Plenty of Blame for Everyone

How many Angels and Twins does it take to screw up a perfectly decent late summer Sunday afternoon in Southern California?

Forty-two.

But if you took 10 minutes to count all the names listed in the box score, you already knew that.

If you didn’t, here’s the roll call:

Abbott started for the Angels and was replaced by Bielecki, Monteleone, James, Patterson, Percival, Smith, Holzemer and Habyan, who combined to pitch to Knoblauch, Reboulet, Puckett, Munoz, Cordova, Leius, Merullo, Meares, Lawton, Masteller, Becker, Walbeck and Hale, who scored nine runs in support of Munoz, Klingenbeck, Stevens, Watkins and Mahomes, who collectively held Phillips, Easley, Edmonds, Davis, Salmon, Snow, Anderson, Myers, Schofield, Gonzales, Owen, Aldrete, Hudler, Perez, and Palmeiro to eight runs.

Nine Angel pitchers, tying the club record.

Twenty-five Angels altogether, one shy of the club record.

They pitched, they threw, they ran, they tried not to run into one other . . . and for what cause?

To blow a 7-2 lead in the fifth inning and lose in the 10th inning after Lee Smith can’t keep Dan Masteller inside the ballpark in the top of the ninth inning and Chili Davis and Tim Salmon can’t drive in the winning run from third base with one out in the bottom of the ninth and Spike Owen can’t tag Rich Becker before one-hopping a throw down the right-field line that enabled Minnesota to score the decisive run with two outs in the top of the 10th?

The Angels played 4 hours 26 minutes for that?

It’s a long way to travel to cough up a game in the standings to second-place Seattle, which has won an astounding three consecutive games--no losses since last Thursday!--to pull to five games out, the Angels’ slimmest lead since July 22.

Meanwhile, the Twins kept pace in the American League Central, staying 40 games behind Cleveland.

“Tough game to lose,” Angel Manager Marcel Lachemann assessed, and, yeah, he would say that, because Lachemann generally doesn’t curse on the record and rarely trashes his office in full view of the media and might find it difficult to field a team tonight if he benched everyone responsible for Sunday’s debacle.

A 7-2 lead, at home, with Abbott on the mound and the losingest team in the majors in the visiting dugout, with the Angels’ magic number at 14 and begging, pleading, screaming to be sliced to 13.

These are the ones the boys of October nail to the wall. Sweep it up, sweep the weekend series, move on to the White Sox and keep pushing ahead.

You grab the gimmes whenever they crop up, because there aren’t many of them in September and the preference is to use the last week of the regular season as stress-free preparation for the playoffs, instead of gripping baseballs with sweaty palms all the way to the anxious end.

“No one ever said it was going to be easy,” Owen said. “Those guys over there [the Twins] scratch and claw every time we play them. I know they’re 40 games out, but they play us hard. They’re pesky.”

And in good with the umpires, if you’re asking Owen, and several reporters did.

Owen played a hand in the go-behind run by fielding a two-out ground ball by Matt Lawton in the top of the 10th, reaching out to tag Becker ambling by--and touched no one.

Compounding the predicament, Owen then hurried a throw to first base, giving the baseball a nice tour of the dirt alongside the right-field box seats and sending Becker around to score.

Officially, it was scored a two-base error.

To Owen’s way of thinking, it was a third-base umpire error.

“The guy ran six feet out of the baseline,” Owen said of Becker. “It’s ridiculous. A horrible call. And he wasn’t trying to get out of the way of me fielding the ball--he was trying to avoid the tag. The guy was so far out of the baseline, he actually ended up on the grass.”

Unlike most football coaches 30 minutes after a game, Owen claimed to have already seen the tape and said, “I started to laugh. It’s a joke. I can’t tell you how far out of the baseline he was. He was so far out of the baseline, he had to slow down and turn around to reach third base.”

Third-base umpire Rick Reed had a different take, leaving Owen with only one option.

Throw the ball.

Shouldn’t that have been his first option, fundamentally speaking--with two outs, take the out at first?

“I ain’t gonna second-guess myself, man,” Owen said. “The guy was right there. Why make a throw?

” . . . I’ll take the heat. I threw it away. I still should have thrown [Lawton] out. I made a bad throw. But there’s no excuse for the call on that play.”

Owen took the heat, but too many other hands stoked this fire.

How can Abbott not hold a 7-2 lead against Kirby Puckett, Chuck Knoblauch and seven other guys who will never be confused with Harmon Killebrew? Abbott couldn’t even make it out of the fifth inning, leaving after he had yielded five runs while recording 14 outs.

How can Smith, baseball’s all-time saves leader, leave one in the ninth-inning wheelhouse of one Dan Masteller, who, with one swing, doubled his major league home run total?

How can Owen and Rex Hudler lead off the bottom of the ninth by reaching base and not break the tie with Jim Edmonds, Davis and Salmon due up next?

“We should’ve scored in the ninth inning,” Owen said.

“We should have done a lot of things. They scored the winning run on [my] play, but we should have put that game away long before that.”

There comes a time, in the course of every division winner’s season, when you have to put the hammer down. Sunday, the Angels were handed the tool box, but they dropped the key down the drain.