Boston’s Little Bloops Bombard Angels, 10-1

When we last checked in on the California Angels, reality had seemingly taken a sabbatical.

This curious concoction of kid pitchers and old codger hitters had suddenly been transformed into the hottest act in baseball, opening a six-game lead in the American League West while pulling out three games against the Toronto Blue Jays with stranger-than-fiction finishes.

Then came the three-day All-Star break.

Then came Thursday night’s opener of the second half, the first of 14 straight road dates for the Angels.

Final score: Boston 10, Angels 1.

Welcome back.

The weirdness that the Angels had been perpetrating on the rest of the league in recent days--rallies out of nowhere, controversial game-winning home runs--came back to deliver a counter-punch before 29,194 fans at Fenway Park. The Red Sox routed the Angels, slicing the Angels’ first-place lead over the Oakland A’s to five games.

The Red Sox did it, not with their accustomed wrecking-ball power, but like termites gnawing away through the basement floor.

There were bloops and bleeders and dribblers and squibs and errors and walks--all coming together in the second and third innings for the Red Sox. As a result, the Angels found themselves down, 10-0, before their 11th hitter had stepped into the batter’s box.

“What’s the headline for tomorrow?” Reggie Jackson wanted to know. “ ‘Bosox Blast Angels’?”

On first appearances, it looked that way. Boston sent 12 batters to the plate in an eight-run third inning to blow things apart early.

But this could hardly be classified a dynamite job by the Red Sox.

Those weren’t mortar shots that did in the Angels. They were more like short jabs with a needle.

The needle and the damage done:

In the second inning, Boston scores two unearned runs after Doug DeCinces lets a grounder by Glenn Hoffman skip through his legs. Hoffman and Rich Gedman, who had walked just before the error, both score on Dwight Evans’ single to right field.

In the third inning, Jim Rice leads off with a dunker to right for a single. Bill Buckner then bounces another Kirk McCaskill delivery over second base for another single.

McCaskill jams the next batter, Mike Easler, but Easler fists the ball to the opposite field, his lofter touching down just inside the left-field foul line for an RBI double. Hoffman then drives in another run with a single so close to being caught on the run by center fielder Juan Beniquez that Easler had to hold at second, watching with caution as Beniquez short-hopped the ball.

A single by Steve Lyons loads the bases before Marty Barrett drops another run-scoring hit into shallow right field.

McCaskill finds himself down, 5-0, out of the game . . . and wondering what in the world went wrong.

“The stuff I had tonight, I’ll take out there with me 10 times out of 10,” McCaskill said. “I’ve never seen anything like that, all those chink hits bunched together. Not in the big leagues. I’ve never seen it, I’ve never heard about it happening.”

McCaskill, 5-6 in his rookie season, hasn’t been around the big leagues all that long. But Angel Manager Gene Mauch has, and in Mauch’s view, Boston’s offensive outburst could have been filed under the heading: Bizarre.

Mauch described the Red Sox’s eight-run third inning as “a succession of funny-looking hits.” He also had this dialogue with McCaskill shortly before removing the starting pitcher from the game in the third:

Mauch: “How can you possibly pitch any better than that?”

McCaskill: “Skip, I can’t.”

Mauch told McCaskill to “just keep grinding it out.” Instead, the Red Sox just kept grinding out flimsy-looking base hits--for a pretty healthy lead.

“I kept thinking, ‘The next pitch is going to be an out. This can’t keep happening,’ ” McCaskill said. “But by that time, the ballgame was over.”

McCaskill exited with one out in the third, having thrown a total of 81 pitches. Luis Sanchez came on to issue a bases-loaded to walk to Wade Boggs, a single to Rice and a double to Buckner. Each hit drove home two runs, building Boston’s lead to 10-0 before Sanchez could get the inning’s final out.

Boston’s Bruce Hurst (6-7) seemed intent on ending that way. Through eight innings, he had the Angels blanked on five hits.

In the ninth, the Angels spoiled Hurst’s shutout bid when Darrell Miller singled, Juan Beniquez walked and Brian Downing doubled off the left-field scoreboard.

So much for the Angel highlights.

“You’ve got to look for something positive,” McCaskill said. “The way we’ve been winning ballgames, I guess we were due for one like that. I’m glad we got it out of our system.”

Mauch concurred on that thinking, calling it “the reversal theory.”

“Nothing extraordinary happened tonight,” he said. “The reversal just set in for us, a reversal of what had been going right for us. A lot of good pitches became hits tonight.”

Who said the second half is always better? Was Thursday an indication of momentum lost, an indication that the Angels’ stride (11 victories in their 13 previous games) had been broken by the All-Star break?

Mauch did grumble that “we rested for three days, got on an airplane and flew 3,000 miles for a messy thing like this.”

But he wasn’t buying the notion that three days off had cooled off the Angels.

“Everybody in this clubhouse has been around long enough,” Mauch said, “to realize that, somedays, you can throw the resin bag up there and they’ll hit it for a single to center field.”

At times Thursday, that’s just how the Red Sox and their feather-duster attack made it look.