Angels Get to Play Spoiler

He endured one of baseball’s worst collapses as an Angel in 1995 and now finds himself amid the Texas Tumble of ’96.

But utility player Rene Gonzales says there’s no comparison between last year’s Angel team, which blew an 11-game, early August lead, and this year’s Ranger club, which continued a potentially epic free-fall with a 6-5, 10-inning loss to the Angels in front of 18,860 in Anaheim Stadium on Friday night.

“I really feel like we’re going to win this thing, as opposed to last year, when I didn’t feel that way,” Gonzales said before the game. “Just look at our clubhouse. Guys are laughing, having fun. There’s no sense of urgency in here.”

Really? If that’s so, why was a copy of a Dallas Morning News editorial imploring the Rangers to win the American League West--”Rally Time!” read the headline--taped to the clubhouse door?

And why was Sam McDowell, director of the team’s psychology program, conducting one-on-one counseling sessions with Ranger players before the game?

“We’ll see how good you are,” Ranger reliever Mike Henneman told McDowell when he entered the clubhouse. “We’ll see if you can help this . . . team.”

Replied McDowell: “I guess I have my work cut out for me.”

Indeed, the Ranger lead over Seattle fell to one game after Garret Anderson’s two-out, two-run double in the bottom of the 10th off reliever Mike Stanton scored pinch-runner Dick Schofield and Rex Hudler.

Ex-Angel Mark McLemore’s RBI single to left off reliever Mike James, which scored Dean Palmer from second base in the top of the 10th inning, gave Texas a 5-4 lead.

The Rangers took a 3-0 lead on Darryl Hamilton’s solo homer in the first and Palmer’s two-run homer in the third, but the Angels tied the score with two runs in the third and one in the fourth.

J.T. Snow’s error on Hamilton’s routine grounder allowed Texas to take a 4-3 lead in the sixth. Angel catcher Todd Greene’s first Anaheim Stadium homer, in the seventh, made the score 4-4, and the Angels completed the comeback in the 10th.

They close the season with nine more games against the Rangers and Mariners and would love nothing more than to spoil both teams’ seasons.

“We want to stick it to everyone in our division, because the whole division has been pounding us for 1 1/2 years,” Troy Percival said. “We have to send a message to these guys for next year, that we’re not going to be anyone’s whipping boys.”

The Rangers, surprisingly, have been the whipping boys of the West, with a 12-19 record against division opponents, but their record against the East (42-20) has allowed them to hold first place for all but four of the 173 days this season.

The first playoff berth in the franchise’s 36-year history seemed imminent a week and a half ago, but that changed when the Rangers were swept by Seattle in a four-game series this week.

Outside of a 6-0 loss in the first game, the Rangers weren’t blown out by the Mariners, who won the next three by 5-2, 5-2 and 7-6 scores. But a potent Ranger offense that ranks third in the league in hits, fourth in runs and fifth in homers had only 14 hits in the first three games.

Whereas the Angel collapse of ’95 was slow and torturous, dragging on for weeks, the Ranger collapse has been sudden, the equivalent of being hit over the head with a sledgehammer.

“We’ve been telling guys since spring training it’s OK to be nervous, but don’t panic,” Manager Johnny Oates said. “Regardless of what happens, baseball will go on and there will be another season next year.”