Magical Start for Velarde

Angel second baseman Randy Velarde was looking forward to Wednesday night’s game against the Chicago White Sox like a Little Leaguer in anticipation of opening day.

He didn’t lay out his jersey, pants and stirrup socks on the bed the night before, but he could hardly contain his excitement. “I may sleep in my uniform,” Velarde said Tuesday.

After Wednesday night, he may never want to take it off. Starting his first major league game in almost 20 months, Velarde energized a sagging Angel offense with a home run, a single and three runs to key an 8-3 victory over the White Sox in front of 13,498 in Comiskey Park.

Velarde, who sat out the 1997 season because of elbow reconstruction surgery, also turned a double play in the first inning and made a spectacular diving stop of Ray Durham’s one-hop shot up the middle in the fourth, throwing a tad late to first, but showing he could make a difficult play.

That throw put a little strain on his elbow, and Velarde was eventually replaced by Norberto Martin in the eighth, but that didn’t put a damper on Velarde’s evening. “This was my opening day--I had that same type of anxiety all night [before the game],” Velarde said. “To be out there sweating, getting into the grind of the game was great. It’s tough playing cheerleader out there. I’m not really a rah-rah guy.”

He is a gung-ho type, though, and that may have hurt him this winter. After a year of rehabilitation, Velarde thought he was ready at the start of spring training, but he did too much too soon and suffered another setback that forced him to miss the first six weeks of 1998.

When he came up in the third inning Wednesday night, it was his first major league at-bat since Sept. 27, 1996. Was it worth the wait?

“I won’t touch that,” Velarde said. “It’s just good to be out there. Obviously, I wished it was sooner than later, but when you’re out for a year you have time to sit back, reflect on and appreciate the game, because from one pitch to the next, you don’t know if you’re ever going to play again. I’m deeply grateful that I’m able to go out there again.”

Velarde showed his appreciation in that first at-bat, driving Mike Sirotka’s full-count fastball over the center-field wall for a 417-foot home run to pull the Angels to within 2-1.

“That was awesome,” said shortstop Gary DiSarcina, who singled and scored in the third, laid down a suicide squeeze in the fourth and added a two-run double in the eighth.

“You don’t want to get your hopes up too high because he’s had some setbacks. Then you see that in his first at-bat and you think, ‘God, maybe he is ready.’ It was like he never left.”

Velarde also singled during the Angels’ three-run fourth and walked and scored in the eighth, providing the most productive offense from an Angel second baseman this season. In Velarde’s absence, Martin, Carlos Garcia and Craig Shipley combined to hit .182 (27 for 148) with seven runs batted in.

“He’s going to be a big addition,” said Angel pitcher Allen Watson, who struggled during a 5 1/3-inning, three-run, nine-hit outing but got the victory. “If we get [catcher] Todd Greene back and Randy hits like that? Man, we could score eight or nine runs a game.”

Especially if Cecil Fielder hits the way he did in the fourth inning, when he sent a monstrous home run to the concourse above the left-field bleachers, an estimated 473 feet away.

“That,” Manager Terry Collins said, “was a rocket.”

It was the second-longest home run in the new Comiskey Park’s history, behind White Sox first baseman Dan Pasqua’s 484-foot bomb in 1991. It was also Fielder’s 15th homer in Comiskey, the most by a White Sox opponent.

“It’s been a while since I hit one like that,” Fielder said. “I didn’t get too excited because I’ve hit some long ones. The most important thing was it tied the game [3-3].”

Darin Erstad also hit his team-leading ninth home run in the fifth, and Shigetoshi Hasegawa threw 2 2/3 innings of scoreless relief for the Angels, but this night belonged to Velarde.

“We won a game and I was able to contribute a little bit,” Velarde said. “It was a good day.”