Thomas Is Too Much for Angels : Baseball: White Sox slugger hits two-run homer in eighth off Percival, adds solo blast in ninth of 6-1 victory.

He has been the Eliot Ness of the Angel bullpen, untouchable for most of the summer, but Troy Percival finally ran into a gang from Chicago’s South Side that he couldn’t handle.

Trailing by a run in the top of the eighth inning Wednesday night, White Sox first baseman Frank Thomas drilled a full-count pitch from Percival over the left-field fence for a two-run homer that ignited a 6-1 victory over the Angels before a paid Anaheim Stadium crowd of 21,314.

More bad news awaited the Angels in their clubhouse. Just as Garret Anderson struck out to end the game, Seattle’s Jay Buhner hit a three-run home run against Minnesota to snap an eighth-inning tie and lift the Mariners to a 7-4 victory.

That moved Seattle to within five games of the first-place Angels with 15 games left, and the Angels’ magic number remained at 11. Third-place Texas also won and moved to within 6 1/2 games of the Angels.

Percival giving up a run had been about as foreign a sight in Anaheim Stadium this year as a football game. He began Wednesday night’s game having allowed only one earned run in his previous 35 2/3 innings, a sparkling 0.25 earned-run average for those 29 outings.

The rookie right-hander replaced starter Chuck Finley to start the eighth after Finley had thrown seven shutout innings, and Manager Marcel Lachemann couldn’t have been more confident about the situation.

Finley had recovered from three straight shaky outings and, making his first start on three days’ rest, had thrown only 109 pitches, allowing five hits and striking out eight. And Lachemann had his trusty closing tandem of Percival and Lee Smith ready to pitch the eighth and ninth.

Only Percival never made it out of the eighth inning and Smith never made it into the game.

“I hate to lose a game like that when Chuck had pitched so well,” Percival said. “I’m as fresh as I can be, but I just mentally wasn’t into it. I got balls up, and that’s not my style. I made bad pitches and they were good hitters.”

Robin Ventura opened the eighth with a single to right and Thomas followed with a homer just beyond the reach of left fielder Anderson to give the White Sox a 2-1 lead.

Chicago then went on to unload a season’s worth of frustration against the Angels, knocking Percival, Mike James and Bob Patterson around for three more runs in the eighth, on RBI singles by Ozzie Guillen, Lance Johnson and Tim Raines.

Finley appeared to be going strong in the seventh, but Lachemann didn’t second-guess his decision to pull the left-hander.

“You can look at it both ways,” Lachemann said. “You can push [Finley] an extra inning and, bingo, they get to him. If I had to do it over again I’d do it the same way. These things happen. Chuck pitched a hell of a ballgame for us.”

Thomas closed out the scoring with a bases-empty blast into the left-center-field bleachers off Mike Bielecki in the ninth. It was Thomas’ 36th homer of the season--moving him into second in the A.L. behind Boston’s Mo Vaughn (37)--and helped Chicago to its second victory over the Angels this season in 12 tries.

Thomas is the fifth player in baseball history to have 100 RBIs in his first five seasons. The last player to accomplish the feat was Cleveland’s Al Rosen from 1950-54.

The four hits and four runs allowed by Percival were both season highs. He hadn’t given up a run since Aug. 2, when Buhner homered off him in Anaheim, a span covering 18 2/3 innings and 16 appearances. It was only the fifth homer Percival had allowed all season.

“He’s human,” Lachemann said.

Chicago’s offensive uprising made a winner of 23-year-old right-hander Luis Andujar, who gave up only four hits, including Tony Phillips’ bases-empty home run in the fifth inning, struck out two and walked two in his second major league start. Larry Thomas pitched a scoreless eighth and ninth for the White Sox.