Angels let lead, game slip away
They squander a two-run lead by giving up four runs in the bottom of the eighth.
After exploding for six runs in the sixth, Angels can’t recover from the Mariners’ late rally.
SEATTLE — Three hours before Wednesday night’s game at Safeco Field, Seattle Mariners shortstop Jean Segura ambled over near the Angels’ dugout to talk a little trash during his team’s pregame drills.
The Angels first signed Segura a decade ago, but he did not come to reference being traded away for Zack Greinke. He came to tell two of the club’s coaches that he planned to run on Angels catcher Martin Maldonado, his hard-throwing former teammate in Milwaukee.
Segura did as he said he would in an 8-7 Mariners victory. After getting the goahead single in his team’s four-run, eighth-inning rally, Segura scampered to second base, glared at his friend and basked in the glory of victory that had earlier seemed evasive.
Up by four runs through five innings, the Mariners trailed by two until their later comeback, as the Angels rallied for six in the sixth. That rally began, as so many big innings do, with a tiring starting pitcher.
Seattle’s splitter-wielding Hisashi Iwakuma had limited the Angels to three singles and a walk through five innings. But he had been drilled in the knee by a liner in the fifth, and he is subject to the same disadvantages as the rest of baseball when traversing the third time through a lineup.
Kole Calhoun’s leadoff double initiated the Angels’ rally. Mike Trout’s smash to center field for a two-run home run set it into motion and extended his hitting streak to a career-high 16 games. Albert Pujols’s single forced Iwakuma’s exit, and then the Angels continued to shoot balls into play. Andrelton Simmons made the first out of the inning, but it seemed bound to be a home run until Seattle’s Guillermo Heredia leaped to catch it over the left-field wall.
The Angels produced seven hits and six runs in that inning and only four hits and one run, a Calhoun ninth-inning solo shot, otherwise. Earlier, Ben Revere began the third by lining a baseball hard to right field, right to the Mariners right fielder, Ben Gamel. When Revere returned to the dugout, he yelled an expletive audible across the nearly empty stadium.
Revere has spent nearly all of his professional career as an everyday player. Being the Angels’ fourth outfielder represents an adjustment. He had garnered only 40 plate appearances before Wednesday night and in the last of them Tuesday he had lined out to left.
In his next at-bat, he slapped a single up the middle and quickly stole second, seemingly leaping out of his season-long slump. He also singled amid the Angels’ sixth-inning rally.
Starter Ricky Nolasco began by permitting a twoout solo shot to Robinson Cano in the first inning. After a perfect second, the Mariners lashed back-toback drives to the same spot of the center-field wall in the third. The first, off Gamel’s bat, was hit too hard for Trout to catch. The second, by Robinson Cano, was not, and it ended the inning.
When Nelson Cruz led off the fourth with a single, right-hander Yusmeiro Petit began to warm in the Angels bullpen. It was an unusual time, for Nolasco had thrown fewer than 50 pitches and given up only one run. The Angels starter remained in the game for another inning. After Mike Zunino doubled, Segura homered and Gamel doubled in the fifth, Petit warmed again.
Nolasco intentionally walked Cano, then fell behind in the count to Nelson Cruz, who sneaked a single into left field, scoring Seattle’s third run of the inning. Angels manager Mike Scioscia decided Nolasco was done.