PITTSBURGH — It took more than a month, but the Angels finally did it.
The Angels beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 5-4 on Wednesday afternoon, winning their second game in a row and taking the three-game series.
The Angels hadn’t won consecutive games or won a series since they swept the Miami Marlins from April 1-3.
“They’re resilient,” manager Ron Washington said. “They’ve just got to go through the experiences that they’re going through to figure out what it takes to be successful. And today, in the sixth, when we made our little comeback, that’s what I’ve been talking about all year, trying to string some stuff together and see what happened.”
The Angels (14-23) have had difficulty sustaining rallies for most of the season, leaving them unable to put together big innings when they need them. This time they needed to rally because starter José Soriano had just allowed four runs in the fifth, after beginning the game with four scoreless innings.
The Angels erased that 4-2 deficit quickly in the sixth.
The first four hitters of the sixth – Taylor Ward, Kevin Pillar, Logan O’Hoppe and Brandon Drury – delivered hits. Willie Calhoun then hit a sacrifice fly to push home the third run of the inning, putting the Angels up 5-4. That restored the lead the Angels had initially built on Jo Adell’s third-inning homer and his fifth-inning RBI single.
“Nobody went to up there trying to do more than the situation indicated that needed to be done,” Washington said, referring to the rally in the sixth.
Drury doubled off the left field fence in the middle of the rally, but the way he gingerly ran out of the box indicated that something was wrong. He had been battling hamstring issues for weeks, and he aggravated the injury when he was sprinting to stretch a single into a double in the fifth inning.
Drury remained in the game for one more inning of defense, but then the hamstring became too tight for Washington to leave him in the game.
“I just wasn’t going to take a chance on him going back out there to try to play defense and make a move and now we’re in more trouble,” Washington said.
Drury said after the game that he “was hurting pretty good” and he’s going to have it evaluated when back in Southern California on Thursday morning.
After the Angels reclaimed the lead, the bullpen was able to lock it down, retiring all 13 hitters it faced.
Right-hander Adam Cimber finished the fifth and struck out the side in the sixth. Left-hander Matt Moore picked up four outs in the seventh and eighth, with right-hander Luis Garcia getting the next two.
Closer Carlos Estévez pitched the ninth to pick up the save.
Angels pitchers were good all day, with the exception of the hiccup in the fifth.
Soriano started brilliantly, striking out six, walking none and needing just 56 pitches to get through his four scoreless innings.
At that point, the Pirates and their fans were certainly lamenting the fact that they had let Soriano go. The Pirates took him from the Angels in the Rule 5 draft in 2020, after he had Tommy John surgery. The Pirates let him go back to the Angels after he underwent the procedure for a second time in 2021.
Soriano’s success against the Pirates came to abrupt end, though.
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The bottom of the Pirates order was due in the fifth. Soriano retired two of the first three hitters of the inning. Then the lineup turned over and hitters were seeing him for the third time.
Soriano walked Andrew McCutchen and Bryan Reynolds and then Cruz went down and golfed a curveball into the gap in right-center, unloading the bases to put the Pirates up 3-2. Connor Joe followed with an RBI single into right field, ending Soriano’s day.
“I just thought he wasn’t finishing,” Washington said. “Early in the game, he was finishing his off speed. Early in the game he was finishing his fastball. And then when we got there in that fifth inning, it looked like he wasn’t finishing. it could have been that he ran out of gas.”
Soriano said he was not tired. It was just a brief lapse when he lost his command.
“Things happen,” Soriano said through an interpreter. “I got out of control with my pitches in the zone. I’ve just got to learn from that and turn the page and be ready for the next start.”