ANAHEIM -- Ervin Santana was pitching the game of his young life, and doing it against a Red Sox lineup that ranks as the most daunting in all of baseball. A beautiful start, to be sure, but it was just a start.

When he walked off the mound at Angel Stadium to a standing ovation, there was more work to be done.

Cue the Angels bullpen.

Ordinarily, this also would be a cue to the guy who flips the switch to light up the halo on the Big A outside Angel Stadium. As soon as the bullpen door flies open, that guy has been poised these last few years to make that light shine, signifying an Angels win.

Lately, however, there's been a short circuit on that switch.

What used to be automatic became an adventure for a few weeks, and a dark halo topped the Big A more often than it should.

Maybe Saturday was the day that all turned around, maybe not. In any event, the halo was shining on Saturday night after the bullpen secured an Angels victory in the afternoon.

Once Santana relinquished the mound, setup man Scot Shields gave up a hit, but got the final out in the eighth before closer Francisco Rodriguez finished out the ninth for the save to preserve a 4-2 win for the Angels and their young starter.

As much as the 22-year-old Santana's outing turned heads, and rightfully so, those last four outs might have been just as big for the Angels in the long run, because the bullpen got back to the business of getting it done in a big-game situation.

Not that Angels manager Mike Scioscia ever had any doubt.

"There's no loss in confidence with anything we're looking for from Scot or Frankie or any of those guys," Scioscia says.

For his part, Rodriguez feels like a mechanical adjustment has done the trick and he's back to being himself on the mound. His 28th save was the result.

"I think I'm back on track," Rodriguez said. "The only way I can prove that to everybody is to keep getting people out."

K-Rod got his three outs on Saturday. And Shields, despite allowing a shutout-breaking single to his first batter, got the big out he needed in the eighth, striking out David Ortiz with a breaking ball.

"I feel like I'm getting back to my old self," Shields said.

Now, you can talk about Rodriguez's mechanics all you want and you can fret about how maybe some fatigue from Shields' 61 appearances had him drifting up in the zone recently. Those are factors in the summer slide, granted.

But getting the Angels' relievers feeling like themselves again mentally is the biggest piece of good news the club could receive about now.

"Mental makeup with late-inning relievers is as important as the physical stuff," Scioscia says.

Shields said a collective deep breath the boys in the bullpen took during batting practice in Seattle following some late-game weirdness in Oakland definitely helped in that regard.

They gathered as a group, talked as a group, laughed as a group and looked ahead to better things as a group.

"That might have been our way of saying, 'Hey, it's not the end of the world. Let's turn the page and move on from here,' " Shields said.

Honestly, that page had gotten awfully heavy with each baffling blowup the Angels faced these last few weeks.

Brendan Donnelly, who's a huge part of the late-game troika with Shields and Rodriguez, had a couple of strange plays in Seattle and has three blown saves in his last five outings. Amid his overall struggles, Rodriguez had his game-ending muff in Oakland, where Shields hit the backstop on the fly with one run-scoring wild pitch the night before.

In their first year without veteran leader and mentor Troy Percival, they've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt these last two or three weeks that they're human, at times giving a little more evidence than necessary. But there aren't many late-innings crews you'd rather see out there to finish out games.

They're live arms with nasty stuff, and they've been there before. Those are qualities that don't go away.

This is a group in which Scioscia retains supreme confidence, as any other manager would with these arms and minds.

"I'm still confident they're going to be an exclamation point for what we need to do," Scioscia said.

After a few weeks of question marks, perhaps Saturday's imperfect yet effective ending put the punctuation mark back where it belongs.

And maybe now the guy with his finger on the halo switch can go ahead and get comfortable again in the late innings.