Finley Lets Angels Clear the Air, 8-4

On the morning after pitcher Bert Blyleven tore into his teammates in a postgame tirade by saying that the Angel offense “stinks,” he found a cluster of bats in his locker.

“I was told I’m hitting fourth today,” Blyleven said with a wry smile before the Angels 8-4 victory over the Boston Red Sox before 34,399 in Anaheim Stadium Sunday.

The Angels held a 40-minute pregame meeting to air responses to Blyleven’s comments and to try to right a team that had lost nine of its past 10 games and 18 of its past 24.

And by the end of the afternoon, the odor of Blyleven’s words had grown faint.

“We came out smelling pretty good,” first baseman Wally Joyner said.

The eight runs and 12 hits both equaled season highs, and it is a measure of how much the Angels have struggled that the other time they scored eight runs was in a 10-8 loss to Seattle.

It is too soon to call Blyleven the instrument of the Angel turnaround. For one thing, it is only one game. For another, there was the timing.

“You going to give Bert that much credit, him knowing that Chuck (Finley) was pitching today?” Joyner said. “It has happened in the past, having a meeting before your ace pitches.”

Finley pitched a shutout in his last start, a 6-0 Angel victory Tuesday that was the team’s only victory in the past eight games. He went 7 1/3 innings Sunday, giving up four runs on eight hits and winning his team-leading fifth game against two losses. The four earned runs were the first he has given up at home and increased his earned-run average from 1.58 to 2.09.

He was one player who had little to do with the pregame meeting, sitting in on only about the last 10 minutes.

“They can hold meetings if they want to,” Finley said. “I didn’t have nothing to do with it. I didn’t want to hear a lot of negative (talk) before I started to pitch.”

The game marked the fourth time this season that Finley has won a game after an Angel loss, casting him in a role that Blyleven played last year.

“He’s been the stopper for us,” said catcher Lance Parrish, who did his part as well, finishing the day three for four with three runs batted in, including one on a solo homer in the eighth inning. It was his fifth home run of the season.

“If anybody was capable of turning this around, it was Chuck,” Parrish said.

He had to struggle to do it.

The Angels spotted him a 2-0 lead in the second inning when Parrish’s two-out double drove in Joyner and Devon White.

Finley gave up three runs in the fifth inning on two singles, doubles by Dwight Evans and Carlos Quintana and a triple by Ellis Burks, and the Angels trailed, 3-2.

It looked like more of the big-inning troubles that have hounded the Angels in recent games. But they came back to tie the score in the bottom of the inning when Donnie Hill singled home Parrish.

Jack Howell, banished to the bottom of the order after going one for 26, drove in the game-winning run in the sixth.

With one out and runners on second and third, White, a switch-hitter, was at the plate to face Dennis Lamp, a right-hander who had relieved starter Eric Hetzel in the fifth. Boston Manager Joe Morgan elected to walk White intentionally, loading the bases but setting up the double play by pitting Lamp against Parrish, a right-handed hitter.

Parrish struck out in his only unsuccessful at-bat of the day, bringing up Howell.

Howell went to a full count before driving in Joyner and Johnny Ray with a single up the middle that gave the Angels a 5-3 lead.

Lamp (0-1) took the loss.

The Angels scored twice more in the seventh inning on Joyner’s RBI single and Ray’s sacrifice fly.

Manager Doug Rader, who has insisted that the team has been very close to breaking out of its slump, was obviously pleased with Sunday’s results.

“I think the whole approach today was so much better,” Rader said. “Everything you do is affected by the frame of mind you’re in, thanks to what Bert said in the paper. A lot of things were resolved because of what he said. I don’t approve of the forum very much, but I do approve of the content.”

Rader said the meeting was not held to chastise Blyleven.

“I’m not going to tell anybody how to do his business,” Rader said. “You hope it’s done in a constructive way.”

But the meeting was held.

“Just so there were no hard feelings or animosities created at all, we discussed it as a team,” Rader said. “I think overall it was a positive thing that happened.”

Joyner held no animosity.

“Lately, we’ve been stinking it up,” Joyner said. “I don’t have any problem with what Bert said yesterday, outside of that he did it of frustration. It was the truth. . . . Sometimes the truth hurts.”

Joyner cautioned against cause-and-effect thinking.

“I don’t think what happened in the newspaper overnight had anything to do with the win today,” he said. “What happened in the meeting did. . . . Today’s taken care of. But there’s a lot more games to be played, a lot more work to be done.”

As he spoke, Joyner spotted Blyleven across the clubhouse.

“Hey, Bert! he called. “How’d we do today?”

Blyleven signaled back to him.

“Thumbs up, thumbs up!” Joyner said. “It’s Siskel and Ebert!”

Angel Notes

Dwight Evans’ fourth-inning double made him the fourth Red Sox player to reach 4,000 total bases, joining Carl Yastrzemski, Ted Williams and Jim Rice. He is the 46th major league player to reach 4,000. . . . Angel outfielder Luis Polonia was not in the lineup Sunday, the day after making a two-base error on a ground ball to left field that allowed a run to score. But he said he did not think he was left out of the lineup because of the error. “The grass is pretty long here,” Polonia said. “They hit a ball in the grass and it goes like a snake. People who have been around this ball park know that. I feel guilty just like anybody else. I go play out there and I make mistakes, just like I do a lot of good things.”

ANGEL ATTENDANCE Sunday’s attendance: 34,399

1990 (18 dates): 599,637

1989 (18 dates): 510,227

Increase: 89,410

1990 average: 33,313