It’s a soggy, sub-filled loss for the Angels in Cleveland

It is the moments that make a season, for wonderful or for awful, and amid their 41/2-hour, twice-delayed debacle of a defeat Thursday night at Progressive Field, the Angels experienced one of their most awkward to date.

It was the bottom of the sixth inning, the outcome long since decided, and Angels Manager Mike Scioscia hewed to it with his decision to remove his top players from the field.

Shane Robinson replaced Mike Trout in center field. Johnny Giavotella came in to play second base, the infield shifting so Yunel Escobar could rest. Gregorio Petit took over for Kole Calhoun in right field, playing the position for the first time in his professional life. Catcher Geovany Soto replaced Jefry Marte at first base, he too playing the position for the first time in the major leagues.

Two outs into the experiment, Indians catcher Roberto Perez popped up a ball 30 or 40 feet in the air, just behind first base. Soto moved under it, shuffled back at the last second and squeezed his glove around the ball, but it bounced out of his glove and around Giavotella’s face before finding its way onto the dirt.

This was, maybe, the lowest point of the 2016 Angels’ season, their 14-4 loss to Cleveland stretching their losing streak to a season-long seven games.

“Tonight, we didn’t give ourselves a chance after the first couple innings,” Scioscia said.

With Tim Lincecum demoted to triple A, the Angels turned to Jhoulys Chacin as their starter, and he fared even worse than Lincecum had in his nine major league starts. Chacin retired four Indians and let nine of them reach base, seven runs scoring against him, the biggest blow being a line drive to left that Ji-Man Choi misplayed into a three-run double.

“When I was coming to the plate,” Chacin said, “they were ready for me.”

Newcomer Brett Oberholtzer hardly fared better in relief, yielding six runs while notching six outs. Mike Napoli pounded a three-run home run against the left-hander, troubling his old team once again.

In the five seasons since he was nearly inexplicably traded for Vernon Wells and his massive contract, Napoli has hounded the Angels for a .338 average, .450 on-base percentage, and .706 slugging mark. The team is almost wholly anew — Jered Weaver is the only Angels player Napoli knows, he said — but the torment continues.

He has hit 19 home runs in 201 at-bats.

“He’s tougher on us than anybody,” Scioscia said.

Asked after Thursday’s loss whether he ever wished that the trade had not happened, Scioscia shook his head.

“We’re not gonna go back to that,” he said.

For the Angels, the few positives were concentrated at the game’s beginning. Punching his way out of two rough days on the Chicago leg of this three-city trip, Trout jabbed a down-the-middle fastball from Corey Kluber out to right field in the first inning. Cliff Pennington poked a solo shot in the third and later drove in a run with a double play.

Play stopped first in the bottom of the fourth inning, for 31 minutes, and then in the middle of the seventh, for 39. The rain began two hours before first pitch, at times torrential, and was in the forecast for much of the night, and will be throughout the weekend while the Angels are in town. Saturday’s game, in particular, appears unlikely to be played sans interruption.

With the bench emptied, designated hitter Albert Pujols stayed in the game throughout, and he led off the exceptionally low-leverage top half of the ninth with a vicious cut to center field. The double moved him into sole possession of seventh place in the sport’s history for extra-base hits, one more than Ken Griffey Jr. and Rafael Palmeiro.

Pujols scored a last run on a Jett Bandy sacrifice fly.

pedro.moura@latimes.com

Twitter: @pedromoura