Angels Pick On Little Devils

Another day, another victory, and the Angels’ playoff dream seems tantalizingly close to reality.

The Angels are not yet soliciting concession speeches from their competition, but the air of confidence in the clubhouse is unmistakable. Certainly, the obstacles standing between the Angels and October baseball appear less imposing with each passing day.

The Seattle Mariners? The invaluable Mark McLemore is hurt, and the starting rotation includes the struggling Freddy Garcia, the ailing Joel Pineiro and the unreliable Ismael Valdes. The Boston Red Sox? Pedro Martinez is hurt, and the Sox have lost eight of their past 12 games.

The Angels? Garret Anderson hit two home runs and tied a career high by driving in seven runs Thursday, in a 10-1 rout of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Angels won their seventh consecutive game, jumping four games ahead of Seattle and 7 1/2 ahead of Boston in the American League wild-card race.

“We’re in good shape for the wild card now,” Angel outfielder Tim Salmon said, “but things will really shake out in the next three weeks.”

And the Angels have not conceded the division championship to the rampaging Oakland Athletics. All that 20 consecutive victories have gotten them is a modest three-game lead over the Angels--the smallest of any division leader in the majors--and don’t think the A’s haven’t noticed.

“That’s one of the most amazing parts of all this,” pitcher Barry Zito told reporters in Oakland. “We’ve been the hottest team in years, and we’re still one bad series away from second place.”

That’s because this year’s Angels do not resemble the many predecessors that self-destructed in September.

The Angels lost 19 of their last 21 games last season, and they posted a winning record once in the previous nine Septembers, but they’re 4-0 this September.

And, with a three-game sweep of the Devil Rays in which they outscored the worst team in the majors, 24-5, the Angels again served notice that they would take no team for granted.

“We’re beating the teams we’re supposed to beat,” Salmon said. “We could always go toe-to-toe with the big boys, but in the past we would fall short against the teams we should beat.”

This year, it is the Mariners and the Red Sox, not the Angels, trying to hang on as injuries mount and depth evaporates. For the Angels, Salmon and pitcher Dennis Cook returned from injury Thursday.

“Everything about this season is really going against the grain of what we’ve been used to the past five or six years,” Salmon said. “But it’s not like we’re getting breaks or we’re getting lucky. We’re a good solid team.”

Said Anderson: “The other years, when I look back, we weren’t good enough. We were always trying to [scrape] together a starting rotation. We had injuries. We had holes. We had inexperience.”

The depth and talent are impressive enough now that Anderson described one of the finest nights of his career as him just chipping in.

“It just happened to be my turn,” he said.

Ramon Ortiz, Scot Shields and Cook combined on a six-hitter for the Angels. In his past five starts, Ortiz is 3-0 with a 2.52 earned-run average.

Cook, pitching for the first time since July 4, closed the game with a perfect ninth inning. He is pitching despite a torn rotator cuff that will require surgery after the season.

That, Cook hopes, will be in November.

And, quietly, there are signs of October popping up throughout the Angel organization.

The ticket office is preparing to put playoff tickets on sale. The coaching staff has adjusted the starting rotation so ace Jarrod Washburn can face Oakland twice and Seattle twice in the final three weeks, putting him in position to start the first or second game of a playoff series.

And Cook, the team elder at 39, can smell October.

“I feel,” he said, “like I’m on a one-month tryout to make the playoff roster.”