José Soriano suffers a rare off night as Angels lose 5th straight

CHICAGO — On a night when José Soriano looked human again, the hitters couldn’t bail him out.

Soriano gave up three runs – two more than he had allowed all season – and the Angels lost to the Chicago White Sox, 5-2, on Tuesday night, dropping their fifth straight game.

As poorly as the Angels (12-19) have played over the past two weeks, they could at least be confident that Soriano would pitch them to victory every five games. They had won his previous six starts.

Soriano, whose ERA rose to 0.84, had no margin for error with the way the Angels were hitting.

The Angels managed nine hits, but they were 1 for 6 with runners in scoring position, leaving 10 on base for the second straight night. They struck out 13 times.

Jo Adell’s RBI single produced their only run, in the fourth inning. By the time they got their second run on a Josh Lowe homer in the eighth, they were down by four runs.

Soriano wobbled through his outing, so it was something of a success that he got through with only three runs scoring.

After breezing through the first inning on 16 pitches, with three strikeouts, the rest of the game was a relative struggle for the Angels’ ace.

Soriano’s scoreless streak ended at 25⅔ innings when he gave up a solo homer to Colson Montgomery in the second.

In the third, he walked the bases loaded. Although he escaped with no runs scoring, he needed 31 pitches.

In the fourth, Soriano gave up a two-run homer to Drew Romo, a 24-year-old catcher who had not homered in his first 62 major league plate appearances. (He hit his second homer against reliever Brent Suter, giving the White Sox an insurance run.)

When Soriano gave up the Romo homer in the fourth, his velocity was down slightly on both his four-seam fastball and his sinker.

Soriano ended up getting through the fifth on 97 pitches. In his previous outing, he had to work hard to get around seven hits, so he also made it through only five innings, despite giving up no runs.

More to come on this story.