Angels: ’95 Again, or Is It?

Rookie Darin Erstad had two hits, including his second major league home run. Garret Anderson had three hits. So did Randy Velarde. Mark Langston pitched seven strong innings.

Oh, and Don Slaught had two hits and three runs batted in. Can’t forget about Slaught.

If this is becoming routine for the Angels, it’s difficult to tell. At the moment, they’re hot and the Milwaukee Brewers were simply the latest victims.

The Angels’ 10-3 victory Thursday at County Stadium was their fourth in a row and 11th in 12 games. They are tied for second with Seattle, five games behind first-place Texas in the American League West.

What’s more, the Angels’ hot streak the past two weeks has drawn the inevitable comparisons to their torrid streak after last year’s All-Star break.

They still have a way to go to match the 17-3 mark that enabled them to go from a first-place tie on July 11 to an 11-game lead on Aug. 2 last year.

The attitude this season might be similar, but first baseman J.T. Snow said the club has severed all ties to 1995--good, bad and ugly.

“I think we’ve tried to distance ourselves from last year,” he said. “We’re a new team with a new identity. You can’t compare seasons. You can’t do the same things every year. If this game were that way, we’d just be robots. It would just be a computer game.”

Slaught, acquired from Cincinnati during spring training, can sense that the Angels learned a great lesson from last season’s rise to the top of the standings and their late-season flameout.

“The hardest thing to do is for a young guy to hit .300 for the first time,” he said. “Once he does it, he expects to do it every year. The hardest thing [for a young team] is to win the division the first time because they’ve never done it. Next time you go out and do it because you expect to.”

Handed a 9-3 lead after the fourth inning, Langston had a brief flashback to ’95. He remembered getting sloppy, chucking his normal aggressive routine in favor of a more carefree approach. He remembered not to do it again.

“I had big leads last year and I was sloppy,” said Langston, 5-2 with a 4.52 earned-run average. “It was a good learning experience. It was the first time in my career I had the offense kick in like that.

“[Big leads] can be easy [on a pitcher] and hard. I pitched like that a lot last year and lost track of the game sometimes.”

“We’ve been swinging the bats again. Now, it’s up to the pitching to limit the time in the field and get the guys back up there swinging.”

Langston gave up three runs on five hits, including Greg Vaughn’s 20th homer, in the first three innings. He hardly looked like the same pitcher in the next four innings, quieting the league’s top-scoring team.

The difference?

“Location,” Slaught said. “In the fourth, I went out there and said, ‘If [the curveball] is going to break like that, let’s just go with that.’ ”

Langston made his fifth start and earned his third victory since returning from an operation to remove damaged cartilage from his right knee May 8. Originally expected to be sidelined up to six weeks, he returned in 23 days.

“That’s a big lift for this club,” Slaught said. “We need him.”

Said Langston of Thursday’s game: “We scored a ton of runs and all of a sudden I started throwing strikes. The offense took off all the pressure.”

The Angels scored two runs in the second inning, three in the third and four in the pivotal fourth.

Erstad added a bases-empty homer in the eighth that no doubt pleased a crew from a Fargo, N.D., TV station that came to Milwaukee to chronicle the rookie outfielder’s exploits in this four-game series.

Erstad, from Jamestown, N.D., continues to attract attention. He is batting .333 with four RBIs in seven games since replacing injured center fielder Jim Edmonds, who has been sidelined because of a sprained right thumb since June 13.

Slaught slightly injured an already sore back running the bases and was replaced by Jorge Fabregas in the sixth inning, which might be the only bit of discouraging news as far as the Angels are concerned.

“My head wanted to go faster than my feet did,” said Slaught, who is not expected to miss more playing time.