SportsHubLA

Before Wednesday’s 14-11 Angels win over the Indians, I asked second baseman Howie Kendrick if, “just between you and me,” of course, the guys with the sticks are in cahoots with Francisco Rodriguez. Maybe a little side deal, wherein he gets a few extra save opps, so when free agency time comes Rodriguez can really cash in? Then K-Rod pays them back with some watches or trips to Bermuda?

C’mon, Howie. You can be honest.

“It’s not by design,” he said with a laugh. “It’s not like we’re not trying to go out and get hits, but it doesn’t happen that way all the time.” Still, “it’s good to have a good closer. That’s for sure.”

The fuel for Rodriguez’s potentially record setting season- after a one-pitch save in the series finale against Cleveland, he has 42 in 45 chances- has been not just killer stuff but an inordinate amount of opportunities to close out close games. Jonathan Papelbon has had 11 fewer chances for the Red Sox, Joe Nathan 16 in Minnesota, Mariano Rivera 20, and so on. That the Angels are 39-18 in one and two run decisions and have given Rodriguez a chance to make history is a double edged sword. On the one hand, they’ve been winning and Rodriguez has been lights out. On the other, “It’s a reflection of our offensive futility that we haven’t been able to expand some leads to where you don’t have to use Francisco,” says manager Mike Scioscia.

Thanks to a group of starters who lead the American League in innings pitched, as a group the Angels bullpen hasn’t been overused. Rodriguez, though, is tied for second in the American League in appearances, and primary setup man Scot Shields (right) hasn’t wanted for work, either. At some point, the Angels need to start stretching out leads. “The amount of close games we’ve played is going to take a toll on our overall production as a team,” Scioscia says, “because at some point you’ve got to sit these guys down and let them rest and recharge. We have confidence in the other guys, but your preference is to keep Shields and Frankie available to hold leads when games are close. It’s just that we’re playing so many of them, realistically we’re not going to have those two guys available every time you have a lead.”

The long term effects, he says, are going to be negative “if you have to go to the post so much with those guys.” The emergence of Jose Arredondo as a lockdown reliever has certainly helped. Without him, Scioscia said Wednesday, the Angels would likely have to shop around for bullpen help down the stretch. Given how much teams have to overpay for arms at this time of year, Arredondo’s performance has been doubly positive for LAA.

The real key, though, to resting those guys doesn’t come from the starters or from finding more arms to lighten the load, but from the offense stretching out leads and limiting the need for Shields and Rodriguez to even remove their warm up jackets. (Guys still wear those, right? Even during an Orange County summer?)

It’s on that front that things are turning around for the Angels.

While they’re currently 10th in the AL in runs per game, things have turned around substantially for the Halos this month. Only the Tigers and Orioles have pushed more runners across the plate in July than the Angels, who are top five or better in homers, total bases, slugging, and OPS. The offense will never intimidate, or at least capture the imagination of the media, like the Red Sox, but there’s some talent and Scioscia likes where things are going.

“I think we’ve seen the worst side. After the first three or four weeks of the season until maybe the last 20 games, our offense was probably at its most ineffective stage that we’vesen in a while here. Hopefully we’ve turned a corner on that. We were totally dependent on manufacturing runs and the situational game because we wren’t driving the ball and nobody was hitting for, I want to say, at least 50 or 60 games. Now we have the potential to do the things we saw in Spring Training, when we projected what our offense could do. It’s an offense, a lineup, that can get deep. I think we can score in a lot of ways.”

“We just weren’t swinging the bats.”

Wednesday’s script flipping win, in which said bats bailed out an ineffective John Lackey and the relievers who followed, was a high octane version of what Scioscia is talking about. The Angels had a grand slam from Jeff Mathis and banged out seven doubles, including three from Kendrick. They also played “Angel Ball,” moving runners over, picking up timely singles, running the bases aggressively. All that good stuff. Best of all, they displayed the sort of depth to which Scioscia was referring. As a team, they had 19 hits, but Vlad Guerrero, Chone Figgins, Garrett Anderson, and Juan Rivera were a combined 3-19.

No question that health is allowing the Angels to produce more runs, as they were at the beginning of the year. From my end, Kendrick (right) has been especially important. Dude can flat out rake, and his presence makes a profound difference in the composition of the lineup. If you’re the type who likes fancy numbers, Baseball Prospectus calculates Kendrick as LAA’s second most effective bat, behind only Vlad, and barely at that, with a VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) of 20.5, only .2 behind Guerrero.

Given that injuries have limited Kendrick to 56 games, he’s been replaced a lot, so to speak.

While Howard, as Scioscia calls him, doesn’t hit the ball over the wall all that often, he does drive it with regularity. Despite only having 208 at bats, he’s currently only one double behind Casey Kotchman for the team lead. His OBP trails only Figgins (another player who has missed time and whose profoundly changes the lineup) for the team lead, and his .875 OPS is tops on the squad. He’s the sort of player for whom your average fan- male or female- can develop a serious crush.

“This guy has a chance to be a special player and a special hitter. It’s great to have him emerge and swing the bat like he can,” Scioscia says, “but it’s more than Howard.”

No question. With the lineup intact, we’ll get a chance to see how potent the Angels can really be. With 61 games left on the schedule and Rodriguez needing only 15 saves to catch Bobby Thigpen for the single season record, it seems very likely he’ll get there. In a perfect world, though, the Angels will keep winning, only with margins large enough to limit K-Rod’s opportunities.

He might get there, but the Angels should hope it’s not by much.

Brian Kamenetzky hosts the Lakers Blog and Blue Notes: A Dodgers Blog for the LA Times.com. He’s a contributing writer to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. Write him at bk@sportshubla.com.

Discuss: