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Garrett Richards aiming to recapture dominant form

TEMPE, Ariz. – They were six across on a line of pitcher’s mounds Monday morning – lefties, righties, big ones, little ones, old and young. Rain was coming: the air heavy with it. The sky was gray. Their work wouldn’t take long, though, not in the last week of February, when pitchers are merely reminding their arms this is what they do.

The Angels' Garrett Richards gets some work in Friday in Tempe, Ariz. (AP)
The Angels' Garrett Richards gets some work in Friday in Tempe, Ariz. (AP)

So they thud-thud-thudded across a 40-pitch reacquainting, 20 fastballs to the arm side, 20 more to the glove side while a pitching coach announced the time they had left. “Four minutes!” he said.

Beyond that, the chatter was generally limited to those who observed from outside the chain-link fence, those being coaches and staff and the plain curious.

“Dang!” Garrett Richards shouted, except it wasn’t exactly “Dang.”

He’d come out of one, and his fastball had drifted high and loose.

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“Keep yer head up,” the catcher, Chris Iannetta, said, meaning literally keep your head up, not the hang-in-there-you’ll-get-it keep your head up.

The next fastball you heard coming, all hissy and mean. Richards had stood tall, come set, brought his stiff black glove to head high, lowered it to beneath his chin, and calmly delivered precisely what Iannetta asked for. It stopped with a crash, as though Iannetta’s mitt was made of a different material than the other catchers’, a tenor snap that turned every head in the place.

“Attaboy,” Iannetta said. “Stay there, G.”

Richards patted his left thigh with his glove, the way he does when he knows it was good. He did that a lot Tuesday morning.

He’s nearly six weeks from opening day. A lot happens over six weeks here. But this is good for the Los Angeles Angels and good for Richards, who only a few minutes before had stood with his arms folded as his teammates stutter-stepped through agility exercises. His left knee, which collapsed six months ago on a Wednesday night in Boston, remains in the final stages of recovery.

His arm, well, that seems good to go.

The idle talk in Angels camp is of the unfinished business of last fall, when they’d won 98 games and then utterly clanked the division series against the Kansas City Royals. It happens. And Garrett Richards would not have saved them, not if they were going to hit a buck-seventy over three games anyway.

But if they’re going to win in the AL West again, and that means holding off the Seattle Mariners, and they’re going to get their postseason do-over, then a lot rests on Richards’ rebuilt knee, his arm and the resumption of a young career that found itself last season.

While the end-to-end numbers – 13-4, 2.61 ERA, 6.6 hits per nine, 0.3 home runs per nine, 1.038 WHIP – were imposing, what Richards had done over his final 15 starts had announced his arrival. From a day in late May when he was knocked around by the Oakland Athletics to the moment he turned to cover first base on the ill-fated play that ended his season, he was 9-2 with a 1.94 ERA and .186 batting average against. At 26, the results had begun to align with one of the harder fastballs in the league – 96.3 mph on average – and a wickedly elusive slider.

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For perhaps the first time, Angels pitching coach Mike Butcher said, “He felt like he belonged. He started to understand last year, ‘Hey, I’m good. Really good.’

“When you’re trying to make your footprint and still trying to learn your delivery, then maybe there’s some doubt in there. You can call it maturing, you can call it what you want. But, there was no doubt in his mind when he threw a pitch it was the right pitch. Last year, he caught up to his stuff. He became who he’s going to be.”

Richards injured his knee against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Aug. 20, 2014. (AP)
Richards injured his knee against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Aug. 20, 2014. (AP)

By mid-summer, Butcher said, he’d get halfway to the mound when Richards was in a jam, only to see Richards holding off a half-smile.

“All right,” Richards would say, “I already know what you’re going to say.”

Butcher would laugh.

“Good,” he’d say. “Then do it.”

The zeroes kept coming. Richards was pitching deeper into games, and becoming better in them. And then one night the crowd went silent and Albert Pujols was bent over him and his season was over, just like that.

He spent the winter here, rehabilitating. On the weekends he’d watch football. Then he was back to rehab, pointing toward opening day, gaining an inch or two on that every morning. By Tuesday morning, he was on a mound for the third time of spring, and a few of the old-timers hanging on the chain-link shook their heads. Yeah, he’s bringin’ it already.

“”It’s coming along,” Richards said. “I invested a lot of time this offseason to get it better. The goal was always opening day. It’s going to be close.”

He thinks about keeping it simple, the way he did on the mound last summer, and counting the steps along the way, staying in the moment, the way he did on the mound last summer, the summer he caught up to his stuff. Now, healing, eager, and getting strong again, there was only a little more to consider.

Like keeping his head up.

Garrett Richards 2014 ERA and Runs Allowed | FindTheBest

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