McCaskill Rounds Back Into Form

ANAHEIM — His fastball, Kirk McCaskill said, was probably as good Saturday night as it has been in his career.

“Honestly,” he said. “But let’s not blow this out of proportion.”

The fastball isn’t McCaskill’s game, as he will be first to say. Even at its best, he said, it rarely hits 90 m.p.h.

McCaskill’s game is location and movement, and he had both Saturday night.

That proved the key to his victory over Toronto at Anaheim Stadium, a combined 5-0 shutout in which McCaskill gave up four hits in seven innings for his second consecutive victory.

McCaskill hadn’t won two in a row since late in 1990, as he gutted out the final months of a season that would lead to elbow surgery in October.

For the pain he endured, and for what he did in spite of it--12 victories and a 3.25 earned-run average despite the pain caused by loose pieces in his elbow--McCaskill deserved to breeze through this season.

The ordeal out of the way, he began confidently. But after winning two of his three starts, he quickly found himself with four consecutive losses, and speculation aplenty.

With Saturday’s victory, a game in which he struck out a season-high six and allowed only one runner as far as third, he erased the worries.

“Mac’s really thrown well,” Rader said. “It looks like he’s over--like we’re over--our scare. He was already over it. It sure is good to see.”

It wasn’t bad for McCaskill to see either.

“I was bewildered myself,” he said. “I hadn’t had a streak like that in my career. Right now I’m happy I’ve bounced back.”

One of the more worrisome trends of earlier outings was his tendency to give up home runs: eight of them after giving up only nine all last season.

Nobody came close to getting one out on him Saturday.

McCaskill’s mastery was to the detriment of the Blue Jays’ pitcher, Todd Stottlemyre, who took his first loss.

Stottlemyre had begun this season with a 5-0 record and a 2.82 ERA the season after going 13-17 with a 4.34 ERA.

“I would like to win them all, no doubt about it, and I’m going to try to win the rest of them,” Stottlemyre said. “But I ain’t going to hang my head because I got beat, 3-0 (the score when he left the game). The guy over there pitched good. He outpitched me tonight.”

McCaskill knows a baseball career sometimes amounts to a series of obstacles. To get to the other side of them is to succeed.

“My trademark in baseball has been these roadblocks come up, and I get around them,” he said.