He fired the first strike of the offseason, with the final out of the World Series still echoing, a most impressive fastball from a former college pitcher whose velocity peaked at 88 mph.
Then Billy Eppler delivered one, two, three more strikes, right in a row, in the span of barely a week, satisfying two obvious needs and acquiring a player who brought more sizzle to the Angels than even Mike Trout.
Suddenly, a team that at times has produced mostly indifferent shrugs in its own market had baseball as a whole buzzing.
Eppler, the Angels' general manager, did all of this in a winter that will be remembered for its lack of player movement, a lull deemed so flagrant that a grievance was filed and an entire class of free agents decried baseball's lagging pace of pay.