This Recipe Is a Big Hit

It has been such a struggle for the Angels to mount offensive threats, let alone score a run or two, that Manager Mike Scioscia found himself in a bit of a quandary Tuesday as he considered strategies to snap the Angels out of their lengthy funk.

“When all nine spots are soft, it’s tough to get the offensive continuity you need,” Scioscia said. “It’s like you want to make a cake and don’t have all the ingredients.”

Scioscia often turns to little ball in these situations, looking to manufacture runs with aggressive baserunning and unselfish at-bats, but the Angels left the bunt pan in the cabinet Tuesday night.

Instead, they layered a pair of two-run home runs and frosted their offensive concoction with a key late insurance run, holding on for a 5-4 victory over the Cleveland Indians before an announced crowd of 38,320 in Angel Stadium.

Garret Anderson homered in the first inning and Josh Paul homered in the fifth, as the Angels, who scored two runs in their previous 29 innings, ended a three-game losing streak. Adam Kennedy’s bases-loaded, run-scoring infield single in the eighth provided the ultimate margin of victory.

Kennedy’s hit gave the Angels a 5-3 lead and a cushion for closer Francisco Rodriguez to absorb Coco Crisp’s leadoff homer in the ninth. Rodriguez recovered to strike out Grady Sizemore and Aaron Boone but needed an assist from shortstop Orlando Cabrera to record his ninth save.

Cabrera, hitless in his last 18 at-bats, made a lunging grab of Jhonny Peralta’s grounder to the hole, fell to his knees, bounced up and fired a two-hop throw to first baseman Darin Erstad, who dug it out to end the game.

Angel right-hander Paul Byrd said he “just survived” his six-inning start, giving up three runs and eight hits, striking out three and walking none, to improve to 3-3, and the Angels, who hit a major league-low .170 in the first nine games in May, had 11 hits, their most in 10 games.

After Vladimir Guerrero singled in the first inning, Anderson hit a 93-mph fastball from Cleveland starter C.C. Sabathia into the right-center field seats for his fourth home run of the season. The single and home run ended the Angels’ string of 31 innings in which they failed to collect more than one hit.

“Garret’s home run got us going,” Paul said. “It was like we all just exhaled and said, ‘There’s the first one, let’s get back to work.’ ”

Peralta’s solo home run off Byrd to lead off the third made it 2-1, and Peralta’s double and Alex Cora’s run-scoring double in the fifth tied the score, 2-2.

But after Cabrera walked to lead off the fifth and stole second, Paul, the backup catcher who entered with a .118 average and hadn’t homered since Aug. 19, lined a 2-and-2 Sabathia pitch over the wall -- and the glove of a leaping Crisp -- in left-center for a two-out, two-run homer and a 4-2 Angel lead.

“We don’t expect anything offensively from [Paul] because he doesn’t play that much, but that homer was huge,” Byrd said. “I felt like I had to win after that.”

Byrd did. Barely.

Crisp’s two-out double and Sizemore’s RBI triple pulled the Indians within 4-3 in the top of the sixth, but Byrd caught a break when Boone’s wicked liner with the tying run on third went right to Cabrera to end the inning.

Setup man Scot Shields replaced Byrd to start the seventh and retired all six batters he faced, including strikeouts of Victor Martinez, Travis Hafner and Ben Broussard, the heart of the Cleveland order, in the eighth.

“I didn’t know much about him, but what a huge asset for a team,” Byrd said of Shields, who is 3-1 with a 1.37 earned-run average in 16 games and 19 2/3 innings. “What’s most impressive is he can get out left-handers and right-handers. It doesn’t matter. There’s a lot of quality people in that bullpen. We have a lot of closers.”