This Time, Angels’ Ace Not Enough

And in the other Canada-Southern California series . . .

You really don’t want to hear about it.

Two countries split two games Tuesday night, just the way everybody figured.

The hockey team from Los Angeles won by three goals in Montreal, and the baseball team from the province of Ontario won by eight runs in Anaheim.

Anaheim, home of the first-place-on-June-1, who-needs-a-bullpen, tour-the-majors-for-$270,000-or-less Fighting Angels.

Anaheim, home of Scott Douglas (Cy) Sanderson.

Anaheim, where the Toronto Blue Jays have spent the past 48 hours schooling our precocious hometown heroes on the finer points of championship-caliber baseball.

Tuesday, it was Defending World Champions 8, Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood 0.

The day before, it was 10-5, take a guess.

One day, Toronto tees off for five home runs in nine innings, but four come against John Farrell, and, well, Farrell is 2-6 with a 5.88 earned-run average and a right arm that didn’t throw a big-league pitch in 1991 or 1992 while recovering from two elbow operations. These things are going to happen.

But then, the Angels revert to the top of the rotation, to Sanderson and his league-leading seven victories and a pregame ERA (2.82) that was 10th lowest among American League starters and just .04 behind Roger Clemens. Sanderson’s opposition is Al Leiter, he of the 6.55 ERA and the notoriously tender fingertips, which forced him again out of this one after 5 1/3 innings.

Pre-blister syndrome was the word from the Blue Jay clubhouse.

But after those 16 Angel outs, Toronto held a 4-0 lead, soon to double by the middle of the seventh inning. Sanderson served up two more home runs in the second inning--on back-to-back pitches, to John Olerud and Ed Sprague--and was down, 3-0, before most of the 18,198 non-Kings fans had cracked open their programs.

Leiter, meanwhile, was never heavier. He retired the first nine Angels he faced, yielded a single line-drive single to Luis Polonia and then handed off a one-hitter to the Blue Jay bullpen, which held the Angels hitless until Tim Salmon’s infield dribbler in the bottom of the ninth.

Two hits measuring no more than a combined 200 feet are not going to win many games for Sanderson or Sandy Koufax. But this was the first time this season when Sanderson left the Angels stranded on his own, yielding seven runs and nine hits in six-plus innings.

“I put us in a hole early,” Sanderson said, “and I just can’t do that to this team. It’s a hard thing to ask, to come back from that big a deficit.”

The Angels weren’t about to come close on this evening. “They kicked our butts,” Buck Rodgers said, and the beating was so thorough, so complete, that the house of cards question immediately resurfaced in the Angel clubhouse afterward--as it is likely to do on odd-numbered days all summer.

“People are going to look at us and raise their eyebrows all year,” Sanderson said. “We can’t do anything about it but play. There are always going to be critics.”

Rodgers, too, refused to buy the litmus test argument, that this three-game set might provide an indication as to how his junior Angels stack up against the best in the business.

“How could it?” he asked, staring at the oversized navy and silver Angel schedule on his office wall. “I’d like there to be a big test in September, the next time we play them, but right now, everybody’s jockeying for position.

“Nobody’s got their club set yet. People have had injuries. Seattle’s just getting its people back right now. Oakland, too. We’ve been buying time.

“We’ve played a little better than we were expected to play, which has enabled our people in triple-A to develop. Now, they have two months under their belts. Now, if something happens and we’re in a race, we’re in a position to bring up some people who can help.”

These people are named Russ Springer, Jerry Nielsen and Troy Percival, they presently reside in the Vancouver bullpen and the reseeding of the Angel relief corps has already begun. Chuck Crim was discarded Monday, replaced by call-up Darryl Scott, who was thrown into the fray Tuesday, working a quick 1 2/3 innings.

He could be the first of many.

Rodgers, who just might be the Last Honest Man in Baseball, admits that “We had no idea we’d be in first place on June 1. But Sanderson and Langston and Finley have been pitching phenomenally, and our kids are playing their butts off. J.T. Snow carried us early, now some others are pitching in.

“We’re just hamming-and-egging this thing, a different guy doing the big job each day . . . These last two games have been very conspicuous, because our starting pitching is No. 1 in the league and Toronto’s scored seven runs against our starting pitchers in back-to-back games. That’s very uncharacteristic.”

At least through the first of June.

The wheels haven’t fallen off yet, the Angels insist. But the Blue Jays have thrown a couple of gnarly potholes at them. For the first time in this improbable season-to-date, the shock absorbers are getting a workout.