Now it’s four victories in a row
The outfielder drives in two runs and scores another as the Angels finish a three-game sweep.
Calhoun drives in two runs, Shoemaker is sharp, A’s are swept.
ANGELS 5, ATHLETICS 1
OAKLAND — The Angels did the same thing twice, the details only slightly altered, to win Wednesday’s matinee in the same manner they have for four games running. They put the ball in play, often beat it into the ground, and defeated the Oakland Athletics, 5-1, to cinch a three-game sweep at the Oakland Coliseum.
Twice, Mike Trout stood in scoring position with two outs, with the Angels in danger of wasting the development. Twice, Kole Calhoun singled through the middle to score him. The pitches Calhoun hit took the same trajectory to the plate, and the balls went the same way off his bat too. They were almost exactly the same.
“He’s the reason why we’re winning the last few games,” Trout said of his fellow outfielder.
Said Calhoun: “You try to stay up the middle and get results, and you get positive reinforcement in those situations.”
Calhoun has hit directly in front of Trout for most of his Angels career and thus drove in Trout only one dozen times over 373 games entering play Wednesday. That number may be quadrupled this season, as Trout will hit third and Calhoun will switch between the fifth and sixth spots, depending on the pitcher.
In this series, Calhoun amassed almost as many hits as he made outs, going six for 13 and raising his 2016 average to .387.
In Wednesday’s third inning, Trout got into scoring position by singling and stealing second. In the fifth, he doubled and arrived at third on a wild pitch from Oakland starter Eric Surkamp. Calhoun began to set the table in the eighth inning, in which he doubled and scored when Andrelton Simmons singled. Albert Pujols added a tworun single in the ninth for insurance runs the Angels made superfluous.
That was because they received an excellent start from Matt Shoemaker, the 29-year-old righthander who disappointed them in his abbreviated 2016 debut. This time, he approached perfection without much notice, giving up one hit in six innings while striking out five Athletics. First baseman C.J. Cron committed the biggest mistake while Shoemaker was on the mound, missing a routine foul popup Manager Mike Scioscia called a “little hiccup.”
“It’s what we needed,” Shoemaker said of his performance. “That was the aggressive mentality I knew I needed.”
After Shoemaker, whom he described as “electric,” Scioscia turned to 22-year-old left-hander Greg Mahle, making his major league debut. Mahle’s wild first pitch brushed back Coco Crisp, but he rebounded to finish the seventh inning using just seven more.
“I felt a lot of nerves,” Mahle said. “Obviously, you could see it with the first throw.”
Managing without closer Huston Street, who had pitched in three straight games, Scioscia used Fernando Salas to start the eighth, Jose Alvarez to finish that inning and start the ninth, and Joe Smith to finish the game.
The Angels struck out only four times Wednesday afternoon, bringing their 2016 total to 48 in nine games. Put another way, just 14.8% of their plate appearances have ended in strikeouts, by far the smallest number in the American League at this early juncture.
The Minnesota Twins, the team the Angels will next face Friday in Minneapolis, have struck out more than twice as often — 30.4% entering play Wednesday. The big league average is 22%, the AL one even higher.
“It is by design, but not by philosophy,” Scioscia said, noting that the Angels’ approach is in part a product of the contact-oriented hitters new General Manager Billy Eppler added in the off-season.