Parrish Homer Adds to Davis’ Disappointment

Anything could have happened, Mark Davis was saying.

“He could have popped it up,” he said.

But Lance Parrish did not pop it up. He knocked Davis’ two-out, ninth-inning fastball out of the park Monday night, giving the Angels a 3-2 victory over the Kansas City Royals and giving the Royals their seventh consecutive loss.

Davis would like to believe that he is close to breaking out of the form that has been a painful disappointment this season, both for him and the team that is paying him $13 million over four years, the team that viewed his 44 saves for the Padres last year as the final piece to the Royals’ puzzle.

“I felt I was throwing the ball good tonight,” Davis said. “He hit it well. He had to take the ball out of the park to beat me, and he did it.”

With that, Davis took his third loss of the season against one victory. He has five saves.

Mike Macfarlane, the Royals’ catcher, and John Wathan, the manager, both agreed with Davis.

They thought he had good stuff.

“We really felt Mark Davis threw the ball pretty well,” Wathan said. “He got beat by one pitch. He hit it well, to the deepest part of the field. When he first hit it, I thought it was just a fly ball.”

It wasn’t, of course.

“Everybody is rooting so hard for Davis, every time he goes out there,” Wathan said. “Just as he seems to be getting the good innings he needs to build his confidence, something like this happens to take him down a peg.”

Those who have watched Davis this season agreed that this is the best he has looked in some time.

Before Monday, he last pitched Friday at Oakland, retiring the two batters he faced. But he has blown three of his last four save opportunities, and is five for nine overall. For the most part, he has come in as a middle reliever, with no save opportunity.

This time, he came on in the eighth, with Tom Gordon leaving the game with a muscle strain below his right elbow.

In the ninth, he struck out Chili Davis and Dave Winfield, and was working on Parrish.

But it was Parrish who got the job done.

The Royals would like to believe that they are close to turning the corner on what has become a wretchedly disappointing season. But such a thing is hard to say with conviction from 16 games behind the Oakland Athletics, who swept the Royals in Oakland over the weekend.

For the second day in a row, one run came between the Royals and the other team. Oakland beat them, 3-2, Sunday. The Angels, once expected to stand toe-to-toe together with Kansas City in challenging Oakland, did the same to the Royals Monday.

“They’re the type of losses you want to look at positively if you can,” said Davis. “If you dwell on it, it will only bring you down.”

The Royals are in the middle of a stretch of 13 games against the A’s and the Angels, and that alone is bringing them down.

“We wanted to do well on our home stand and then continue that on the road,” Davis said. “We haven’t played the way we wanted to. We have to come back and battle as hard as we can. We battled, but they did the thing they needed to do to beat us. There’s not much you can do about that.”

Today, they try again.

“Tomorrow I want to be able to throw the same type of stuff I did today,” Davis said.