If this were seven years ago, Michael Wacha might have finished Tuesday’s game. He needed only 60 pitches to get through 5 2/3 innings and had allowed only two hits. He rarely labored and had a two-run lead.

But Alex Cora pulled him in the sixth. With the Red Sox offense sputtering and the bullpen rested, Cora favored matchups in the end, and they worked. The Red Sox beat the Angels 4-0, with Wacha walking off the mound with the fifth-best ERA in baseball.

“Certain days, if we score more, he goes seven, eight, (or even) gives us a complete game,” Cora said. “But where we were in the game, 2-0, with (Shohei Ohtani) at the plate, regardless of the stuff that (Wacha) had, the matchup is better at the end of the day, and he understands that.”

Scoring four runs was not exactly the offensive awakening the Red Sox were hoping for — even with their lineup struggling, they’ve averaged 3.5 runs per game this year — but Wacha made it work and lowered his ERA to 1.38 through five starts.

When the Red Sox signed him, Wacha was easy to label as another of Chaim Bloom’s dumpster dives. He had a 5.39 ERA the past two years and being cheap seemed to be his greatest attribute, but the Red Sox signed him for $7 million (more than he’d made the past two seasons combined), and they signed him before the lockout (so early that even Wacha was surprised by their immediate interest).

The Red Sox didn’t so much settle for Wacha. They went after him, intrigued by last season’s uptick in velocity and command, believing he was finally back to full health and seeing room for pitch-mix optimization. These weren’t purely speculative observations. Wacha had reworked his arsenal late last year — basically ditching his cutter, adding a two-seamer and throwing more curveballs and changeups — and the result was a 2.88 ERA in his last seven outings, two of them scoreless starts on the road against the Astros and Yankees.

It’s working again this year. Two at-bats were definitive Tuesday.

After breezing through the first eight batters he faced — half of them were retired on one pitch — Wacha was barely breaking a sweat before Andrew Velazquez drew a two-out, six-pitch walk in the third. The next batter, Taylor Ward, also worked a walk, and suddenly Wacha was in trouble. Big trouble. Pitching-coach-coming-to-the-mound trouble. Mike Trout was coming to the plate with the highest OPS in baseball.

“Walking two guys before you get Trout up there is not something I recommend,” Wacha said.

After falling behind on two high sliders — Statcast labeled the pitches cutters, but Wacha called them sliders — Wacha came back with a 93 mph fastball at the top of the zone, and Trout fouled it off for strike one. Then Wacha changed everything. From up-and-away to down-and-in. From mid-90s fastball to mid-80s changeup. Trout swung-and-missed at one changeup, then he swung-and-missed another.

“There are times where I can double up, triple up (with the changeup),” Wacha said. “Not every time, but there’s definitely times. Sometimes you just try to out-trick a really good hitter. It was definitely my two best changeups I threw all day, so they came at the right time.”

Wacha’s changeup has always been important, but in his early years, he was mostly throwing fastballs. He used his four-seamer more than 60 percent of the time as a rookie, and he was still throwing it 58 percent of the time two years later when he made the All-Star team. His changeup was his most used offspeed pitch, but Wacha threw it only 16.5 percent of the time in 2015.

This year, he’s throwing it 32 percent of the time, basically twice as often. His four-seam usage is below 40 percent. Still, he said throwing a changeup in that situation — trying to get a swing-and-miss with a good right-handed hitter at the plate — would not have been unusual in his early 20s.

“Probably pretty likely,” he said. “Over my career, I would say a lot of my punchouts have been either a changeup or a fastball.”

The way he got out of his next near jam was definitely different.

In the fourth inning, Wacha clearly fooled Ohtani with another changeup, but Ohtani lunged at the ball and got it into right-center for a soft single. Now facing Anthony Rendon with no outs and a runner on, Wacha went straight to his two-seamer, a pitch he basically didn’t throw until the end of last season. It was down and in, over the plate but not where Rendon could do much with it. Rendon rolled over for a routine double play that ended the threat before it had teeth. When Wacha got another double play in the fifth, it was another sinker in on the hands of a right-handed hitter.

“It’s just something different that they have to end up respecting,” Wacha said. “It’s definitely a different pitch compared to a four-seam fastball. It’s just got a little more run, and I was getting a lot of weak contact, and they were just kind of beating it into the ground.”

It’s working for him. It doesn’t always look the same as it did seven years ago, but Wacha’s off to a reminiscent start. He’s the first Red Sox pitcher ever to allow two runs or less and four hits or less in each of his first five starts with the team. In his past 12 games dating back to last season, Wacha has a 2.24 ERA. He’s not thrown 100 pitches in any of them, but he’s gone at least five innings in nine of them.

“It’s similar to what he did last year,” Cora said. “He prepares, he understands information, and he wants to keep getting better.”

Wacha gave the Angels all they could handle, and he gave the Red Sox all they needed.

(Photo: David Butler II / USA Today)