By John Klima
January 14, 2009

The Angels didn’t get the $160 million left-handed pitcher and they didn’t get the $180 million first baseman. For substantially less money for a longer period of time, they extended Manager Mike Scioscia, who if he remains with the club when his reported contract expires in 2018, might turn out to be the best managerial acquisition in baseball history.

Among other things, Scioscia is former General Manager Bill Stoneman’s greatest legacy. Signed after two seasons as a major league coach and one year as the Dodgers Triple-A manager, Scioscia transformed the Angels from hapless losers to a franchise that hates losing.

Scioscia is a victory for old school baseball thinking. He goes with his gut and sometimes gets criticized, but his hunches are based in baseball logic. You will not find a better game runner. He does things the media doesn’t know enough to write about.

A case in point is how he nursed Francisco Rodriguez through a tense playoff inning at Fenway Park. Scioscia had a closer without a stinger and he got away with it. I could have written the entire game story around that sequence, because it’s not just calling pitches. It’s calling pitches based on the hitter’s adjustments off each pitch and the offensive guessing game of the runners. It’s judging the quality of each pitch. It’s intellectually fighting the other manager and subtly shading the defense. Scioscia is not running a game by looking in his binder.

What he does, really, should be called forensic baseball. He computes several variables from pitch to pitch, looking ahead and looking back. You can’t spell Scioscia without CSI.

Throw out your stats and your spray charts when it is intellect between the lines. Scioscia is beating other managers by thinking two or three steps ahead. I’m not talking two or three hitters.

I’m talking two or three innings ahead.

Spare me the arguments that I am over assessing Scioscia because the Angels have recently failed to win the AL pennant. They have lost in the recent playoff past because a catcher wasn’t quick enough to apply common sense or a tag on strike three. They lost because a slugger ran the bases poorly or an infielder failed to put a bunt down. They lost because the closer had nothing left.

The Angels have partly been defeated because the players have gotten away from what got them there. What got them there was Scioscia commanding the game. He knows how to maintain power without being a complete dictator, though I’ve heard my share of beat writers bitch about him. The players who complain aren’t there long enough to matter.

He likes to hide his signs, but you have to understand, it’s not personal. In his mind, he’s simply shielding his thoughts with his glove hand.

You cannot teach someone how to run a major league game at such a sophisticated level. You can’t even say it’s simply because he was a player, because I have known some dumb catchers.

This is a gift, and he has it in greater abundance than his mentor, Tom Lasorda.

Scioscia’s secondary skill is people based. Scioscia owns his room, but he won’t big league people the way Lasorda can. Now, I’ve seen Scioscia wrap his fingers around his fungo bat when he’s sick of stupid questions, but he’s not going to become Billy Martin any time soon. It’s going on a decade and I still haven’t seen a meal spread tossed. And if it has been, it was cleaned up before anyone outside the room knew it.

Like Martin, Scioscia loves small ball and the contact play, daring squeeze bunts and loves to make the other team try to beat him by playing basic baseball. Sometimes he gets ripped in the media and questioned, but the fact is that his baseball mind is vastly superior and faster than anyone who covers him upstairs. There have been times when I’ve felt I could write essays about what he does and why. Looks like I just did, and I didn’t even go from first to third.