Jered Weaver is not the first to recognize the fact, and he won't be the last. But he is one of the latest illustrations that baseball can be a strange and frustrating game.

In his four starts prior to Friday's outing with the Detroit Tigers, Weaver had allowed six earned runs in 26 innings. For his troubles, he was 0-2 with a pair of no-decisions.

Friday against the Tigers, he gave up six earned runs in 513 innings — and picked up his first win since July 16, improving to 7-5 as the Angels beat the Tigers 11-6.

Weaver saw the first five Tigers reach base, and might have been down 6-0 in the first inning if not for a catch by Gary Matthews Jr. that may have robbed Craig Monroe of a grand slam. But that catch kept the game at 2-0, the Angels scored six runs in their half of the first — their biggest first inning since 1999 — and the Angels were on their way to victory.

"I felt great in the bullpen," said Weaver. "Everything felt good. It was just one of those times when you feel good in the bullpen and then you go out in the game, and it's like, What happened?' ...

"Sometimes you won't feel good in the bullpen and come out and throw a great game, and other times, you feel good and don't do as well as you'd like to in your outing. It's just one of those funny things of baseball, I guess."

Still, he said, there was nothing funny about the feeling that came with battling into the sixth inning to get a win against a team responsible for his shortest major league outing earlier this season. On April 23, he went just 123 innings against Detroit, allowing seven runs (five earned).

"It's very satisfying," he said. "Going up against a lineup like this, you know you're in for a tough day of work. ... They've had my number. It's like anything I throw up there, they're either on it or taking it. I'll just have to make some adjustments for the next time I face them."

Manager Mike Scioscia felt that after the rough start, Weaver "got into a little bit of a nice rhythm. I thought he hit spots well and used his breaking ball. But that's a team that's not very forgiving if you make mistakes. ... Even though his linescore didn't look great, he did make some pitches."

Added third baseman Chone Figgins, "They were obviously scoring a couple of runs off him, but he kept fighting and kept us in the ballgame."

A hot bat, again: Figgins, who had four hits in that game, remained one of the Angels' few consistent bats during a recent offensive downturn which ended, fairly emphatically, as the team scored 34 runs in the three-game series with Detroit. Before that, the team had scored three runs or less in 13 of 24 games.

"We keep waiting for some guys to turn the corner," said Scioscia after the series opener, "and it's almost like Figgy is out in front saying, Hey, follow me.' He has not missed a beat — had a little soft spell 10 days ago, but he's re-emerged in his game."

Figgins started July by going 5 for 35, but since has hit in 13 of 14 games going into Monday night's game in Seattle, batting .509 (27 of 53) to raise his season average to .341.

Figgins — who has attributed his recovery from a .156 start to "finding holes" when he wasn't before — had a similar view of the recent team inconsistency at the plate.

"Our guys are swinging the bat fine," he said after Friday's game. "Sometimes pitchers are going to make good pitches and you're not going to score runs. It has nothing to do with the offense struggling. They just don't find any holes."

By the conclusion of the Detroit series — which saw the Angels pound out 13 hits in each game — no one was questioning the way the team was swinging the bats.

Productive: The 39-run weekend against the Tigers marked the first time the Angels had scored 10 or more runs since the All-Star break, and gave them 10 games with 10 or more runs this season.

The only other time they'd had back-to-back 10-run games were June 17 (a 10-4 win over the Dodgers) and June 18 (a 10-9 win against Houston.) It was only the second time in club history they'd scored 10 or more runs in three straight games, and the first time they'd done it in a single series.

— David Lassen's baseball notebook appears Tuesdays.