ANAHEIM — Joe Maddon spoke weeks ago about how he was eager for the challenge of facing the Dodgers.
If the Dodgers were a measuring stick for the Angels, they didn’t measure up very well.
“Right now they’re better than us, there’s no question,” the Angels manager said after an 8-3 loss on Sunday put his team on the wrong side of a sweep. “We have to get better, primarily the pitching…
“Nobody’s quitting in here. We’re going to keep fighting to get back to the point where we had been in the past.”
After losing four in a row and seven of nine, the Angels are 7-15 with more than one-third of the 60-game season complete.
Even with a new playoff format that will include eight teams per league, the Angels are digging a challenging hole.
The top two teams from each division will comprise six of the playoff spots, and the Angels are 4-1/2 games behind the second-place Houston Astros in the American League West.
Two other teams with the best records will also qualify. The Angels are four games behind the Texas Rangers and Chicago White Sox, who are currently at .500 and tied for the No. 8 spot.
With 38 games to play, there is certainly time, but they will need to play better than this.
“We’ve got to pitch,” Maddon said. “You don’t win if you don’t pitch. There’s just there’s no way around it. We have to pitch better, starting and relieving. It always begins with that. And as we do that, we’ll see the appropriate runs scored. We’ve just got to get off to better starts and not constantly have to battle from behind.”
Julio Teheran took the ball for his third start since the Angels signed him over the winter looking for, at worst, dependable innings.
Teheran came down with the coronavirus in late June, and as a result he missed two of the three weeks of summer camp. The Angels decided to insert him into the rotation after just three innings in an intrasquad game, and it hasn’t worked.
“He’s a professional, man,” Maddon said. “He’s been around for a long time and if he felt he was ready, sometimes you just have to go with that. It’s just an unusual year. Normally, yeah, if we had a Triple-A rehab to send someone through, we would have done that. But it was the best we could do under the circumstances. Now we just have to reassess and talk to him and try to get him back.”
Maddon added that Teheran “knows he has a lot of work to do, and we’ll try to get that work done.”
Teheran has allowed 11 earned runs in eight innings, including four more runs on three homers. Teheran got through the first two runs without giving up a run, but in the third he gave up a homer to Keibert Ruiz in his first big league at-bat and then a two-run homer to slumping Max Muncy.
After a walk in the fourth, Teheran was pulled.
Teheran said he actually felt like his stuff had improved, and he was optimistic that he can find himself.
“I feel that everything is in the right direction,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’m taking every game like a spring training game. Every time I get the ball I feel good to compete.”
Matt Andriese entered and allowed Teheran’s runner to score along with three of his own on a Corey Seager three-run homer.
The only positives on the day for the Angels were Anthony Rendon’s continued hot streak and Jo Adell’s improvement.
Rendon belted a solo homer, his fifth in six games on the homestand.
Adell had two singles that left the bat at 115 mph and 111 mph. He also made an out on a 106 mph groundout and a 101 mph flyout. It was just the 13th time since 2015 — when Statcast began recording exit velocities — that an Angels player hit four balls at 100 mph or harder in one game.
Adell was 4 for 13 with four strikeouts in his second week in the big leagues, after going 2 for 15 with nine strikeouts in the first week.
He also memorably made a four-base error a week earlier, but this week he had a nice catch against the fence and on Sunday he picked up his first assist. He threw out Matt Beaty trying to stretch a single into a double, saving a run.
“Defensively, offensively everything about his game looks a little bit smoother to me right now,” Maddon said. “And I know he’s playing with more confidence so good for him. Yes, he’s definitely trending in the right direction.”
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Angels allow four homers as pitching issues sink them in sweep against Dodgers - OCRegister
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