Angels hang on to hope

There is no crying in baseball. Tom Hanks told us that in a movie.

The Angels deserve dispensation. They could be sitting around in the dugout every night, drowning in their own pool of tears, and nobody would blame them.

The 2009 Angels, only one season removed from the dazzling 100 wins of 2008, have been hit by the perfect storm. Clouds have come from everywhere and figuratively collided over Angel Stadium.

The thunder and lightning brought hail and wind, then tornadoes and cyclones. The best regular-season team last year is off to one of the worst starts this year. It would be understandable if Angels players were seen running and screaming away from black cats.

There has been a cascade of injuries. That’s part of the game but not quite like this. The Angels started Friday night’s game against the Seattle Mariners with seven players on the disabled list, including John Lackey, Kelvim Escobar, Vladimir Guerrero and Ervin Santana. That’s like trying to run a cruise ship without radar and midnight snacks.

This is not a baseball team. It is a hospital ward.

Most of the current Angels pitching staff are recognizable only to their mothers. Friday night’s starter, right-hander Shane Loux, once went four years, 10 months and 12 days between major league appearances. He had a career record of 1-5, an earned-run average of 5.95 and was in a jam right from the start.

Injuries are one thing. Chips fall, not always in your lap.

Death is another, and the horror that has been visited upon the Angels in that regard is almost unspeakable. When 22-year-old Nick Adenhart was killed in an auto collision April 9, just hours after turning in the best pitching performance of his major league career, the entire organization was knocked on its back, as were hundreds of thousands of fans.

This was a team already wearing a diamond-shaped decal on its uniform sleeve in honor of deceased special assistant Preston Gomez. Now there is a No. 34, Adenhart’s, in a patch over each heart. Angels uniforms are running out of grief space.

Adenhart died 16 days ago. So did the Angels’ swagger. We would expect no less.

“Most of these kids in this clubhouse never lost anybody on their team, never experienced anything like this,” says Torii Hunter, at 33 among the veteran leaders. “Matter of fact, neither have I.”

This is the kind of thing that can destroy a team, kill a season before it has a chance to begin. The excuse is built-in, ready-made. Our teammate died. We had lots of injuries. They’d say it. We’d would write it. Fans, for the most part would accept it.

But there are reasons to believe that won’t happen here. You can sense the pilot lights starting to come back on. The Angels are hanging on, waiting for the big guns to return, fighting for survival. The body parts move, hoping the hearts will follow.

The team held a private memorial service for Adenhart on Thursday, then won a scratch-and-scramble game over the Detroit Tigers that night, sparked by Chone Figgins’ two-run bunt with the bases loaded.

“We had some closure,” Hunter says of the memorial service. “Some guys even told some funny stories about Nick.”

Mostly, the Angels are unlikely to roll over and pack it in because of the rock sitting in their dugout. Manager Mike Scioscia made his reputation in the majors as a catcher who refused to allow players in other uniforms to cross his home plate. That same resolve will serve well in crucial weeks to come.

That his players might use all that has happened as an excuse to cave is not even on Scioscia’s radar. He calls Adenhart’s death something “not about our pain, but their pain, Jim and Janet Adenhart’s. They lost a child. That is beyond my comprehension.”

He says the players have a haven in just playing the game. He says the boisterousness common after victories has started to return to the clubhouse. He doesn’t say they’ll be all right, that injured players will return, that time will heal, that the cream that is a healthy Angels team will rise to the crop.

He doesn’t have to. He is the rock.

Friday night, Loux gave up 11 hits and seven runs over four innings and the struggle continued.

But the Angels body parts kept moving. Mike Napoli hit a towering home run and Howie Kendrick made a daring dash from first to third that got a lot of pulses going again. The throw bounced off the head of Angels third base coach Dino Ebel as Kendrick slid head first into third. The ball ricocheted into the stands and Kendrick scored.

But first-place Seattle prevailed, 8-3.

Afterward, fans filed past the impromptu memorial for Adenhart in front of the stadium. Lots of caps, T-shirts, teddy bears.

And one potted plant, living, growing.

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com.