Angels’ rookie has wild debut

Just think of Thursday night’s game like a home run ball hit by a Chicago Cubs opponent into the Wrigley Field bleachers, and you get an idea of what the Angels would like to do with it:

Throw it back.

Nick Adenhart’s much-anticipated major league debut quickly deteriorated into a walk on the wild side, setting the tone for the Angels’ most unsightly pitching performance of the young season and an ugly 15-8 loss to the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium.

Adenhart, the team’s top pitching prospect, didn’t make it out of the third inning, giving up five runs and walking five, and the A’s pounced on relievers Dustin Moseley and Darren O’Day for eight runs and eight hits in the fifth inning.

The A’s amassed 20 hits, including four each by Emil Brown and Jack Cust, to earn a split of the four-game series, bookending a pair of routs – they won, 14-2, Monday night – around crisp pitching efforts by the Angels’ Joe Saunders and Ervin Santana.

Adenhart, who was starting on three days’ rest, a risk the Angels tried to reduce by having the right-hander throw lightly in the bullpen Tuesday instead of his usual “power pen,” as Manager Mike Scioscia called it, was anything but crisp, lasting only 57 pitches.

His afternoon started with some advice Scioscia likes to give pitchers before their major league debuts, and the evening began with such promise when Adenhart, who at 21 is the youngest pitcher in the major leagues, retired the side in order in the first inning.

“You want them focused on their stuff as opposed to the hitter,” Scioscia said. “With experience, you’ll be able to factor in things like pitch selection. We want him to execute pitches, stay within his best stuff and kind of take the other lineup out of the equation.”

Adenhart, who went 4-0 with an earned-run average of 0.87 in five starts for triple-A Salt Lake before being recalled Wednesday night, did that in the first, needing only 12 pitches to record three outs, but things went haywire in the second.

After Brown’s one-out single, Adenhart lost touch with the strike zone, walking the next four batters and throwing a wild pitch that allowed Brown to score.

This was not a shock to the Angels. Adenhart had struggled with his control at Salt Lake, where he walked 15 in 31 innings.

But Adenhart wasn’t even close to the strike zone with many of his pitches. Ryan Sweeney forced in a run with his bases-loaded walk, and Kurt Suzuki’s two-run single to left gave Oakland a 4-0 lead.

The Angels countered with five runs in the bottom of the second, all of them unearned, all of them scoring with two outs after Cust, the A’s left fielder, flubbed Garret Anderson’s routine fly ball.

Robb Quinlan singled, Mike Napoli hit an RBI single, and Erick Aybar ripped a three-run homer to right-center field off starter Justin Duchscherer for a 4-4 tie. Chone Figgins singled, stole second and scored on a Gary Matthews Jr. single to make it 5-4.

But Adenhart walked Frank Thomas and gave up a single to Brown to open the third and was replaced by Moseley, who lost the lead when he gave up Jack Hannahan’s sacrifice fly in that inning and Daric Barton’s RBI single in the fourth.

Napoli tied the score, 6-6, with a solo home run over both bullpens in left field in the bottom of the fourth, giving the Angels’ catcher his American League-tying seventh homer of the season.

But the A’s blew the game open with their eight-run fifth, in which they sent 13 batters to the plate and got a home run from Cust, two-run singles from Thomas and Bubba Crosby and RBI singles from Sweeney and Barton to take a 14-6 lead.

The Angels managed only one hit from the fifth through eighth innings before Anderson and Aybar singled in the ninth and Matt Brown followed with his first major league hit, a two-run double.

mike.digiovanna@latimes.com