If Angels Keep It Simple, It Might Just Work Out

Since it looks as if the Angels’ season will depend on Francisco Rodriguez, you might want to hear this status report.

“I feel fine,” Rodriguez said. “I feel great, mechanically. Mentally I feel fine. I feel fresh.”

You can’t get any more basic than this: the last three times the Angels have faced the Oakland Athletics, it has come down to Rodriguez. In Oakland on Aug. 11 he dropped a toss from the catcher and Jason Kendall scored the winning run. Tuesday night he surrendered a game-winning home run to Bobby Kielty in the 11th inning. And Wednesday night the Angel Stadium crowd couldn’t relax until a ball launched off Eric Chavez’s bat landed in Chone Figgins’ glove for the final out of the Angels’ 2-1 victory.

It’s much easier to be Frankie than to watch Frankie.

Take Chavez’s fly ball, which had many in the crowd thinking “Not again!”

“Soon as he hit it, I knew it was in the park,” Rodriguez said, casually.

Just like that, he was over Tuesday night, moving past Wednesday night, ready for September. He says the problems with August are over.

“I had a little trouble two weeks ago with my mechanics,” he said.

His release point was off, which led to trouble finding the strike zone. He had eight walks in 6 2/3 innings going back to that blown save in Toronto on July 28. He doesn’t have a walk in 5 1/3 innings since.

We know what we’re getting from the rest of the Angels: Solid starting pitching and anemic hitting. It’s the bullpen that’s been so unpredictable.

After John Lackey delivered another strong performance, giving up only three hits in seven shutout innings, it still wasn’t safe to turn away.

That’s because the Angels had clawed for only two runs. To start the ticker, that’s two runs since their pregame meeting Wednesday, and three runs since Scioscia juggled the lineup Tuesday.

Scioscia came as close as he gets to criticizing his roster when he said the depth of the lineup can get “a little shallow.”

(Scioscia isn’t one for dramatics. If he were the captain of the Titanic, Scioscia would have announced that the ship was taking on “a little water.”)

He also made this concession: “You don’t have to get hit with a brick in the head to know the offensive part of our game needs to find its form.”

Maybe it would be a good idea for him to toss a brick at someone. Or at least a Nerf ball.

What the Angels have needed for a while is a shakeup, a bold move, a sign that everything is NOT going to be OK without some serious changes. It finally happened this week, sort of, with the Angels acquiring a left-handed reliever and Scioscia benching Steve Finley.

Why wait so long to acknowledge the obvious, that Finley wasn’t in a slump but was officially having a bad year?

Scioscia cited two factors. For one, Finley has often started slowly in recent years and turned it around. He was hitting .248 on May 6 last year and finished at .271. In 2003 he had a .242 batting average on May 21 and ended at .287. He waited even longer in 2002, dropping to .242 on June 3 before recovering for another .287 finish.

The other was that when Garret Anderson was injured, the Angels didn’t have an abundance of extra hitters to use in Finley’s place.

But the Angels also got a little complacent.

We keep waiting for this team to adopt a singular attitude.

There were all sorts of options on Wednesday.

“Stay Humble,” it said on Orlando Cabrera’s T-shirt.

The Angels shouldn’t need a slogan to keep the egos in check. Falling from an 8 1/2 -game lead to a two-game deficit in less than two months could even make Tony La Russa humble.

Humbling is having the Cleveland-Detroit game on the big screen two hours before the Angels took the field. Hard to believe the Angels are in a position where the Indians matter to them. But given they started the day -- half a game behind the Indians in the wild-card standings, a full game behind the New York Yankees -- now they’re forced to pay attention.

Scioscia had another word: Patient.

Another option is loose. It was all fun and games to John Lackey.

In the second inning he grabbed a high chopper by Scott Hatteberg and was only a couple of steps from first base. Inexplicably he tossed the ball to a surprised Darin Erstad, who managed to catch it against the heel of his glove and step on the bag to get the out.

Lackey smiled and made a joke on his way back to the mound. Erstad looked as serious as an arresting officer.

The Angels’ five-game losing streak was no laughing matter.

Erstad’s approach apparently was: “Payback’s a mother.”

He struck out with the bases loaded in the first inning.

In the fourth, with Vladimir Guerrero taking off from first, Erstad laced a double to drive in the game’s first run.

Oh, and just because it’s still in play, the Yankees won and Cleveland lost.