Angels blow three-run lead in the ninth, lose to Astros, 5-3

The balance of the American League West, and maybe the Angels’ best shot at winning the division, hung high in the air Sunday, the ball blowing back toward the right-field foul pole.

In the batter’s box, Jed Lowrie leaned in, urging the ball fair. On the mound, Huston Street looked up, hoping for the opposite. In right field, Kole Calhoun ventured toward the wall, tracked the ball, then jumped.

When he fished his hand out of the crowd, in fair territory, his glove was empty.

The Angels had been within a strike of sweeping the first-place Houston Astros. They had a three-run lead. Then a smattering of hits, a would-be game-ending grounder caught in the webbing of a glove and this go-ahead three-run home run dashed it all. The Angels lost, 5-3.

They fell 4 1/2 games back of the Astros in the West and three back of the Texas Rangers in the wild-card race.

“You have those innings,” Street said, “when nothing goes right.”

After he’d been pulled, Street sat in the dugout, his eyes blank and mouth open. He was replaying the five-run ninth inning in his mind, he said, thinking of what he could’ve done different.

Really, he determined, it came down to the one pitch to Lowrie, a pinch-hitter in the cleanup spot, and the same player whose walk-off single eliminated the Angels in the division series in 2008, when the Angels were the heavy World Series favorite.

The Angels were cruising. Andrew Heaney grinded through five scoreless innings by stranding nine runners. Mike Trout hit a first-inning home run, and C.J. Cron added two more solo shots to give the Angels a 3-0 lead.

Street had retired the first two batters of the ninth, and had Preston Tucker within a strike of ending the game. In the dugout, Street didn’t regret challenging Tucker with an aggressive pitch with a three-run lead. But Tucker lasered it over the right-field wall for a home run.

Still, Street needed just one more out. Then George Springer tripled past a diving Calhoun and Jose Altuve slapped a single. It brought up maybe the Astros’ best hitter, shortstop Carlos Correa, the prohibitive favorite for the rookie-of-the-year award.

He scorched a ball up the middle. Second baseman Taylor Featherston dived and grabbed it, but the ball got stuck in his webbing. He had no play.

Yet all of those pitches, Street said, he could live with.

“You just think that one of those balls is going to find the glove,” he said. “And they didn’t.”

It was the pitch to Lowrie that preoccupied him later, a changeup high in the zone. Off the bat, Calhoun said he felt as though he had a bead on the ball. He thought he might come down with the catch. When he realized he hadn’t, he sat slumped against the outfield wall.

“I just couldn’t get there,” Calhoun said. “If I’m an inch taller, maybe I get to that ball.”

Afterward, Street pondered the odds. A few feet, and the home run goes foul. A couple inches, and Calhoun steals the triple. An extra few stitches, and the ball doesn’t get stuck in Featherston’s glove.

Any of those goes right, and the Angels are two games better in the West standings, with the momentum of a sweep.

“We are where we are,” Manager Mike Scioscia said afterward. “If we’d lost this game other ways, it’s still a loss.”

He said that the Angels “have to turn the page on it. Sometimes the page is heavy, like it is this afternoon.”

The Angels were beginning to heat up in September. They had won seven of the month’s first 10 games. They’ll still play the Astros three times, in Houston, before the season concludes, and they’ll finish the season with a four-game road series with the Rangers.

This game was brutal, several players said, but it was not fatal.

“We know that tomorrow the sun’s going to come up,” Calhoun said.

Up next

Right-hander Garrett Richards (13-10, 3.71 earned-run average) will oppose Seattle Mariners right-hander Taijuan Walker (10-8, 4.70) at Safeco Field on Monday at 7 p.m. TV: FS West; Radio 830, 1330.

zach.helfand@latimes.com