Angel Secret Comes Out of Left Field

Incredible month?

“Incredible career,” Angel Manager Mike Scioscia responded, aptly correcting the timeframe.

“How many guys have averaged 120 runs batted in and been as productive over the last three or four years?” Scioscia said. “He’s simply one of the best hitters going. He’s fulfilled all of his promise.”

He was talking about Garret Anderson, of course, and what’s new?

Amid the June gloom Sunday, Anderson continued his June boom, enhancing a career in which one monster month has started to look like just about every other and enabling the Angels to salvage the final game of the Freeway Series with the Dodgers, 6-3.

It was a game that the Angels and Dodgers tried to give away at times, and it was won by the team that needed it most, with Anderson’s bat and a chorus of 12 hits speaking louder than any team meeting, of which the World Series champions had held two in the previous 72 hours.

“He’s the guy, when I’m done playing and people ask me who was the most professional hitter I ever played with, my answer will be Garret Anderson, hands down,” Darin Erstad said.

“I mean, people talk about him being underrated and unsung, and maybe he still is to an extent, but I really think the secret is out.

“Everybody knows what kind of a hitter he is, and it’s not that he’s just a great hitter.

“He’s a clutch hitter who has the ability to stay calm in a big situation, and that’s something you can’t teach. It takes a special talent.”

Steady and stabilizing, resistant to the offensive inconsistency that has otherwise hounded the Angels through the first three months, Anderson stepped up early and late Sunday.

He did it by leading off the second inning with a double ripped into the right-center field gap and then scoring the game’s first run after Kevin Brown -- coming in at a virtually invincible 10-1 -- had retired the Angels in order in the first inning, striking out two of the three batters, a pattern that Anderson quickly interrupted.

He did it again in the ninth inning, after the Dodgers had closed from 4-1 to 4-3 with two runs in the seventh, slugging a two-run homer into the right-center field pavilion on a fastball that Paul Shuey would later say was on the outside black of the plate, a location the left-handed hitter would normally take the opposite way to left.

“You wouldn’t expect him to pull that pitch out of the park,” Shuey said. “What can you do?”

It’s a familiar refrain.

Anderson leads the major leagues with 11 homers in June, a month in which he is also batting .313 with 24 RBIs.

He is tied for third in the American League with 18 homers, ranks second in RBIs with 66, leads in doubles with 27 and is fourth in hits with 94, 47 of which have been for extra bases.

He is on a pace to hit 60 doubles, eclipsing his club record of 56 last year, and he is on a pace to drive in a club-record 146 runs, surpassing his career high of 123, achieved in each of the last two years, an illustration of his calm, cool, consistency.

In addition, Anderson is one of only six major leaguers to average 190 or more hits over the last three years. Only Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi have driven in more runs in that span and only Derek Jeter has more hits since 1996.

“I don’t know what my ceiling is,” Anderson said. “I’m focused on continuing to be a more complete hitter, and I feel I’ve matured a lot over the last four years and am hopeful of keeping it going. Through the experience of failing and thinking about it, I’ve been able to apply it as opposed to learning it and not doing it. It’s an ongoing process.”

Coming up to the midpoint of a 162-game schedule, the process has produced what Anderson called the best start of a career in which he also has been one of baseball’s most adaptable and successful interleague hitters, although he shook his head and said, “I’m not a big fan of it. I don’t like facing pitchers I don’t know. They have a big advantage. Fortunately, I’ve faced some of [the Dodger] pitchers before.”

He will face them again this weekend in Anaheim. The Dodgers, having gone 4-2 against the Angels and San Francisco Giants, left Sunday night for the Bay Area and a three-game rematch with the team they are tied with for the National League West lead. The Angels, having gone 2-5 against the Dodgers and Seattle Mariners, begin a three-game rematch with the AL West-leading Mariners in Anaheim Tuesday night.

The Angels are 12 1/2 games behind Seattle, seven behind Oakland in the wild-card race, and Scioscia reiterated that the opponent and standings are irrelevant at this point, that his team needs to continue playing with the focus and aggressiveness of Sunday, when they had 10 hits off Brown in five innings and several times went from first to third on singles.

“We can beat anyone if we play our game,” he said, “but we have to do a better job of doing it on a daily basis. If we don’t put it together, the standings will be irrelevant anyway.”

Scioscia doesn’t have to worry about his left fielder putting it together.

If the secret isn’t out about Garret Anderson, and Dodger Manager Jim Tracy said he is as underrated as any player in the big leagues, it should be. He should be more than simply a player that Scioscia takes to the All-Star game as a reserve.

As Tracy said: “He’s as good as there is, and it doesn’t matter if a left-hander or right-hander is pitching. He’s a star.”

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Red Hot

*--* Garret Anderson is having an outstanding June. He has hit 11 home runs, two shy of the Angels’ record for a month, which is held by Tim Salmon (June 1996) and Mo Vaughn (May 2000). Anderson’s statistics: CATEGORY JUNE 2003 Home runs 11 18 Doubles 8 27 RBIs 24 66 Runs 17 41 Batting average 349 316 On-base pct 386 346 Slugging pct 843 609

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