Yankee Homers Get to Finley, Angels, 7-2

He reviewed tapes of the game for perhaps half an hour, searching for the smallest of clues to explain his woes. Still, after Chuck Finley watched replays of his struggles during the Angels’ 7-2 loss to the Yankees on Monday, he was no wiser.

“I have to just fight through this thing. Right now I’m struggling as far as some things I want to do,” Finley said after walking six and giving up two home runs, including a three-run shot by Danny Tartabull that broke a 2-2 tie in the seventh inning.

Mike Stanley’s two-run homer in the second inning and Tartabull’s blast were the first this season off Finley with men on base. But, with the Angels squandering scoring chances against Greg Cadaret (3-3), Finley could ill afford to give up anything.

Finley (1-2) has yielded nine home runs in 32 1/3 innings, or one every 3.59 innings. Last season, he gave up 23 homers in 227 1/3 innings, or once every 9.88 innings. He’s baffled by the increase.

“It just seems like everything I leave up in the strike zone, they’re hitting out,” Finley said after the Angels’ fifth loss in their last seven games. “Before, I was in bad counts and they’d be hitting it out. I’m just not getting the job done. . . . I feel if I can get everything together, all this nonsense will stop. I pray.”

Finley walked the leadoff batter in each of the first four innings but suffered only when Stanley followed Tartabull’s fourth-inning walk with a homer to the short porch in right field.

Finley struck out Pat Kelly to open the seventh. Mike Gallego singled to left field, and Don Mattingly struck out. Roberto Kelly, who had grounded into two double plays and struck out, was all that stood between Finley and preserving the tie.

“It was a real good pitch,” Finley said. “It’s a game of inches. A foot either way and we’d be out of the inning. Being so close to leaving the seventh with the game tied is just very, very frustrating.”

Kelly grounded that pitch through the right side for a single. Tartabull, who bypassed the Angels to sign a five-year, $25.5 million contract with the Yankees last winter, then crashed a 1-and-0 pitch into a brisk wind for his second homer with the Yankees and first at Yankee Stadium, a feat applauded by the crowd of 13,250.

“When you hit a ball like that as a hitter, you know you got it all,” said Tartabull, who missed 16 of the Yankees’ first 36 games because of injuries to his wrist and hamstring. “The only question was whether it would fight the wind, because it was so high.”

Angel Manager Buck Rodgers didn’t second-guess his decision to leave Finley in to face Tartabull.

“He gets right-handers out, for the most part, better than left-handers. He had one guy to get to get out of the inning,” Rodgers said. “He threw a couple of fastballs to Kelly, and he nubbed one to right field on a good forkball, so I thought Chuck was still OK. . . .

“I let him pitch to (Tartabull) because he had good stuff and he was throwing better the last four innings than the first three. He just threw him a forkball that didn’t fork and he hit it nine miles.”

After taking a 2-0 lead against Cadaret in the first inning on two walks and RBI singles by Rene Gonzales and Gary Gaetti, the Angels couldn’t get to him again. “You give up two runs in the first, you’re right away trying to throw up sandbags to stop the bleeding,” Cadaret said.

The Angels might have scored in the third inning, but Roberto Kelly made a diving stab of Lee Stevens’ bloop to short center field with a man on third.

They had two on with two out in the fourth, but Gonzalez grounded out.

Gonzales was thrown out by Jesse Barfield while trying to take third base in the fifth inning on Gaetti’s single to right field, and Chad Curtis ruined a potential threat in the seventh when he was caught trying to steal third.

“This is the only game on this trip we didn’t play good baseball,” said Rodgers, whose team is 1-3 and has scored only five runs in four games. “We had enough opportunities that if we executed a little bit, we would have scored four, five runs. You have to give Kelly and (right fielder Jesse) Barfield credit for making two good defensive plays, but we didn’t execute.”