Angels try to pick up pieces after Adenhart’s death

Tight hamstrings, sore knees, tired arms . . . the Angels are used to coping with such nagging injuries.

Friday night, they took the field with heavy hearts.

Playing their first game without fallen teammate Nick Adenhart, the 22-year-old pitcher who was killed along with two friends in a traffic accident early Thursday, the Angels took a 2 1/2 -hour break from mourning to beat the Boston Red Sox, 6-3, in Angel Stadium.

Howie Kendrick keyed a three-run second inning with a two-run single, Jeff Mathis highlighted a three-run seventh with a two-run single, and Jered Weaver fought through tears to deliver 6 2/3 strong innings, yielding one unearned run and four hits.

Weaver and Adenhart had become so tight that Adenhart was set to move into Weaver’s Long Beach house on Sunday. After being pulled in the seventh inning, Weaver walked to the dugout, where Adenhart’s No. 34 jersey hung all game, and pointed toward the heavens.

“You know he’s looking down on you, and he’s going to help us battle through the season,” said Weaver, who struck out eight while mixing a crisp fastball with a superb changeup. “It was a tough thing, walking in here and seeing his locker with everything in it.

“And we have the patches on our jersey, his picture in center field, and his number behind the mound. He was a great kid. This is the toughest game I’ve ever been through. It’s a tough thing to swallow. It really hasn’t hit me yet.”

The raw emotion of the previous 36 hours, in which the Angels were stunned by Adenhart’s death, grieved with his father, Jim, in a gut-wrenching meeting Thursday and his mother, Janet, Friday, and honored Adenhart with a pregame video tribute and a moment of silence Friday night, gave way to a familiar, comforting refrain from the stadium public address announcer: “Let’s play ball!”

Torii Hunter, who with pitcher John Lackey held Adenhart’s jersey on the mound during the moment of silence, ran to the center-field fence and tapped Adenhart’s heart on the wall graphic of the pitcher that was erected earlier Friday.

“I gave him a chest bump,” Hunter said, “just like I did after the game [Adenhart pitched] Wednesday night.”

Weaver delivered a first-pitch strike to Jacoby Ellsbury, and with that, the Angels began the monumental task of playing the rest of their season in the face of tragedy, which can be achieved only if they treat the baseball field as their sanctuary.

“There is no template, no instruction manual for dealing with what has happened,” Manager Mike Scioscia said. “There are a lot of guys in that clubhouse who were very close to Nick, and it’s going to take some time.

“But this game has a way of focusing you on the field. One of the easiest things for these guys will be playing the game, going between the lines.”

The Angels never seemed to lose their focus Friday night. Bobby Abreu had three hits and two stolen bases, singling in each of the Angels’ run-scoring rallies, and Scot Shields threw 1 1/3 innings for the save.

“Baseball is our safe haven, the place you can go where you have no problems,” Hunter said. “Before and after the game, that’s when you have problems.”

It was the downtime between innings that was the toughest for Scioscia.

“The game has a way of sucking you in, but in between, you see Nick’s shirt, it brings you back to reality,” Scioscia said. “I’m happy to get a win. It doesn’t do much for what happened the last few days, but we’re playing baseball.”

Before the game, Adenhart’s parents, who watched the game from a suite, took several jerseys and caps from Adenhart’s locker and some dirt from the Angel Stadium mound as keepsakes.

The rest of Adenhart’s locker will remain preserved -- with the pitcher’s cleats, gloves, iPod, headphones and other clothes -- for the rest of the season, and Adenhart will have a locker on the road.

“He’s going to be with us,” Scioscia said. “That’s something the guys felt very strongly about.”

Pitcher Dustin Moseley, a teammate of Adenhart’s for much of 2008 at triple-A Salt Lake, choked up when he spoke of Thursday’s meeting, when Jim Adenhart broke down as he addressed the team.

“I can’t even begin to explain how it felt to see what his dad had to go through,” Moseley said. “I had to bury my dad a few years ago. I can’t imagine burying a son.

“Everyone who knows Nick was proud to know him. I’m sure God is proud to know him now too.”

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mike.digiovanna@latimes.com