ANAHEIM — To hear Angels pitcher Bud Norris tell it, the story of how he became a closer is simple. He began the spring in an unusual position — a veteran starter with a minor league contract and no defined role — and seized an unexpected opportunity.

Twenty days into the regular season, the Angels’ ninth inning had become a chasm. Plans A, B and C collapsed when injuries befell Huston Street, Cam Bedrosian and Andrew Bailey. Suddenly the team had no closer. Almost by default, in his 240th career game, Norris entered a one-run game in the ninth inning April 22 and logged his first career save. He never looked back.

The Angels “had plenty of guys in the mix — all the articles that were written, which was fine — they had their guys templated to do some things,” Norris recalled. “It’s hard to speculate in spring training what’s going to take course over a six-month season.”

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Angels at Indians, Tuesday game time, TV channels, starting pitchers It’s an accurate narrative, true to the facts and to Norris’ supreme self-confidence. Proving people wrong, he said, drove him from the moment he was drafted as a 21-year-old.

About that draft.

Norris never finished a game in 2006, his final season at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Yet this was the role Houston Astros scouts recommended to General Manager Tim Purpura when Norris was selected in the sixth round of that year’s amateur draft. Norris reported to the short-season New York-Penn League and recorded a couple saves. Before April, those were the only saves of his professional career.

A funny thing happened on the way to Norris’ destiny as the Astros’ closer: the kid decided he was going to be a starter.

“I got told that’s all I was going to do. I got projected as a back-end bullpen guy with a bulldog approach, a good fastball and a good slider,” Norris recalled. “I thought that was a fair assessment. Once again, I wanted to prove a lot of people wrong for a long time.”

Purpura, who oversaw the Astros’ only World Series appearance in 2005, didn’t expect Norris to climb the organizational ladder as a starter.

“I don’t believe a closer can and should have one pitch,” Purpura said. “How do you develop more than one pitch? You become a starter. We had Billy Wagner, an unbelievably dominant pitcher with only one pitch. We had him starting, sent him down to Puerto Rico to develop a slider. Donnie Wall, another pitcher in the minor leagues, had an unbelievable changeup, a Greg Maddux changeup. So you expose guys to different situations like winter ball to develop secondary, sometimes tertiary pitches. That’s the career path Bud was on: get some innings on the arm, build arm strength, build up stamina.”

Three years after he was drafted, Norris was in the Astros’ rotation. His time in Houston ultimately outlasted both Purpura and his successor, Ed Wade. By the time he was traded to the Baltimore Orioles in 2013, Norris had started 118 games over parts of five seasons.

But when he became a free agent last October, the numbers suggested Norris was on the back end of his career. In 35 games with the Braves and Dodgers, he went 6-10 with a 5.10 earned-run average. He began as a starter in Atlanta, was traded to Los Angeles, and ended the season as a seldom-used long reliever.

Angels general manager Billy Eppler looked beyond the surface numbers. Starting in June of last season, Norris incorporated a cut fastball into his repertoire. With proper command, the pitch started over the plate and drifted in on left-handed hitters. It had the same desired effect for Norris as his changeup, only with better results: the pitch yielded more strikeouts (18) than hits (10).

“There seemed to be a time stamp in that moment, a difference,” Eppler said. “It piqued our interest.”

Eppler began talks with Norris’ agent in November and finalized a minor league contract in January. With no major league offers to choose from, and a strong opportunity to win a starter’s job close to his family and friends on the West Coast, Norris felt his best offer was in Anaheim.

To an extent, the Angels did not get lucky with Norris. Knowing they might need a pitcher to start or relieve, they found a veteran who had done both. They correctly identified the secondary pitch Norris needed to resurrect his career. And they were aggressive, reaching out to Norris’ agent early in the free-agent signing period.

But this only partly explains why Norris, 32, has 15 saves in 17 opportunities this season.

Ask any of the Angels’ brass — Eppler, Manager Mike Scioscia, pitching coach Charles Nagy — and they will say Norris possesses a “closer’s mentality.” It’s one of the few qualities in baseball that doesn’t jump off a spreadsheet, yet is impossible to miss.

The sport is littered with pitchers who failed to adapt to the unique challenge of the ninth inning. Earlier this month, the Washington Nationals traded two prospects and a set-up man to the Oakland A’s to acquire two veterans with closing experience, Ryan Madson and Sean Doolittle.

In spite of their early injuries, the Angels don’t have to sell out to acquire a closer before next Monday’s deadline. They already have one. To that extent, they did get lucky. The same indefinable quality the Astros once identified in Norris, dormant for 11 years, only re-emerged in Anaheim.

“You have to have good scouts who can talk to players, get a feel for who they are,” Purpura said. “Scouts do their background work with coaches, all the way back to Little League if you can get a hold of them. That closer mentality, it’s kind of like you know it when you see it. You know it when you hear it.”

On July 16, Norris entered the ninth inning of a game against Tampa Bay looking to protect a 4-2 lead. He got the first out, then allowed a double and two singles, the last of which drove in a run. Trailing 4-3, Rays designated hitter Brad Miller stepped into the batter’s box and drew a four-pitch walk, loading the bases for Tim Beckham.

Nagy visited the mound.

“Just, ‘hey, get back one hitter at a time, one pitch at a time. Focus on this guy and what we want to do out here.’ That’s all,” Nagy said he told Norris.

Norris threw a cutter tailing away from the right-handed batter. Beckham pounded it into the ground to shortstop Andrelton Simmons, who started a double play to end the game. Norris’ new pitch had conspired with his rare focus to convert save No. 14.

Three months into the second act of his career, prior to a game against the Washington Nationals, Norris took a stab at explaining why he’s succeeded where so many others have failed.

“I don’t know if there’s one specific thing that makes it easier for one guy or the next guy,” he said. “I think it’s really controlling yourself in the heat of the moment, trying to execute pitches.”