Angels Don’t Make Sacrifice Needed to Help Out Abbott

Luis Polonia said Jim Abbott had no luck at all Wednesday, and Abbott said he would rather be lucky than good.

They both would have settled for good execution by Polonia in a fifth-inning bunt situation.

Polonia’s failure to read a bunt sign contributed to the latest in a series of valiant losses for Abbott, who gave up eight hits and struck out seven in the Angels’ 2-1 loss to the Minnesota Twins before 25,629 at Anaheim Stadium.

Abbott (4-10) took the defeat stoically, at which he is becoming better at than he would like. But Polonia bemoaned the Angels’ fate and his own ill-timed gaffe.

“The way we’re playing right now, we’re just not a good team,” Polonia said. “Any team can come here and beat us, any pitcher can beat us. Anybody who is in a slump should play us if they want to get out of it.

“We don’t give up, but it’s not how hard you play the game, it’s how right you play.”

Polonia acknowledged he was wrong when he failed to bunt on a 2-and-1 count with runners on first and second and no one out in a 1-1 game. The runners had to hold when he flied to left, and although Von Hayes’ fly ball to right-center was deep enough for lead runner John Orton to tag and take third, Junior Felix struck out to end the inning.

“I thought the sign was off,” Polonia said. “That was the key play right there. If I do that, we might still be playing. You’ve got to execute right. . . . (Early in the season) we were thinking if there was a man on second, ‘I got to move him to third.’ Then we struggled and forgot how to do those things. Right now we don’t believe in anybody. Whoever gets to the plate is saying, ‘I got to do it.’ We’re just not playing the game right. We are a team, but we’re not playing as a team.

“We don’t know how to play when we’re losing and down. We play well when we’re winning, but we start losing games and everybody’s mind goes away from it.”

Polonia’s mistake was very much on the mind of interim Manager John Wathan after the Angels’ eighth loss in 10 games.

“I’m tired of missed executing,” Wathan said, his tone stern but not loud. “We don’t have that many chances to score and we’ve got to suck it up and do what we can. We’re struggling, and every situation is so important.

“Every time we don’t move a runner over, it nips us in the rear end. You score four, five, six runs a game, you don’t notice something like this. But we’re in a situation where we’re not scoring runs. . . . We gave him an opportunity on the hit-and-run and he missed a foot or two foul. On 2-and-1 he’s got to bunt. It was a critical point in the ballgame. We move him over and get a sacrifice fly, you don’t know what might happen.”

But nothing else happened offensively for the Angels, who were held to three hits by Willie Banks (3-1) over five innings. A parade of four relievers finished, with Rick Aguilera pitching a perfect ninth inning to clinch the Twins’ sixth consecutive victory--their longest streak of the season--and 13th in their last 15 games.

“This win kind of put an exclamation point on our road trip,” said second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who singled and scored the decisive run on Chili Davis’ sacrifice fly.

In maintaining a share of first place in the AL West, the Twins swept the Angels in a three-game series at Anaheim Stadium for the first time since May 7-9, 1984; their dominance last week at the Metrodome and on the road this week has given them back-to-back series sweeps over the Angels for the first time since 1988.

They have outscored the Angels, 27-5, in six games and held them to 31 hits, shutting them out three times and earning their first one-run decision Wednesday.

“Abbott stifled us pretty good and we managed to stifle them pretty good,” Twin Manager Tom Kelly said. “I don’t know if we played nine more innings if we could have scored more. Or if the Angels could have, either.”

Scoring runs has been the Angels’ problem all season, particularly when Abbott pitches. Until they scored 14 runs in his two previous starts, they averaged fewer than two runs per game in his support.

After the Twins manufactured a run in the second on Davis’ single, a groundout and Kent Hrbek’s double to right off a hanging slider, the Angels pulled even in the third. Hayes drew a two-out walk and was on the run when Felix singled to right. Hayes simply kept going when Pedro Munoz didn’t charge the ball and threw weakly to cutoff man Greg Gagne, scoring from first.

That, however, was Abbott’s run ration for the day.

“It’s kind of hard. All of a sudden you’re rationalizing everything, philosophizing about everything,” Abbott said. “It’s not enjoyable. It’s been a frustrating time.”