Angels’ Blyleven Goes Too Far : Baseball: He fails to get the final out of the fifth inning and the Blue Jays rally for an 8-6 victory after trailing, 6-1.

All Bert Blyleven had to do during the fifth inning Saturday was retire Candy Maldonado, which he had done twice, and he could have gone to the Angels’ dugout in happy anticipation of his 283rd victory.

“He struck out (Dave) Winfield, and I thought he was throwing well enough to get one more out,” interim Manager John Wathan said. “It’s my fault for leaving him in. I can take it.”

When Maldonado hit a 2-and-2 pitch to the fence in right-center field for a two-run triple, Blyleven’s outing ended. Capitalizing on a balk by reliever Mark Eichhorn during the sixth inning and a throwing error by Gary DiSarcina during the eighth, the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Angels, 8-6, extending their AL East lead to two games over the Baltimore Orioles and sending the Angels to their sixth consecutive loss and into last place in the AL West, .002 behind Seattle.

Blyleven lasted longer than in his previous start, a 17-pitch, five-run debacle last Sunday at Seattle, but the outcome was the same. Handed a 6-1 lead over Jack Morris (10-3) after 4 1/2 innings, Blyleven couldn’t hold it. Encouraged by a crowd of 50,418, the Blue Jays batted around during the fifth and scored five times.

After that, it was merely a matter of how the Angels would lose. The tie was broken in the sixth inning when Manuel Lee singled, took second on a balk charged to Eichhorn (1-4), went to third when Eichhorn’s pickoff attempt bounced into center field and scored on a sacrifice fly by former Angel Devon White.

“That’s what you expect from a good team,” White said of the Blue Jays’ comeback, which he capped with a run-scoring double in the eighth.

Wathan expected Blyleven to weather the storm during the fifth, but Maldonado’s triple finished his day. Blyleven, who has given up 19 hits and 16 earned runs in 10 1/3 innings in his last three outings, left the SkyDome without speaking with reporters.

“Other than that one inning, I thought he threw the ball pretty well,” Wathan said of the 41-year-old right-hander. “He wasn’t able to come inside as much as he wanted to, and he has to be able to do that to be effective. He just couldn’t get it in there.

“This was a rough one because it got away from us. When we score six runs, with our pitching staff, you hope we can win it.”

The first five Angels got hits against Morris, leading to a four-run burst that was their best first inning this season. Winfield hit his 14th homer of the season--the 420th of his career--during the second inning, but the Angels scored twice during the fifth.

But Blyleven loaded the bases in the bottom half on a double by Jeff Kent, a single by Lee and a walk to Roberto Alomar. Carter got a 1-and-0 single to center, driving in Kent and Lee, but Winfield, after missing a homer by barely five feet on Blyleven’s first 3-and-2 offering, lunged for a high curveball and struck out.

That escape was wiped out by Maldonado’s line drive. “No matter what we do, we end up losing,” Luis Polonia said. “We need to get everything together, our pitching and our defense. One thing comes one day and the next thing comes the other day.”

The balk by Eichhorn was called by second base umpire Ken Kaiser.

“He said I didn’t step to first,” Eichhorn said of Kaiser. “How can I throw the ball to first without stepping toward first? I threw over two times before with the exact same move. It put (Lee) right where Toronto needed him, in scoring position.”

The Angels’ position is 15 games under .500 for the first time since June 16, 1988. They are playing .405 baseball, worst in the major leagues.

“I hope it changes. I’ve been saying that for two months,” Polonia said. “It’s getting very frustrating, and it’s getting very late.

“Soon, it will be we’re just playing to finish the season. That’s a point you don’t want to get to. You just play and just wait three hours for the game to be over.

“We still don’t feel like we’re out. We come here and think we can win. But we’ve got to take at least half of the games on this trip. If we go ahead and lose eight or nine on this road trip, we’ll be out of it. We’ve got to have a good road trip now and try to hurt people in the second half.”