Angels Go in New Direction : Baseball: Anaheim defeats Minnesota, 4-2, and wins its fourth in a row. Vaughn has four hits to back pitching of Finley.

Manager Joe Maddon described his closer as “crispy” and his starting pitcher as “snappy.” That starter, Chuck Finley, said an injury he termed a strained “SI joint,” not to be confused with the SI jinx, in his right hip was “a little cranky.”

If the Angels’ choice of adjectives was a little confusing, how’s this for something bizarre and bewildering: The Angels won their fourth consecutive game Friday night, a 4-2 victory over the Minnesota Twins before 11,200 in the Metrodome, and will go for their longest winning streak of the season today.

Mo Vaughn had four hits, including a two-run homer, and three runs batted in to lead a 13-hit attack against Angel nemesis Brad Radke, Finley (9-11) gave up two runs on three hits in 7 1/3 innings, and Troy Percival, rebounding strongly from the worst slump of his career, threw a hitless ninth for his 28th save.

“Our season was lost a month and a half ago,” said Finley, who is 4-1 with a 1.74 earned-run average since the July 31 trading deadline, “so we’re just trying to finish on a positive note.”

Finley had a little extra incentive Friday night. In attendance was his college coach, Lou St. Amant, who is in town to do radio commentary for Louisiana Monroe’s college football game against Minnesota tonight.

“It was kind of weird when some of the [football] players stopped by the clubhouse before the game,” said Finley, who played at the school, then known as Northeast Louisiana, in 1984-85. “I couldn’t let my college coach down.”

He didn’t. Not Friday night, when Finley struck out seven and walked two, and not throughout his 14-year big league career.

“I always knew he had what it took if he got serious and someone pushed the right buttons,” said St. Amant, who retired as the school’s baseball coach in 1993. “Chuck was a hell-raiser. He was a good kid who worked hard, but he liked to have fun.”

Finley pleads no-contest to that charge.

“I’m still a hell-raiser, but I’m a corporate hell-raiser now,” Finley said. “He had his hands full with me. When someone got in trouble, my door was always the first one he knocked on.”

Radke, the Twins’ ace, has been just as problematic for the Angels, entering Friday’s game with an 8-2 career record and 1.57 ERA against them, but the Angels throttled the right-hander, as Tim Salmon, Ben Molina and Gary DiSarcina each added two hits.

The Angels took a 1-0 lead in the first on Salmon’s two-out double and Vaughn’s RBI single and added three in the third, which included DiSarcina’s leadoff single, Jim Edmonds’ RBI double and Vaughn’s home run to right, his 25th of the season.

The Twins scored in the third when Todd Walker singled, took second on a wild pitch, third on Cleatus Davidson’s infield single and home on Denny Hocking’s sacrifice fly.

But Finley seemed to get stronger, throwing four hitless innings from the fourth through seventh, before Walker walked and Torii Hunter singled to open the eighth.

Salmon, who leaped at the right-field wall to catch Terry Steinbach’s drive in the fourth, made a nice sliding catch of Doug Mientkiewicz’s bloop near the line after a long run, holding Walker at third.

Reliever Mark Petkovsek gave up an RBI single to Hocking but got Brent Gates to ground into an inning-ending 4-6-3 double play. After walking Marty Cordova to open the ninth, Percival retired the next three batters, giving him two saves and a win in his last three appearances after giving up 11 earned runs in 7 2/3 innings of his previous 10 appearances.