidated and won’t be.

“I suppose in the sense that not a lot of people gave us much of a chance in this series that validation has to be a part of it, but I think that’s a lot different than vindication.”

Maybe it is.

After all, hasn’t Scioscia been saying from the start, broadcasting through the media to help convince his players, that they are championship caliber?

After all, hasn’t he insisted, as he did again Saturday, that the controversy in Game 1 wasn’t a controversy at all but only a difference of opinions?

And didn’t he react matter-of-factly to the final out Saturday, saying later this was only the first rung on the ladder to the Angels’ ultimate goal?

Yankee Manager Joe Torre had purposely watched Scioscia’s reaction to “see if the son of a gun would let his guard down.” When it didn’t happen, when Scioscia merely walked out, shook hands with his celebrating players, and walked off, Torre said he wasn’t fooling anyone, that it was a “lot of baloney because you know what’s going on [inside of him].”

On this day, in this October, you have to believe it was a lot different than what was going on inside the Yankee manager.