To their credit, the Angels didn’t look for excuses, instead limiting their search to themselves as the reason they are trailing 2-0 heading into today’s Game 3 of the ALCS against the Yankees.
“It was wet but I won’t blame the conditions,” said Torii Hunter, asked about the wet field and a good team gone suddenly a lot colder than just 47 degrees at game time. The drainage at Yankee Stadium, said Brien Fuentes, was good. So were the Yankees, who drained the Angels of their usual life.
Failing to get the final three outs in the 11th inning can do that to you. But before, during and after that, the AL West Champions did not look like themselves.
“Very uncharacteristic of this team,” Hunter said. “It’s tough, this is not our baseball.”
After his team had made three errors without his help in Game 1, Maicer Izturis threw the winning run away in the 13th inning of Saturday night’s 4-3 loss in Game 2, stupidly trying for a double play he had little chance to get.
An inning earlier, Erick Aybar got caught straddling, not touching, second on what should have been an easy inning-ending double play, and umpire Jerry Layne called the shortstop on it. It’s the kind of mistake you might get away with once, which the Angels did, but not twice, as proven by Izturis.
Though the Yankees also made some mistakes — boots by Derek Jeter and Robinson Cano — in the cold, they proved more cold-blooded about taking advantage of their opportunities. Vladimir Guerrero stranded eight runners and, with one run already driven in by Chone Figgins in the 11th, Hunter left the bases loaded by hitting into a double play.
That left closer Fuentes no margin for the grievous error he made, leaving an 0-2 pitch over the plate to Alex Rodriguez, who did what he is doing all the time this October with his team down to three outs, which was hit a home run.
Save Figgins, the Angels got offensive contributions from everybody in their sweep of Boston, and just when Figgins seems starting to come alive, they need wild pitches to score runs. Bobby Abreu, who was on base nine out of 13 times against the Red Sox, is hitless in nine at-bats this series.
“We did a lot of good things tonight,” manager Mike Scioscia said. “Unfortunately, one of them wasn’t hitting with runners in scoring position (3-for-15) and that’s eventually what hurt us.
“We have to get better at that, that’s for sure. The momentum in this series can swing in a heartbeat.”
The Angels are going home and to dry land, which would be a plus to get their running game going, except that nobody holds runners like Andy Pettitte, today’s Game 3 pitcher. If seems unfathomable that a team this deep in skill and brainpower could go down so easily, it happens, as it did to the 2001 Mariners, who won 116 games and were out in five to the Yankees.
“We’re going to grind it out pitch by pitch,” Scioscia said.
Like the Red Sox in 2004, Scioscia has the team for it. But the Angels now need four out of five, two of them against CC Sabathia. And even all that Southern California sun can’t hide that cloud.