Angels End Long Road Trip With Rough Loss to Orioles

Halos head home after dropping the series in Baltimore

After a ugly showing from the Angels on Wednesday that allowed the Orioles to finally snap their 19-game losing streak, the hope was that they would bounce back for today’s matinee contest and end their long road trip on a high note. To put it mildly, however, that did not happen, as the team put in an even worse showing in a series-ending 13-1 drubbing in Baltimore.

Despite how bad that final score is, the Halos actually got off to about as good of a start as you could hope for, with Shohei Ohtani leading off the game with his 41st home run of the season and his first career longball at Camden Yards, a moonshot off of Orioles starter Keegan Akin that gave them an early 1-0 lead.

From this point on, however, pretty much nothing went right for the Angels. On the offensive side of things, they put in a pretty toothless effort against Akin, who came into this one carrying an unsightly 7.92 ERA. After the Ohtani home run, Akin didn’t allow an Angel baserunner to pass second base, conceding only two hits and two walks over his seven innings the rest of the way. The Halos’ best chance against him came in the second inning after Kurt Suzuki and Jo Adell led off the frame with a hit by pitch and a single (which very well could’ve been ruled an error, as left fielder D.J. Stewart lost the ball in the sun), but Brandon Marsh, Jack Mayfield and Juan Lagares all struck out to end pretty much the only threat of the afternoon.

This poor performance with the bats meant that the Angels would need a great day from their shorthanded pitching staff, and they got pretty much the exact opposite. Jaime Barria got the ball to start the game, and while he didn’t pitch terribly, it was clear that he did not have his best stuff. He made pretty quick work of the Baltimore bats in the first two frames, but ran into trouble for the first time in the 3rd when former Angel Jahmai Jones led off the inning with a double down the left field line. Kelvin Gutierrez followed this up with a base hit that scored Jones and tied the game, but Barria finished the inning with no more damage done.

He ran into more trouble in the 4th, as Trey Mancini and Stewart both reached base safely to put two runners on with no outs. A subsequent single by Ramon Urias made it seem like another run would be tacked on to Barria’s line, but a great relay from Lagares to Suzuki kept the game tied at 1.

Joe Maddon decided that he’d seen enough from Barria after this, though, and handed the ball to Andrew Wantz, who bounced back from a rough outing Friday to strand both of his inherited runners and end the threat.

Elvis Peguero came on in relief of Wantz in the 5th inning for his first appearance in the majors, and his debut was one forget. His raw stuff—a high 90s sinker with good movement and a pretty nice high 80s slider—looked pretty impressive for a guy who started the year in High-A, but his command of it left a lot to be desired. He walked both Cedric Mullins and Ryan Mountcastle to put two runners on board, and Mancini made him pay with a two-out base hit up the middle (albeit one that had just a .110 xBA in what was a pretty unlucky break for Peguero) that gave the Orioles a 2-1 lead.

A double by Stewart to drive in Mountcastle and another walk to Urias loaded the bases and marked the end of Peguero’s major-league debut, and Jake Petricka was brought on to try to bounce back from his rough outing yesterday and get out of the jam that he inherited. On his first pitch of the game, though, Pedro Severino ambushed him for a grand slam that ballooned the Baltimore lead to 7-1.

With the way that the Angels lineup was struggling, the game was essentially over at this point. This didn’t stop the Orioles, however, as they managed to tack on an extra six runs before things were mercifully over. Urias brought home a run off of Jose Quintana in the 7th inning and another off of James Hoyt in the 8th to cap off his very nice day, and Mountcastle and Severino both got in on the fun with two-RBI base hits off of Hoyt to bring the score to its final tally of 13-1, the third-worst margin of defeat for the Angels all season.

The series against Baltimore started well enough on Tuesday but ended in a rather embarrassing fashion, with the Angels giving the Orioles consecutive wins for the first time in almost a month. With the loss, the Halos fell to a record of 63-66, which marks the first time that they have been more than two games above or below the .500 mark since all the way back on June 29. They’ll try to rebound at home on Friday night when they open up a rare two-game weekend series against the currently scuffling Padres, who have recently been passed up by the Reds for the 2nd NL Wild Card spot.