Angels Are Still Looking Down the Barrel, 7-4 : Baseball: They lose for the seventh consecutive time and fall 12 behind the Twins. Davis hits his 26th home run.

The time for excuses passed Tuesday with the Angels’ 7-4 loss to the Minnesota Twins.

The truth is ugly and apparent.

“It’s getting pathetic,” Dave Parker said after the team’s seventh consecutive defeat and 17th in 25 games since the All-Star break.

“I’m pathetic,” added Parker, who was hitless in four at-bats and drew boos from the crowd of 27,872 at Anaheim Stadium.

“This is by far the worst I’ve ever swung the bat. We can’t seem to get a break. Every break in the ballgame seems to go against us.

“This is too good of a ballclub to be where we are right now, definitely.”

All that’s definite about the Angels is that they are in a slide that seems to have no end.

“I can’t say we’re at the bottom of the barrel,” catcher Ron Tingley said, “but we’re getting down to the last drops.”

A two-run home run by former Angel Chili Davis and the pitching of rookie Willie Banks dropped the Angels 12 games out of first place Tuesday.

Davis victimized Chuck Finley (14-6) for his 26th homer of the season in the first inning, and Minnesota added two runs in the second on a walk, two singles, a sacrifice fly and a passed ball.

Wally Joyner’s two-out, two-run double in the fifth brought the Angels within 5-3, but Banks (1-0) persevered through the fifth and sixth to win his first major league start.

Angel Manager Doug Rader said: “The Twins are executing extremely well. They’re outhustling us and outthinking us and it shows.

“If (the reason for the slide) were that easy to define, we would have done something about it by now. It’s been a progressive thing and extremely disturbing.”

Of Finley’s performance, Rader said the left-hander “pitched great. Those four runs early should not have been scored and the runs later should not have been scored. We let him down.”

Finley failed to record a strikeout for the first time in 23 starts this season, and six of the runs charged to him were earned, elevating his earned-run average to 4.06.

Although his career record against Minnesota was 9-2 and his 2.23 ERA against them suggested he might have an easy time, he struggled for most of the night.

“We finally got some runs off that Finley guy,” Minnesota Manager Tom Kelly said after his team maintained its 3 1/2-game lead over the White Sox.

“We never get anything off him. He’s been a thorn in our side for a long, long time.”

They got two quick runs against Finley in the first. He hit leadoff batter Dan Gladden, who was forced at second on Chuck Knoblauch’s grounder.

However, Knoblauch took second on second baseman Luis Sojo’s wild throw past first. Davis then hit a 2-and-2 pitch over the center-field fence, extending his hitting streak to 15 games.

“Chuck made a mistake with the pitch and I got my bat on it,” said Davis, who signed with the Twins last winter as a new-look free agent.

“He threw me an off-speed pitch over the plate. It was no big deal getting a home run off Chuck. We’re good friends and we both know what we have to do.”

The Angels know what they have to do, too: win. A lot.

“It has to end sooner or later,” Rader said of the losing streak. “It had better be sooner.”

Said Tingley: “It’s one thing after another. Now the frustration, it’s there. Everybody’s getting frustrated. The players are getting frustrated, the pitchers are getting frustrated. I just don’t know what to say anymore.

“I wish we could turn it around and play like (the Twins) are now. In every at-bat, put the ball in play instead of popping it up. Those guys are swinging great bats.”

Why the Angels didn’t swing more effectively off Banks was a mystery to Tingley.

“A guy comes in from triple A and he’s excited about being here and he throws three, four miles per hour faster than usual,” Tingley said.

“But that’s no excuse. We have to stay on top of a guy if we’re going to get to him. You can’t score one here, one there because we’re not scoring those types of runs.

“If we get on top of somebody, we’ve got to bury him.”

Or be buried.