Angels Gladly Heed the Call

Scott Schoeneweis deviated from his usual script Friday night, and the New York Yankees argued the Angel left-hander had an influential co-author in home-plate umpire Laz Diaz.

The Angels didn’t really care how the story was written. All they know is it had a happy ending, one that resulted in the Angels’ 8-3 victory over the Yankees before a near-capacity crowd of 43,169 in Edison Field and pulled the Angels to within two games of Oakland in the wild-card hunt.

Schoeneweis is a sinker-ball pitcher who relies heavily on ground-ball outs, but he struck out a career-high nine Friday night while limiting the Yankees to three runs--two earned--on nine hits in 6 2/3 innings.

To put that in perspective: Schoeneweis had struck out five or more batters only twice in 17 previous starts. In his last five starts before Friday night, Schoeneweis had a combined 10 strikeouts.

Schoeneweis’ pitches appeared to have a little more movement Friday night, and his fastball seemed a little more brisk, hitting 93 mph at times.

But the Yankees claimed he was aided by Diaz’s liberal strike zone--four Yankees went down looking, including Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius with runners on second and third and no outs in the fourth inning, third-strike calls that sent both grumbling to the dugout.

“I don’t want to get into that,” Yankee Manager Joe Torre said, when asked about the strike zone, “but it was awful. I’m not going to [complain] about the strike zone. That’s not why we lost the game. But something has to be done. The hitters don’t know when to swing.

“I’ve talked to some umps who have said, ‘Yeah, we allow [the length of] 2 1/2 balls off the [corners of the] plate. If they’re going to do that, why don’t they just dig up the plate and make it bigger? It doesn’t make any sense that the umps are calling strikes on balls that don’t cross the plate.”

It did to Schoeneweis. Asked what was working for him Friday night, Schoeneweis needed no time to formulate his response: “Good zone.”

He wasn’t about to complain.

“It’s nice to get calls that go your way once in a while,” Schoeneweis (6-6) said. “I had the same game plan. The strikeout total was higher than usual because the guy was calling borderline pitches you don’t usually get.”

In fairness to Schoeneweis, Torre said the calls were the same for both sides, as evidenced by Yankee starter Orlando Hernandez’s fourth-inning called third strike on Troy Glaus, who flipped his bat and jogged about 20 feet toward first before heading back to the dugout, shaking his head.

“The hitters shouldn’t be that surprised all the time,” Torre said. “Someone should be watching--not necessarily to replace the umps, just instructing them and letting common sense prevail. It’s just so unsettling.

“I remember when I played, your eyes tell you what’s a strike. It’s tough to tell yourself to swing at a pitch you know is a ball. I had trouble with that. You become so conscious of hitting a bad ball that you can’t hit the good one.”

Though Hernandez (8-9) had the same zone to work with, he couldn’t do as much with it as Schoeneweis. He was tagged for four runs in the first inning, as Mo Vaughn ripped a two-run double to right, Garret Anderson hit an RBI double to left and Adam Kennedy blooped an RBI single to left-center.

New York countered with a run in the third on Paul O’Neill’s RBI single, and Bernie Williams’ two-run homer in the fifth made it 4-3. But Anderson’s clutch two-out, two-run double in the fifth made it 6-3, and the Angels used speed and power to tack on two insurance runs.

Erstad singled, stole second and third, and scored with a daring dash home on Vaughn’s fly to shallow left in the seventh. Glaus, after striking out three times, crushed his 32nd homer in the eighth.

Reliever Mike Fyhrie helped preserve a three-run lead in the seventh when he got Glenallen Hill to fly to right on a bases-loaded, two-out, full-count pitch, and Mark Petkovsek pitched a scoreless eighth and ninth.

Fyhrie, who has played a key role in patching the Angels’ injury plagued bullpen, was placed on the 15-day disabled list because of an inflamed right elbow after the game.