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.
“I felt great, but my pitches weren’t there today,” Soriano said through an interpreter. “Things happened. Sometimes you feel great and you don’t have command.”
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 didn’t have it,” Manager Ron Washington said. “His sinker wasn’t there. He couldn’t get a feel for his breaking ball. It looked like he couldn’t get any kind of rhythm all night. They hit some pitches down in the zone, and usually those balls right there are ground balls, but they were hitting bullets. It was just one of those nights.”
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, Washington sent him out for the fourth.
“He’s one of my better pitchers,” Washington said. “We were still in the ball game. We’ve got to give him a chance to see if he can find it.”
Washington added that Reid Detmers – who was normally would be his best multi-inning option to take the ball immediately from Soriano – was only available for one inning on Tuesday. He had thrown 38 pitches on Saturday night. So Washington tried to see if Soriano could right the ship.
Soriano gave up two singles and a three-run homer to Andrew McCutchen, on a sinker in the middle of the zone.
“I just didn’t execute,” Soriano said. “I was trying to go in off the plate and I left it in 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 him out.
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.”