Angel rookie proves to be simply 'unfazable'

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- A game ends 11-10 and most of the time, nobody on either side wants to talk about the pitchers.

Nobody on either side, though, could stop talking about the kid.

"Is unfazable a word?" Angels reliever Ben Weber asked. "Because if it isn't, it ought to be."

"How good can he be?" Giants shortstop Rich Aurilia said. "I can't tell. I only saw three pitches."

Francisco Rodriguez is three months shy of his 21st birthday, but Sunday night he played baseball like a man-and-a-half.

Anaheim manager Mike Scioscia turned to his rookie reliever to start the sixth inning in a game his team trailed 9-8 and couldn't afford to lose. The kid from Venezuela is so cool afterward, you wonder whether unfazable might not be worming its way already into some dictionary, somewhere.

"I'm not going to say for me it's easy, because there are tough situations. But they bring me in to try to keep the score the same," Rodriguez said through an interpreter.

As job descriptions go, that's like Shaq saying he's paid to grab rebounds, or Ray Lewis saying he's paid to make tackles. It isn't just the success that makes them stand out; it's the way they dominate while going about their business.

Blink and you could have missed Rodriguez's first World Series appearance. It totaled three perfect innings and maybe the same number of minutes.

Nothing but strikes

In the sixth, he struck out Aurilia and Jeff Kent on three pitches each, then used only one to get Barry Bonds to ground out to first. In the seventh, he needed just three to punch out Benito Santiago, and two more to put J.T. Snow in an 0-2 hole.

For those keeping count, that's a dozen strikes in as many pitches. He finally missed on a pitch to Snow, but quickly got him to roll out to first. Then he rung up Reggie Sanders to make it four strikeout victims in six batters.

"We've been hearing he had good stuff," San Francisco manager Dusty Baker said, "but that was the first time we really saw him in person."

Rodriguez has been in the major leagues all of five weeks and now, with five wins since these playoffs began, he's tied with Arizona's Randy Johnson as the winningest pitcher in one postseason. But it's even more of a kid-comes-out-of-nowhere story than that.

Rodriguez was a star pupil at the Graciano Ravelo Baseball School in the Caracas slum of El Valle, playing the game on a series of dusty diamonds in the shadows of towering apartment buildings and hillside shanties. He couldn't afford the $7 monthly school fee, but Ravelo knew a good investment when he saw it. He let Rodriguez play, anyway.

Precocious as his talent seemed back then, he was still a minor leaguer as recently as September. A year ago, he was watching Johnson and the Arizona Diamondbacks on TV back in Venezuela.

"I told my mom, 'Hey, one of these days, I'm going to be there.' So it's kind of like a dream come true," Rodriguez said.

But there was nothing dreamlike about the situation he stepped into Sunday night. Angels fans were banging their Thunder Stix together, the fake geyser and fireworks exploded periodically from what looks like a prehistoric rock formation beyond center field, and the San Francisco bats were threatening to make even more racket.

Until Rodriguez stepped in, that is.

"I was focused, trying to keep the ball down and get ahead in the count," he said. "Then I go right after the guy with my fastball and try to put them away with my breaking ball."

That description doesn't begin to do his performance justice. Rodriguez's teammates keep insisting you have to stand up at the plate to begin to appreciate how nasty his breaking stuff, especially the slider, can be. After a few of them had the dubious honor, there was no dissent in San Francisco's clubhouse.

"I know he's 20," said Shawon Dunston, who popped out in his only at-bat against Rodriguez, "but he doesn't act like it."

"He's got that doughboy arm right now," Kent said. "Kids like that wear out in their 30s."

At first, it was hard to tell whether the former NL MVP thought that was a good thing; whether he dreaded facing the kid for another decade, possibly, or was taking comfort in the thought that it wouldn't extend much further than that.

Or maybe he was just steeling himself for the three-game set that opens tonight when the series shifts to San Francisco and Pac Bell Park.

Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated Press.