ANAHEIM — Just when the Angels’ hitters were starting show some signs of life, Tomoyuki Sugano showed up and shut them down.
After scoring 18 runs in the previous three games and providing some hope that their three three-week offensive malaise was over, the Angels managed just four hits in a 4-1 loss to Sugano and the Baltimore Orioles on Friday night.
“You’ve got to give some credit to Sugano,” Angels manager Ron Washington said. “He kept us off balance. The only guy that was having some good at-bats against him was Jo (Adell, who had one of the three hits against Sugano). But you know, we stayed in the game. We put some pressure on him. We had some opportunities, not many, but we did have some opportunities to maybe make something happen. But then he made some pitches.”
Once Sugano was lifted in the eighth inning, the Angels put together a threat with an Adell single and a Jorge Soler walk. But Zach Neto struck out at the end of a 13-pitch plate appearance, and then Nolan Schanuel hit a flyout.
A few pitches before Schanuel’s out, he started trotting to first on a 3-and-0 pitch that was clearly outside. Umpire Adam Hamari called it a strike and brought Schanuel back to the plate.
“What can I do about it?” Washington said. “We yell from the dugout, but what can we do about it? It might have made a difference. We got another hitter up there, in (Yoán Moncada), and then we seen what happened. Once he called that 3-0 pitch a strike, (Schanuel) still had two pitches to work with.”
In the ninth, the Angels (15-22) went down in order, coming up short in an effort to win for the third time this week when trailing after the seventh inning.
The result was a loss on a night when the Angels got good enough pitching to win from starter Kyle Hendricks and four relievers.
While it would be easy to dismiss the Angels’ offensive performance as yet another example of their lackluster hitting, it’s worth noting that Sugano has been one of the pleasant stories for an Orioles team that has gotten off to a disappointing start.
Sugano, who pitched 12 seasons in Japan before signing a one-year, $13 million deal with the Orioles, now has a 2.72 ERA through his first eight major league starts.
“Good command, with five plus pitches,” catcher Travis d’Arnaud said. “Keeping guys off balance. Almost like what Hendricks does, with a little more velocity.”
For the first six innings, the Angels didn’t do much of anything against Sugano. They had only two hits and didn’t have a runner in scoring position until Luis Rengifo’s double in the fifth. They finally got on the board in the seventh, when Moncada led off with a triple and scored on a Taylor Ward groundout.
Meanwhile, the Angels were playing behind all night, because Hendricks gave up three runs in the first two innings. He pulled himself together and got into the sixth without allowing another run.
When Hendricks is at his best, he’s not walking people and he’s getting hitters to chase his changeup out of the zone, and neither of those things happened against the Orioles.
In Hendricks’ previous start against the Detroit Tigers, when he gave up one run in 7⅔ innings, Hendricks did not issue a walk. Also, the Tigers swung at 63% of his changeups, and they went 1 for 10 when they put them in play.
The Orioles swung at 54% of his changeups, and when they did they often put them in play hard.
Gunnar Henderson hit a first-inning homer on a changeup. The Orioles also got a single and a double against Hendricks’ changeup. In the second inning, he missed badly with two straight changeups that Tyler O’Neill took, leading to one of Hendricks’ three walks.
O’Neill walked just after Ryan O’Hearn walked, and both came around to score.
“Definitely got better as I went today,” Hendricks said. “Just kind of locked it in, got back down in the zone. Really nothing bad, just the two walks. The two walks to start the second inning were bad, and then just ground balls that found holes instead of getting hit at somebody. So now it was really just those two walks. Other than that, locked it in, battled through it much better at the end.”
Hendricks managed to stay in the game until the sixth, and that’s when left-hander Reid Detmers got a chance to get back on the mound after a string of three straight horrible outings.
Detmers, who had retired only one of the 13 batters he faced in his previous three games, got all three hitters on Friday night. His fastball velocity was also up to 96.7 mph, from 94.4 mph coming into the game.
Washington, who gave Detmers a pep talk as he entered the game, said he was pleased.
“I just told him, this is his time,” Washington said. “You know you’re better than you’ve been performing. We know you’re better than you’re performing. This is a good time right here for you to come back. And he did. He really stepped up.”
The Orioles added a two-out insurance run in the ninth, an inning that began with Matthew Lugo slipping while trying to catch a pop-up in shallow center field.