josh beckett

BOSTON - The ace right-hander who could face the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim twice in the Division Series is a better, craftier pitcher than he was in 2003.

The fire in Josh Beckett, however, remains uncompromised.

"He's got very lofty goals in this game," said Boston Red Sox manager Terry Francona, who gave Beckett the ball last night in Game 1 at Fenway Park, and will do so again on Monday, if the series goes to Game 4 in Anaheim.

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"He wants to be good for a long time," Francona said. "He's a monster in his workout routine. When young pitchers come in here, like Clay Buchholz, we point to Josh and say, follow him."

Beckett, who was Florida's World Series MVP in 2003, said he admires Curt Schilling.

"Absolutely. Look at what he did in 2004, and 2001," said Beckett, 27, referring to Schilling's World Series titles with Boston and Arizona.

"He's had an unbelievable career, and several good Octobers, but am I trying to be the next Curt Schilling? No. I'm trying to be Josh Beckett, going out and doing what I do best.

"As I get older, I'm still learning. I don't think anyone ever considers the learning process over in this game."

In 2003, Beckett's Series-clinching 2-0 win over New York at Yankee Stadium stamped him as fearless. That quality didn't always help him last year, his first in Boston.

After a hot start, Beckett finished 16-11 with a 5.01 ERA. After surrendering only 39 homers over 78 starts for Florida from 2003-05, he coughed up 36 in 33 starts last year.

He relied relentlessly on his fastball in key spots, an approach considered much more suited for the National League. Beckett even referred to his own "stupidness," but Francona doesn't agree.

"He's always been a good listener," the manager said. "We were asking him to do things he wasn't physically capable of doing."

To Francona's thinking, throwing an assortment of breaking pitches was too demanding on a pitcher dogged by injuries throughout his career. But Beckett's two seasons in Boston have been relatively injury-free.

He was 20-7 this year, the only 20-win season in the majors over the past two seasons. His 3.27 ERA was sixth in the AL, and he allowed only 17 home runs, less than half his 2006 total.

"I think you certainly learn a lot through failure, and also through succeeding," Beckett said.

BOSTON -- The last time Josh Beckett was on the mound in a postseason game, he pitched a shutout against the New York Yankees to give the Florida Marlins a World Series championship.

It turns out some habits die hard. Because Wednesday, in a different uniform on a different mound in a different league, Beckett picked up right where he left off, pitching the Boston Red Sox to a 4-0 win over the Angels in Game 1 of the American League division series.

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And the one guy who played behind him in both games said they looked the same to him.

"This was pretty dominating," Boston third baseman Mike Lowell said. "He had all his pitches. Was very composed. Was hitting his spots. Great velocity.

"He's a guy who wants the ball in that situation. And he expects himself to do well."

Here's how well Beckett did Wednesday: He threw first-pitch strikes to 25 of the 31 batters he faced, gave up only four hits -- two of which deflected off infielders' gloves -- did not walk a hitter and threw nearly 80% of his 108 pitches over the plate.

Only five of the 27 outs the right-hander got came on fly balls to the outfield and right fielder J.D. Drew didn't touch the ball all night.

If any of that surprised anybody, however, don't count Beckett among them.

"The thing that helps him out most is he goes out there and he thinks he should beat every hitter and should pitch nine innings," said Kevin Youkilis, whose first-inning home run gave Beckett all the support he would need. "If a guy gets a hit, he says how bad he did or something."

In that case Beckett was pretty quiet through most of Wednesday's game. Between Chone Figgins' leadoff single in the first and Vladimir Guerrero's one-out single in the seventh, he set down 19 consecutive hitters, matching the third-longest streak in postseason history.

If Beckett was pleased by his effort, however, he wasn't showing it at his postgame news conference, barely managing a wry smile.

"You go out there and you find out what kind of pitcher you are that day and you just go from there. Just exploiting hitters' weaknesses. [It] ends up snowballing and every inning you end up with a quicker inning because they know you're throwing strikes and they're up there swinging," said Beckett, the first pitcher to throw a playoff shutout since 2004 and the first to throw shutouts in back-to-back postseason starts since teammate Curt Schilling did it with Arizona in 2001.

Oh, and about that back-to-back shutout thing. Beckett disagrees with Lowell, saying the only similarity between the two games is the other team's score.

"They're similar because of the results. I don't think really anything else is similar," he said. "I got a lot of ground balls tonight. I got a lot of fly balls that night [against the Yankees]."

There was one other similarity, though. As good as both games were, neither was flawless. Which means Beckett could be even better if the Angels face him again next week.

"He misfired. He was human," his catcher, Jason Varitek, said. "But when it came down to it, he made pitches."

And that proved more than enough for Boston Manager Terry Francona.

"That," he said of Beckett, "was a great performance."

The Angels' young lineup hadn't seen anything like Josh Beckett before, but to win this Division Series it will have to deal with him again.
MARK WHICKER
Register columnist
mwhicker@ocregister.com BOSTON - Dino Ebel is the Angels' third-base coach. Before Game 1 he took a vigilant look at Fenway Park's left-field wall.

He talked about Boston's Manny Ramirez, and how he likes to deke and deceive, pretending he'll catch a fly before he wheels to pluck the carom and fire to shortstop Julio Lugo.

"From there, Lugo has a really short throw," Ebel said. "It took me a while to get used to all that. We have guys who can run, and we're going to let them run, but in this place you have to be careful."

Then the game started, and Josh Beckett started, and Ebel could have been a human windmill. He could have stood with a sign that read "Speed Limit 75."

For the nine innings Ebel stood in the coaching box, he saw one Angel ― Chone Figgins in the third inning. From then on Beckett was a human barricade, the guy who can creep into your off-night dreams, the guy who can dominate a playoff series, even in absentia.

Which is the other thing Ebel said, two hours beforehand:

"We've got to get on base first."

The Angels didn't. Four singles. No walks. Figgins bounced a leadoff base hit off Dustin Pedroia's glove and into centerfield, and Beckett overwhelmed the next 19 Angels hitters. Against fifteen in succession, he got strike one.

The Red Sox won, 4-0, and Beckett turned himself into the only player on the field. Which was good news for John Lackey, who got pasted for four runs and eight hits in the first three innings.

Because the Angels' silence was so deafening, Lackey could be forgotten, indeed dismissed. He and everyone else was a bystander Wednesday.

"He threw strikes with everything he had," Casey Kotchman said. "It wasn't just that he got strike one on us. It was strike one, strike two."

What's amazing is that Beckett has been better in hotter playoff fires.

When he was a Florida rookie in 2003, he stood in the middle of Yankee Stadium and stuck out his tongue. He won World Series Game 7, 2-0, on a five-hitter.

When the Marlins trailed the Cubs, 3-1, in the NLCS, Beckett threw a two-hit shutout with 11 strikeouts and opened each of the first six innings with strikeouts.

And where were most of these Angels then?

Kotchman was rehabbing after a 57-game season at Rancho Cucamonga. Mike Napoli was his teammate. Reggie Willits and Howie Kendrick were finishing up Rookie League season at Provo. Maicer Izturis was working his way up the Cleveland chain, at Akron and Buffalo.

Izturis, Kotchman, Kendrick, Napoli and Willits batted 5-6-7-8-9 against Beckett here. They went 1 for 15 with four strikeouts.

Forgive them. They were here for flying lessons and somehow wound up in a weightless chamber.

"He was different each time I faced him tonight," Willits said. "First time, he was throwing that two-seam fastball, and I got some foul balls and finally got a pitch to hit and didn't really get it (flyball to left).

"Next time he was throwing a cutter and a changeup, and then he went with curveballs (for strikeouts both times). He's got that 12 to 6 curveball and sometimes it goes into the dirt and sometimes it stops there for a strike. I don't think it happens very often, when a guy has everything working. He made it hard for us to get into our game."

Maybe Gary Matthews Jr., who's sitting out with knee tendinitis, and Juan Rivera and Kendry Morales and some older hands could have done more. Probably not. Vladimir Guerrero had two hard singles, and Kendrick dribbled one through the shortstop hole, and Napoli got robbed by third baseman Mike Lowell.

"He misfired some," Boston catcher Jason Varitek said. "He was human, really. He settled down as it went along."

Now the Angels gather all their strength and adrenalin for....another day off.

"I'm going to be honest, this is a weird setup," Mike Scioscia said.

They'll work out. They'll hang around the hotel. They'll dine. They'll douse the TV and ignore the paper. Beckett's most damaging act was to get it over with in 2:27, which meant almost 48 hours yawned in front of the Angels before Game 2.

"Yeah, that's hard to do, pitch one that fast when you've got a 2:55 (commercial) break between innings," Varitek said.

Beckett, for his part, said he feared the Angels would play pepper with the spectators, as they often do, and swell his pitch count early. "I didn't want to get wrapped up in strikeouts," he said. Instead, he got through it with 108 pitches.

The Angels settled for such bite-sized victories as Ervin Santana's 6 up, 6 down relief. They'll need something more substantive. Beckett is pitching Game 4. To win this series, the Angels will have to beat him. Don't tell the new guys, the ones Beckett hazed Wednesday, but he's been better. Josh Beckett insisted earlier this week he doesn't ever worry about his place in baseball history.

Hey, if I could pitch like him, I wouldn't worry, either.

Beckett, the favorite along with Cleveland's C.C. Sabathia to win the American League Cy Young Award, completely grasped the magnitude of the opening game of the Division Series last night against Los Angeles.

His baseball team, as it has all season, was counting on him to establish himself as not only the ace of the staff, but the ace of the series.

Consider it done. Beckett crafted a four-hit shutout masterpiece last night at Fenway Park. He squared up against Los Angeles's top hurler, John Lackey, who posted the lowest regular-season ERA (3.01) in the AL, and showed him how you establish the tone in a short series.

With heat. With consistency. With domination. And, perhaps, most notably, with absolute locked-in concentration.

He was Roger Clemens, circa 1986. He was Pedro Martínez, circa 1999. He was all but untouchable, and because of him, the Angels went quietly into the night as 4-0 losers who were wondering how anyone can possibly pitch any better.

After Beckett relinquished a single up the middle to Chone Figgins to start the game, he retired an astounding 19 consecutive batters. None were even close to fashioning a hit during that stretch. Not Vlad Guerrero, one of the most frightening hitters in baseball, who grounded out twice and finally slapped a single to left to break Beckett's string in the seventh. To be fair, Guerrero is battling a triceps injury, but what excuse can the rest of his teammates fall back on?

Let us examine the anatomy of the 19 straight retired batters: Ground ball, ground ball, strikeout. Ground ball, ground ball, short fly to center field. Ground ball, short fly to left field, strikeout. Strikeout, ground ball, strikeout. Pop out in the infield, strikeout, ground ball. Strikeout, strikeout, a fly ball to center field. Ground ball.

That is evidence of Beckett's command. The only ball that could have been characterized as "well-hit" was Figgins's liner to center in the sixth.

But here's what you know heartened pitching coach John Farrell, manager Terry Francona, and general manager Theo Epstein: He caught Orlando Cabrera swinging with a fastball in the fourth, but two batters later, he punched out Garret Anderson on a nasty changeup. The curveball was working, too, and that's the most dramatic difference from 2006 to now - Beckett is utilizing his complete repertoire.

After striking out Kendry Morales to end the eighth, Beckett pumped his fist and sprinted off the mound. It looked as though he was done for the night, but to the delight of the 37,597 in attendance, his manager allowed him to skip back out to the mound in the ninth. Francona inserted Jacoby Ellsbury in left for Manny Ramírez, and the kid made a nice diving catch of Figgins's sinking liner to start the inning. After Beckett induced yet another ground ball out to erase Cabrera, the crowd rose to its feet in anticipation of a shutout. They had to wait one more batter, as Guerrero knocked out another single. But, when Anderson flied to center, it clinched Beckett's third postseason shutout in his last four postseason games.

He finished with eight strikeouts and didn't allow a walk.

Farrell prefers not to discuss last year for obvious reasons: He was Cleveland's director of player development at the time, and any opinions he may have had on Josh Beckett were from afar, and not based on intimate knowledge.

But certainly he could look at the numbers as well as any one of us. This remarkable young pitcher, with so much swagger and so much ability, clearly ran into his share of thorny wickets, a number of which were attributed to his inherent stubbornness. When Beckett got into trouble in 2006, he reared back and threw his fastball - often over the objections of catcher Jason Varitek.

Opposing hitters knew it, so they sat back, forced him to exhibit some control, and, when he didn't, they waited on his heater.

Good luck following that strategy now.

This isn't 2006, when Beckett surrendered a gaudy 36 home runs, twice as many as any of his previous campaigns, which, not incidentally, were all in the National League.

When Farrell came aboard, he preached patience, and insisted Beckett fine tune the command of his other pitches.

And, what he discovered as he became better acquainted with the ace of his staff is that beneath the cool demeanor, the seemingly 20-something "whatever" public persona, there was a young athlete who cares deeply about his legacy.

When you are the MVP of the World Series at the tender age of 23, as Beckett was for the Florida Marlins in 2003, it would be easy to assume your place in history is already established. But, Farrell has revealed in recent weeks, Beckett wants to be considered one of those Boston pitchers for the ages, like Clemens and Pedro before him.

He is certainly off to a marvelous start.