MINNEAPOLIS -- All right. You're a major league hitter in the playoffs. Your team has battled back from a six-run deficit to make it 6-3 in the eighth inning with two outs and runners at the corners. You're the potential tying run. A stadium-record crowd of 55,990 (including the nation's most famous governor/wrestler) is screaming at the top of its lungs.

And in comes Troy Percival, an eight-year veteran who has never allowed so much as an earned run against your team. A closer who throws gas that consistently reaches 97 and 98 miles per hour. A man who needs prescription eyeglasses but refuses to wear them on the field. A man who has to squint just to see the catcher.

Rodriguez has a great future. He also has an advantage over his fellow relievers. He can see. The rest of the relievers are blind as bats. Ben Weber wears goggles, Percival squints and Donnelly wears glasses.

OK, then. Get up there. Screw that helmet on tight. Stay loose. And oh, yes. Better check your underwear.

"Oh, man, it has to be intimidating," Anaheim shortstop David Eckstein said after the Angels evened the ALCS with their 6-3 win in Game 2 Wednesday. "Percy's eyesight is not the best and to stand up there and seeing him squint like that? Especially when he lets one go back to the screen? That has to be scary. And remember, the first pitch he ever made in the postseason, he fires one in and hits Alfonso Soriano right in the back. You see that and there's no way you can dig in after that.

"I'm glad I don't have to bat against him."

"I think I have the worst eyesight in the league," Percival said after closing out the victory. "I have glasses but I won't pitch in them. I can still see the catcher's signs if I squint."

Percival doesn't need to see them very often. He usually just throws gas, with an occasional offspeed pitch thrown in to embarrass a hitter. Almost every pitch he threw Wednesday night was 95 miles or more. He pitched to four hitters and struck out three, including pinch-hitter Bobby Kielty on an 86-mph pitch he called a changeup to end Minnesota's threat in the eighth inning.

"It's not fun," Minnesota's Denny Hocking said. "You know he's going to just throw gas, and then when you look for that, he slips in that pitch that cuts in on you."

Percival rarely pitches in the eighth inning but he did so for the second time this postseason Wednesday and had no problem in the ninth inning. If he can do that consistently this series, he will be even more imposing. And his is just the final arm in a bullpen that led the league in ERA and compelling biographies.

There's also Brendan Donnelly, who bailed starter Ramon Ortiz out of a jam in the sixth inning. He's a 31-year-old rookie who has played for nine organizations, including two independent minor-league teams. He's been released six times, including 1999 after the Devil Rays asked Donnelly to go to Double-A to clear room for the most famous former high school chemistry teacher in baseball history, Jim Morris.

"That's when I asked them to give me a release," Donnelly said. "I knew if they weren't going to use me on that team, they would never use me.

"But Jim's a great story. The only difference between the two of us is he was out of baseball for 10 years and I was in the minors for 10 years."

	Percival

	Donnelly

Life in the minors is not easy. To make ends meet, Donnelly has worked a wide variety of offseason jobs, paying the bills by digging ditches ("I dug a mean ditch") and exterminating pests. "I developed some phobias," he said. "Black widows were the worst."

Donnelly began the year at Triple-A Salt Lake before the Angels called him up and watched him hold opponents to a .184 average in 46 games. And now after 10 minor-league seasons and nine clubs, here he is in the postseason, though he and his wife, Rhonda, have moved so often that they still have all their mail delivered to her parents. "Basically, I don't have an address right now," he says.

But before you fall in love with Donnelly's story, consider the reliever who replaced him Wednesday, 20-year-old rookie Francisco Rodriguez. He grew up so poor in Venezuela that he says he didn't receive his first glove until his fourth year playing baseball as a kid. His parents separated when he was a few months old and he was raised by his grandmother. He has 13 siblings. He says he doesn't think his birth parents even know he's in the majors. "They didn't care about me and I don't care about them."

Of course, not many people could identify Rodriguez as a major leaguer before last week. The Angels didn't call him up until mid-September and he only pitched 5.2 innings. He's pitched more than that in the postseason, winning two games against the Yankees -- the first wins of his big-league career (how cool would that be?) -- and throwing 1.2 scoreless innings Wednesday. He's fanned eight batters in the postseason and is so confident and relaxed, he looks like he's been doing this October thing for 40 years.

"Do I look like I get nervous? Nah," he said. "I just go out there and have fun."

Rodriguez has a great future. He also has an advantage over his fellow relievers. He can see. The rest of the relievers are blind as bats. Ben Weber wears goggles, Percival squints and Donnelly wears glasses. "I got them after I crossed up the catcher one night and broke the umpire's hand with a pitch because I didn't see the signs right," Donnelly said. "The next day the ump showed up with a cast and I showed up with glasses."

Percival, however, holds out against glasses, though he denies he does so for intimidation purposes. "People always say that, but if it really intimidated people, there would be a lot more pitchers out there squinting," he said.

Well, maybe. But even the mascot wears a helmet when he's on the mound.

"It's a challenge," Minnesota manager Ron Gardenhire said of Anaheim's relievers. "You got a lot of different throwers out there and we didn't even see Weber tonight."

The Twins have a superb bullpen of their own, though, which makes scoring early especially important when the series switches to Anaheim for the next three games.

"All we've got to ask out of our starters is to give us five good innings, hand it over to the boys and let them get their work done," Percival said. "It's a lot of fun for me to sit and watch."

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com.