Anaheim, Calif. — The Los Angeles Angels have been struggling to win baseball games of late. But, with a helpful nudge from the Tigers, they were able to salvage the series finale at Angel Stadium, 3-2.
After the Tigers seemed to be humming on all cylinders Saturday night, things just seemed a little off in the hot, California sun Sunday.
“We come away with a series win,” said Jake Rogers, who caught 165 pitches Sunday. “We’re happy. Obviously, you want to get the sweep here. It could’ve been a big win, but it wasn’t our best performance today.”
Tigers starter Casey Mize, who left the game in the fourth inning after taking a ground ball off his left wrist, and then reliever Drew Anderson both had a hard time throwing strikes and commanding their pitches. Tigers’ pitchers had trouble, in general, keeping the Angels off the bases.
“They did a really good job of getting on base and battling their butts off,” Rogers said of the Angels hitters. “I don’t even know if we had a clean inning (there was one). But it felt like there was always someone on base. Tip your cap to them for that.”
In a 1-1 game in the bottom of the fifth, Anderson, rushed into the game after Mize left, walked the first two hitters and gave up a single to Nolan Schanuel to load the bases.
Amazingly, the Angels squeezed only one run out of that opportunity, on a ground out by Jorge Soler. Right-hander Brenan Hanifee, after Anderson walked another hitter to load the bases with two outs, got Jo Adell to tap out to third base.
Colt Keith made a strong play coming in hard on the ball and throwing quickly to first.
BOX SCORE: Angels 3, Tigers 2
The Angels scored a third run in the sixth off Hanifee on an RBI single by Zach Neto.
It wasn’t much, but it was all they needed.
“We didn’t have a ton of opportunities,” manager AJ Hinch said. “We had a hard time putting anything together and on the flip side, we were under stress the entire game. They made our guys work a ton and we had to go through a few pitchers. And yet the game was still winnable.”
After scoring seven runs Saturday night, the Tigers managed two productive swings. One was the first swing of the game.
Rookie Kevin McGonigle led off the game with his ninth home run, a 402-foot, opposite-field blast off Angels starter Ryan Johnson.
Johnson didn’t allow another hit until James Outman squibbed an infield hit with two outs in the fifth. Rogers and McGonigle walked. But Johnson, at 91 pitches and facing his last hitter, struck out Dillon Dingler to end the inning.
The second productive swing came in the ninth. Riley Greene launched his 14th home run, a towering 390-foot drive into the seats in right-center.
With the loss, the Tigers fall back to 6½ games out in the AL Central Division and 4½ games back of the final wild-card spot.
“Every game is critical,” Hinch said. “We’ve been playing Game 7 for like two months, since May.”
Mize’s day started laboriously and ended painfully.
He struggled to hone his command and the Angels were able to drive up his pitch count. Mize needed 49 pitches to get through two innings.
He’d allowed a run in the second on a leadoff double by Vaughn Grissom and a two-out infield single by Oswald Peraza. The inning ended after he struck out Neto, but it took him 10 pitches to do it.
Like several Tigers pitchers in this series, it took Mize a while to shake both the rust from the All-Star break and to adjust to the steeper mound at Angel Stadium.
“Multiple things can be true,” Mize said. “It is a steeper mound and trying to find my command, it took me longer to get the foot strike. I had plenty of swing-and-miss to get out of some of those situations. Just frustrating that I put myself in them in the first place.”
After another long inning in the third, where he stranded two runners by striking out Grissom and Josh Lowe, Mize was at 72 pitches. And on his second pitch in the fourth, Adell shot a ball up the middle. The ball left his bat at 108.8 mph and Mize corralled it in his midsection. After he made the play at first, he started to shake out his left hand.
Assistant trainer Kelly Rhoades came out but the examination didn’t take long. Mize almost immediately started walking back to the dugout. But it turns out the bruise on his wrist wasn’t the only issue he was dealing with.
“Everyone could see him get hit in the wrist,” Hinch said. “But he was also dealing with some groin tightness. He had multiple things going on. I needed to get him out of the game.”
Mize has had two stints on the injured list because of groin issues this season. He said coming out of the game was precautionary.
“With the wrist, he smoked it and it hit under my glove, like on the side of the hand or wrist,” he said. “But that’s doing good. That’s nothing I’m going to be concerned about. We will see how I feel tomorrow, but right now, I feel good about that.”
Hinch said more tests and more rehab work will be done on the groin before any decision is made in terms of missing a start.
“It’s tough,” Mize said. “As a starting pitcher, you want to get more than 10 outs for your team. That’s always frustrating.”
chris.mccosky@detroitnews.com
@cmccosky
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Tigers can’t complete sweep of Angels: ‘Wasn’t our best performance’
Reporting by Chris McCosky, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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By Chris McCosky, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
