Angels Prevail With Some Longshots : Baseball: For a change, they beat a left-hander with homers by Curtis, Fitzgerald and Felix in victory over Blue Jays.

The Angels aren’t likely to win many home run contests this season, and they are even less likely to beat left-handed pitchers.

Yet, they succeeded on both fronts Wednesday night at Anaheim Stadium in their 5-4 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays, hitting three homers to overcome two by Toronto. In the process, they defeated left-hander Jimmy Key before a crowd of 22,178.

“Surprise, surprise,” Angel starter Chuck Finley said, smiling.

A victory for Finley would have been the most pleasant surprise of all, but an eighth-inning homer by Dave Winfield off Joe Grahe erased that possibility. Still, Junior Felix’s homer off Key (6-8) leading off the eighth, a drive that glanced off the glove of left fielder Candy Maldonado and over the fence, allowed the Angels to record their fourth victory in 22 decisions against left-handed starters and allowed Grahe to even his record at 3-3.

“This is the most upset I’m going to be leaving the ballpark after a win, that’s for sure,” said Grahe, who was six for six in saves until Winfield slammed a 1-and-1 pitch for his 422nd career homer. “If I get a chance to save one for Chuck, I want to nail that sucker down. It’s just tough for Chuck to have it turn out this way, but to take two of three from the Blue Jays after being swept there (July 3-6), that’s nice. It’s nice that after I let them tie it, this team didn’t fold up shop.”

The Blue Jays squandered a chance to expand their American League East lead, but Key said they are not watching the standings too closely yet. “The frustrating thing is we’re trying to win series, and California beat us two out of three,” he said. “That’s what’s more frustrating, not that we didn’t gain on Baltimore. We’ve still got a few more games to play before we can start worrying about what they do. We’ve still got to go out and win some more games.”

They didn’t win Wednesday because of Felix’s sixth homer of the season and first since May 12. It came on Key’s first pitch of the eighth inning, an off-speed pitch Felix anticipated.

“Jimmy Key throws slow, so I was waiting for that,” said Felix, a former Blue Jay. “You get a lot of motivation playing against these guys because (Luis) Sojo and me, we come here from there. Winfield would like to beat us and make this team look bad, like Sojo and me, we want to make Toronto look bad. It’s a big satisfaction to beat them.”

Added together, Felix’s six homers, Mike Fitzgerald’s five and Chad Curtis’ eight don’t equal the 20 hit by Joe Carter. That includes the first-pitch homer Carter hit to give Toronto a 1-0 lead in the first, a drive Curtis matched in the bottom of the inning to become the first Angel to lead off a game with a homer since Luis Polonia’s inside-the-park homer off Oakland’s Dave Stewart last Aug. 9.

The Angels scored two runs in the third on a walk and a steal by Curtis, two infield hits and two fly balls, but the Blue Jays pulled even with runs in the fourth and sixth. Winfield made it 3-2 with his 2,800th career hit, a single that scored Roberto Alomar after Alomar walked and stole second; and Pat Tabler tied it with a single to left, after the Angels intentionally walked Maldonado.

“They’ve played well against us this year,” Winfield said of the Angels, who won five of 12 games in the season series. “The long ball got us tonight.”

The long ball got the Angels a 4-3 lead in the seventh, when Fitzgerald lined a 2-and-2 pitch to left for his first homer since May 24, but Winfield tied it again with his 16th homer of the season.

“It was a dogfight because those guys don’t give up,” Fitzgerald said, “but we showed we can come back, and that was the key.”

Felix’s homer made for the decisive comeback.

“I see a lot more fight on this team now,” Curtis said. “If we go down by a run, we scrap back and get one of our own. A couple of weeks ago, you got the feeling if we were down by one, we were out of it. Now we have confidence.”

Finley didn’t have a victory to show for his seven-inning outing, but he was encouraged by his solid effort and the team’s comeback. “It’s not our goal to win the AL East or win the AL. Our goal is to have a good second half and finish real strong,” said Finley, who has one victory in his last 16 starts and is 2-9. “That we were able to grind with these guys and hit ‘em out, that was a good sign. We’ve got to be happy with this one.”