New and Improved Lackey Will Be Key to Postseason

Into a division race-come-early, mid-summer, the Angels gave the baseball to John Lackey, just like all the other fifth days.

It is a real race, too, against the undead Oakland A’s, summer having arrived typically early in Texas, and never at all in Seattle.

So, they’ve got 50 games left.

The Angels, with Tuesday’s 9-2 win, have a one-game head start, and if they are to make something of it, anything at all, then Lackey will have to stand among the clear Angel advantages.

He’ll have to pitch with Oakland’s No. 2 starter, Rich Harden, clean up the 7.44 ERA of the last three Augusts, gather the slack left by injuries to Kelvim Escobar and Jarrod Washburn and cover the first steps taken by Ervin Santana and Chris Bootcheck.

Not too much to ask for a guy who has been to Game 7.

Funny thing about Lackey; he has been working his way back to that ever since, back through the normal process of becoming a big-league pitcher, consenting to and then abiding by a new delivery, learning and then having the courage to throw a changeup.

Everybody does it, or everybody who’s somebody. Very few do it with the Game 7 pedigree, especially when they’ve carried it since they were 23.

“It put some definite high expectations on me,” Lackey said Tuesday night, talking when he might rather have been boarding a bus back to San Francisco.

“There hadn’t been anybody do what I did that year for a long time. But, I had a lot to learn.”

Now he is 2-0 in his fourth August, after seven shutout innings against the A’s, who merely scored 27 runs in their previous two games and had won 23 of their last 27 games, and had convinced themselves that the Angels were ripe for the picking.

They pushed Harden out to the mound and it was Harden who broke, both with the ball in his hand and the ball headed toward him.

After two ups, in fact, the Angels had eight hits and seven runs; the A’s had two errors, a wild pitch, a couple of motor-skill malfunctions and a few emotional crises.

And Lackey, against a lefty-laden lineup that, since May 30, batted .288, hit .310 with runners in scoring position and scored more runs than any team in baseball, gave up five hits, four of them singles.

He is 10-4.

He has won four consecutive decisions.

He has given up two earned runs over three starts, four over his last five.

Lackey, at 6 feet 6 and 235 pounds, at 26 years old, at 106 career starts, looks like he’s ready to give Game 7 another try.

It is the result of his trust in pitching coach Bud Black, and in Black’s suggestion to shorten his stride and land on the ball of his foot.

It created a greater downward thrust to his fastball, disguised the release of his curveball and ultimately allowed him the same deception in a changeup that has softened left-handed hitters.

A year ago, left-handers batted .303 against him and hit 13 home runs.

This year, before Tuesday night, they batted .273 and had four home runs.

He’s striking out left-handers, including Nick Swisher twice Tuesday.

So, he looks polished. He looks grown up. He looks prepared for six more weeks of regular season, pitching from the front end of an Angel rotation that apparently will really need him.

“He burst on the scene in 2002 without anybody knowing him, which is always an advantage to the pitcher,” Black said. “If you’re throwing well and throwing strikes, it should work to your advantage.”

He was 24-29 in two seasons after Game 7 of the 2002 World Series, and his ERA was 8.22 after three starts this season.

Manager Mike Scioscia and Black asked him to lighten up and toughen up, to drop the frustration and pitch through the disappointments.

Just take the ball back, and throw it again, and pitch away from the innings that lose ballgames.

“Stuff has happened in dribs and drabs,” Scioscia said. “He slowly set the bar so high it was going to be virtually impossible to achieve that without being perfect.”

It followed for some, perhaps even Lackey, Scioscia said, that Game 7 would precede a Cy Young Award, that success begets more success.

It didn’t go that way.

But, it has happened. A hit doesn’t always become three. A run doesn’t always become two. Sometimes, they become a win, for Lackey and the Angels, and with any luck at all he’d have a few more.

That’s what Lackey brings into this division race, into these final weeks, with the veterans Bartolo Colon and Paul Byrd beside him, helping to hold things together until Washburn and Escobar return. He has been in tighter spots, pitched in bigger games.

Just, he hasn’t pitched in these games before, and that will have to do for now.