It’s High Time for These Angels to Make Their Move

Baseball is the game without a clock, right? There’s no game clock or shot clock, no stopwatch or timer.

But for the Angels, time’s up.

There was a sense of urgency about Wednesday night’s game against Oakland. A four-game losing streak and a 10-game trip starting Thursday. That’s not great. But it’s better now. The Angels saved the homestand by scoring a run in the bottom of the ninth and beating the A’s, 3-2.

Only April you say? Way too early to get uptight? One error, two errors, three errors, four; five games behind, six games behind, seven games behind, even more.

The Angels don’t have the luxury of lollygagging around. It is not OK for Tim Salmon to wait until the middle of May to start hitting line drives instead of fly-ball outs. It is not OK for Adam Kennedy to take a leisurely couple of weeks to make plays in the field instinctively again.

By the end of the weekend, the Angels could find themselves nine or 10 games behind Seattle. It’s only April, the Angels will argue. There are still 140 games to go. This is silly, worrying about games behind when it’s still snowing in Chicago.

No it isn’t.

It will be another six weeks before school is out. If the Angels are too far gone by then, Edison Field will be a dismal place to spend the summer. And that’s if the lights stay on.

Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium.

Those are destinations. People plan vacations to go to baseball games in those parks. Fans from all over Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia make reservations a year in advance to travel to Cincinnati to see the Reds. Cincinnati is a cool place to be if you’re in Ashland, Ky., or Huntington, W.Va. Really, it is.

The Big Ed is usually not a destination. It is more an impulse buy. On a summer morning mom and dad could wake up and decide: (1) Let’s go to the beach; (2) It’s a California Adventure kind of day; (3) Maybe a baseball game would be fun. Maybe. If the Angels are hot or fun or fighting for a division title. Or maybe not. Not if the Angels can’t field pop flies or are always playing from behind or if they’re 15 games behind Seattle on the Fourth of July.

This is a young Angel team. It could be good enough to contend in the AL West. It is not good enough to come from 10 or 12 or 15 games back.

The 6-8 record isn’t horrible if you are just looking at the 6 and the 8. What makes it bad is that the Angels are wasting seriously stellar starting pitching. Starting pitching is supposed to be the big question mark for the Angels. Right now it is their strength.

Everything else is their weakness.

The Angels are 12th of 14 teams in the American League in fielding percentage. They are ninth in hitting. They are seventh in pitching.

“We have one of the best offenses in the league,” Salmon says bravely.

“We’ll hit, I have no doubt about that,” Manager Mike Scioscia says confidently.

And maybe the Angels will. But it better be sooner rather than later. It would help if it would happen now, today, in Seattle. Against the Mariners. The team that has, Salmon says, the best pitching in the division in which all the teams are supposed to have good hitting.

Scioscia also said, defiantly, that he was not concerned about all the defensive bloopers. The errors are coming early and often. Kennedy made his second in two nights against the A’s Wednesday.

Salmon and Erstad--who have goofed this week--have said it’s hard to pick up the ball in the weird light of Orange County dusk at Edison.

We could argue that the opponents aren’t dropping three pop-ups in a single inning while the Angels are. And we could argue that major leaguers who will blame the bright sun of day for causing them to drop fly balls shouldn’t then be able to blame the setting sun of evening, too.

But whether just a weird confluence of sinking sun and dropping baseballs or just plain incompetence, teams that are 12th in fielding percentage don’t win division titles or even come close.

So here we were Wednesday night into the top of the eighth inning. Scott Schoeneweis was being masterful again.

His command of space (the strike zone) and time (the speed his pitches were traveling) was precise. Through seven innings, Schoeneweis gave up no runs.

Since the Angels were batting against Cory Lidle, the Oakland starter who brought an earned-run average of 27.00 to the mound, this seemed like a good time for the Angel hitters who are absolutely going to be good to start being better than average. They weren’t.

Schoeneweis had only a 1-0 lead going into the eighth. Oakland third baseman Eric Chavez started the inning with a double over left fielder Garret Anderson. It might have taken a spectacular play to get the out, but Anderson’s pursuit of the ball was late and his body was twisted awkwardly by the time Anderson tried to make a flailing catch.

One out later, Johnny Damon cracked a sharp line drive toward right fielder Salmon, who seemed to read the ball wrong. Could he have gotten a better jump and caught the line drive? Maybe. Could he have read the flight of the ball better and fielded it cleanly and given himself a chance to throw out Chavez at home? Absolutely.

But Salmon didn’t. Chavez scored, and so, eventually, did Damon on Jason Giambi’s double. Schoeneweis left, down 2-1 and hoping for a no-decision. He deserved better.

In the bottom of the ninth, Troy Glaus and Anderson led off with back-to-back singles. Two outs later, with Glaus taking off from second at the sound of Kennedy’s bat hitting the ball, the Angels won. Kennedy’s line drive fell in front of Damon. Glaus scored.

The clock is still moving. Just not as fast.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com