ANAHEIM — Momentum is only as good as the next game’s starting pitcher.
The Angels demonstrated why that is one of baseball’s ultimate truisms on Tuesday night. All the good feelings from their comeback victory on Sunday vanished amid a poor performance from their starting pitcher.
Right-hander José Soriano gave up five runs and didn’t make it out of the fourth inning in the Angels’ 9-3 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Soriano had been arguably the Angels’ best starting pitcher since the start of last season, but he had one of his worst outings in his game.
It was clear early that he didn’t have his typical stuff. Soriano was fighting his command, either missing the strike zone badly or leaving pitches right in the middle of it.
He walked two and gave up two hits in the first two innings, escaping without damage. The Pirates got to him for two runs in the third, when he walked two more and gave up three singles. Only an inning-ending double play spared him from more damage.
At that point, Soriano had thrown 64 pitches, and exactly half of them were balls.
Still, Manager Ron Washington sent him out for the fourth, and he only got one more out. He gave up two singles and a three-run homer to Andrew McCutchen, on a sinker in the middle of the zone.
When Soriano was pulled with one out in the inning, he became the first Angels starter this season to fail to make it through the fourth.
Soriano now has a 4.34 ERA five starts in the season. Two of his starts have been excellent, one was mediocre and two have been poor.
The hitters couldn’t bail out Soriano.
Taylor Ward started the scoring with his sixth homer of the season, in the third inning. It was the Angels’ 10th straight solo homer. They haven’t hit a homer with someone on base since April 10.
Just after McCutchen’s homer put the Angels in a 5-1 hole, they briefly got back into the game by parlaying three hits and a sacrifice fly into two runs in the bottom of the fourth.
That was it, though.
The Angels didn’t have another baserunner until Ward drew a walk in the eighth.
There was also a disturbing defensive moment in the seventh, with right fielder Mike Trout and center fielder Jo Adell collided as both were trying to catch a routine fly ball. The ball dropped, and Adell was charged with an error. The Angels put extra emphasis on communication in the outfield this spring because Trout was adjusting to a new position. The only good news was that the ball hung up long enough that neither player was running hard when they collided.
By having such a pedestrian performance on the heels of their stirring comeback, the Angels showed why Washington was careful before Tuesday’s game not to put too much emphasis on what they did on Sunday.
“If that was a big win in September and we were in the hunt, then that’s different,” Washington said. “But this is April, and we enjoy it, but we can’t get hung up on it, because we’re only in the first month of the season.”
More to come on this story.
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