ANAHEIM
Chone Figgins felt like a bystander about to watch a train wreck.
“I knew that wasn’t going to go well,” he said of the seventh-inning mound meeting between Angels starter John Lackey and manager Mike Scioscia in Thursday’s Game 5.
With two outs and the bases loaded, Lackey was trying to squirm his way out of the inning with as much of the Angels’ 4-0 lead intact as possible. But Scioscia came to get him, deciding the left-handed Darren Oliver would have a better matchup against switch-hitting Mark Teixeira.
“I obviously didn’t agree with the decision,” Lackey said. “I thought I had a lot left.
“I felt I got to a point in the game where I should have been able to determine it. It was frustrating.”
That was clear to a national audience of amateur lip-readers. FOX’s cameras clearly caught Lackey objecting to Scioscia’s decision.
“This is mine, Sosh. This is mine,” Lackey appeared to be saying quite forcefully. “Are you (kidding) me? This is mine.”
Things had begun to unravel for Lackey three batters earlier when a 3-and-2 fastball to Jorge Posada was ruled a ball by home-plate umpire Fieldin Culbreth, putting two runners on with one out for the Yankees. Lackey reacted angrily to the call, objecting demonstratively enough to draw Culbreth out to the mound for a rebuke.
“He didn’t like the way I reacted,” Lackey said. “I just told him, ‘That’s kind of a big pitch there.’”
Scioscia might not have liked the way Lackey reacted either. There were times in the past when Lackey’s emotions got the better of him and he followed the questionable call by walking Derek Jeter on four pitches.
“It’s been awhile,” Lackey said of his propensity to lose his composure as a young pitcher. “We’ve been over that for awhile.”
Scioscia would not say that was a factor in his decision to pull Lackey, citing the taxing nature of going through the Yankees’ dangerous lineup and his desire to get a better matchup with Teixeira batting right-handed.
“I don’t think it was about his focus,” Scioscia said. “But to get to that point in the game, facing those hitters as dangerous as they are where if you make one mistake the game can be tied, I just thought it would be better to turn Tex around.
“I have a lot of confidence in John. He might have had enough to get in there and get Tex out. But I thought to turn him around at that point was the move. Obviously, it didn’t work.”
Teixeira drove in three runs with a double off left-handed reliever Darren Oliver, part of a six-run inning for the Yankees that the Angels overcame with their own rally.
Wow. I bet some of you never thought it would end this way.
offseason moves clearly indicated a changing of the guard atop the AL West (just ask PECOTA).
