No coming-out parties when Lackey throws

BOSTON -- There have been times Mike Scioscia has pulled pitcher John Lackey from games when the Angels manager wished he had gone to the mound in full catcher’s gear.

“Every game he’s ever started, subtract his complete games, and that’s how many times he’s been mad at me,” Scioscia said. “It’s John.”

Not that Scioscia minds. That bulldog mentality, that inner Jack Morris, is a byproduct of Lackey’s ferocity and has helped fuel the right-hander’s evolution from a promising but erratic youngster into a staff ace, a feisty veteran whom Seattle left-hander Jarrod Washburn recently tabbed “the best big-game pitcher in baseball.”

And it is exactly the kind of attitude and mound presence the Angels will need if they are to neutralize Boston’s home-field advantage in Fenway Park, where Lackey will oppose Red Sox ace Josh Beckett in Game 1 of the American League division series Wednesday.

A nationally televised playoff game against a prolific lineup in one of baseball’s most historic and hostile stadiums, where the Angels are 14-22 since 2000? Sign Lackey up. The 28-year-old lives for this kind of game.

As a rookie in 2002, Lackey won Game 7 of the World Series, giving up one run and four hits in five innings of a 4-1 win over San Francisco.

He has a 1.88 earned-run average in three division series games, including a 5 2/3 -inning, one-run, two-hit emergency effort on three days’ rest in Yankee Stadium in 2005 in place of Washburn, who came down with a throat infection.

He is 1-1 with a 3.75 ERA in two AL Championship Series games and had a 4.38 ERA in 12 1/3 innings of the 2002 World Series.

Lackey won the Angels’ AL West-clinching game over Seattle on Sept. 23, and in the 10 games he started after a loss this season, the Angels are 10-0.

Though Lackey has struggled in Fenway, where he is 1-4 with a 7.46 ERA in seven starts, there is no pitcher the Angels -- and at least one former Angel -- would rather have on the mound for Game 1.

“Any time it’s a must-win situation or a big game or a postseason game, he’s nails,” said Washburn, a teammate of Lackey’s for four years. “He’s great every time he takes the mound, but it’s like he takes it to another level. He lets his talent take over, he focuses a little better and bears down.”

Not trying to elevate his game may be the key to Lackey’s elevated performances.

“You definitely have to keep your routine the same; you can’t look at the game itself as bigger than any other game,” Lackey said. “You’ve got to get beyond the distractions of the flyovers, the extra media, that kind of stuff, and look at it as a game. You still have to make pitches.”

Lackey’s first big-game lesson came during the pennant race in 2002, when he got too keyed up for a Sept. 11 start against Oakland and gave up five runs in 4 1/3 innings of a 6-5 win.

“I put too much pressure on myself, I tried too hard to be too fine, and it didn’t go very well,” Lackey said. “I learned a lot from that game, that you have to stay to your strengths, that you can’t try to do too much.”

When Scioscia told him after the Angels’ dramatic World Series Game 6 victory over the Giants that he would start the next day, Lackey doesn’t recall being nervous.

“I was excited, and I didn’t want to mess it up for some of the older guys who’d been around for a while,” Lackey said. “A couple guys came over and told me they were confident in me, and that made me feel more comfortable.”

Does Lackey ever wonder how his career would have turned out had he gotten shelled in Game 7?

“Well, the next two years were really up and down, I was still learning on the job, I’d have a good month and a down month,” Lackey said. “So Game 7 didn’t exactly catapult me straight to success. But it definitely gave me the confidence to know I could do that.”

Lackey went a combined 24-29 with a 4.65 ERA in 2003 and 2004, seasons marked by his penchant for allowing a walk, an error, a bloop hit or a bad pitch to snowball into huge innings. It reminded Lackey’s father, Derran, of what Lackey was like at Abilene (Texas) High.

“Even though John was an all-state baseball player, he did not have the demeanor to pitch in high school,” said Derran Lackey, now the varsity baseball coach at Horn High in Mesquite, Texas. “He wasn’t able to control his emotions, and even as a young major leaguer, it took him time to get his composure together.

“He wanted everything to be perfect. He was a little immature, like most kids. He didn’t understand that if someone makes a mistake, you can’t do anything about it.”

If you’ve seen Lackey react in disgust when a teammate doesn’t make a play that could have been made, it’s apparent he still struggles a bit in this area.

But part of his maturing process was learning how to let that frustration roll off his back, which he began doing a better job of in 2005, when he went 14-5 with a 3.44 ERA, and 2006, when he went 13-11 with a 3.56 ERA and emerged as a staff ace.

Add to that growth an expanded repertoire -- he now changes speeds on his curve to give it two looks and has added what Washburn calls a “two-seam come-backer,” a pitch that, unlike his cut fastball, tails from the outside back over the plate to right-handers and from the hands of left-handers toward the plate -- and the result is a finished product in 2007.

Lackey probably will get Cy Young Award votes after a season in which he was 19-9 with an AL-leading 3.01 ERA and 179 strikeouts and 52 walks in 224 innings. And, good for Scioscia, two complete games.

“You could see his rookie year that he had the makeup and the stuff to be one of the best in the game, but that process doesn’t happen overnight -- he’s worked his butt off over the years,” Washburn said. “He’s getting pretty darn close to becoming the complete package.”

And to think, it might never have happened if Lackey, goofing off one day in practice during his freshman year at the University of Texas Arlington, hadn’t hurled a ball from the left-field line over the right-field fence.

Pitching coach Ron Liggett, now an economics lecturer at the school, noticed the arm of the team’s first baseman and took him over to a bullpen mound.

Lackey threw 14 innings that season, hitting 90 mph in his first appearance, and after going 10-3 with a 4.23 ERA the following season at Grayson County College, Lackey was a second-round pick of the Angels in 1999, a pitcher with low mileage and a high ceiling.

The Angels loved Lackey’s size and athleticism -- he was a star quarterback and power forward, as well as a power-hitting first baseman, in high school -- and it was evident Lackey, the son of a former college infielder, was a fierce competitor.

“My dad always encouraged me to go out there and get after it, whatever it was,” Lackey said. “We always played hoops in the driveway, and he never let me win. We had a pingpong table growing up, and he used to wear me out. I dunked on him one time when I was in high school. We started playing H-O-R-S-E after that.”

Said Derran Lackey: “I was not one of those dads who would let him win.”

Lackey zoomed through the minor league system, and by July 2002 he was a 24-year-old rookie pitching in a pennant race and getting his first taste of the major league lifestyle.

It was that summer that Dennis Cook, a veteran reliever on the 2002 Angels, noticed Lackey’s affinity for the night life and told the kid something that still resonates with Lackey.

“He said do whatever you want at night, have fun,” Lackey said, “but if you’re going to hoot with the owls, you better get up and soar with the eagles.”

That advice helped push Lackey to develop a grueling between-starts routine that has improved his endurance and a work ethic that has turned him into such a team leader that last spring training, Scioscia had Lackey address about 100 Angels minor league pitchers.

Using the Tempe Diablo Stadium as his platform, Lackey was the pitching professor, the sage tutoring the kids on preparation, between-starts routines and in-game management.

“It was cool that he thinks enough of me to give me the opportunity to speak to those guys,” Lackey said. “It was weird to see myself as a veteran, but we’ve had a lot of turnover in the clubhouse, and I’m one of the long-tenured guys here.”

Knowing Lackey, he probably refused to leave the mound that day until he was finished.

--

mike.digiovanna@latimes.com