PITTSBURGH — Angels pitchers have very little margin for error these days, and certainly not enough to overcome it when one bad inning includes a grand slam.
Tyler Anderson gave up a third-inning grand slam to Edward Olivares and that was all the Pittsburgh Pirates needed to beat the Angels, 4-1, on Monday night.
Anderson didn’t give up anything else in 6⅓ innings, which was little consolation on a night when the Angels (12-23) dropped a season-worst 11 games under .500.
“We’re in a tough stretch right now,” Anderson said. “It seems like when we do make a mistake like tonight, you think you might get away with that. Might get a foul ball or something. When things are going really well, it seems like when you make a mistake or mental mistake like that, you kind of get away with a little bit.
“It just seems like for all of us, we’re just in a bad stretch, so that one you make really hurts you. And it’s happened to all of us. It’s not always that way. It’s just one of those stretches right now. If we keep doing our job, we’ll be OK.”
Manager Ron Washington lauded the performance of Anderson, despite the homer. He said that over the last seven games the Angels starters have been better. They have a 4.95 ERA in that span, but the starters have made it past the fifth inning in every game, and through the sixth four times.
“Our starting pitching is starting to come around,” Washington said. “Now we have to do something offensively to support them. And we have to stop taking ourselves out of innings.”
Washington was referring to one forgettable moment in the top of the fourth, just after Anderson gave up the grand slam to put the Angels in a 4-0 hole.
Nolan Schanuel was at first base when Mickey Moniak hit a ball to the fence in left-center. Third base coach Eric Young Sr. waved Schanuel home. Schanuel went into the plate standing up and he was tagged out.
The rule of thumb is that you should never make the first out at home, so a runner shouldn’t be sent unless he’s going to make it easily. Down by four runs at the time, it was an especially poor moment to scuttle a potential big inning before it even started.
“If we try to score that run right there, we got to be 100% that he can cross the plate,” Washington said. “We had two runners in scoring position with the best part of the lineup we have coming up.”
Although Young was sending Schanuel, the rookie said the mistake was his, especially since he didn’t slide.
“One hundred percent my mistake,” Schanuel said. “Baseball 101. Kind of just a mess up moment.”
Matt Thaiss was thrown out at the plate on Sunday in Cleveland, but that was a more reasonable gamble because there were two outs.
The reason the Angels are pushing the envelope so much on the bases is that they don’t have much power in their lineup, which puts more pressure on their pitchers.
Anderson had trouble in two innings, the second and third. He escaped a jam in the second with a strikeout, but in the third he couldn’t.
Anderson walked leadoff man Andrew McCutchen and No. 3 hitter Ke’Bryan Hayes, around a Bryan Reynolds double.
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After a pop-out, Olivares came to the plate.
Anderson threw him a first-pitch cutter and it cut right back into the barrel of Olivares’ bat, as he ripped it 424 feet and over the left field fence.
“Obviously, the walks kill,” Anderson said. “I felt like, man, some of them were really close pitches too. Then I feel like I kind of started guiding stuff a little bit. You feel like you make a really good pitch right where you want to, and you get balled and you think ‘Shoot maybe I need to bring it up a little bit,’ so I threw some maybe a little passive after that, which I don’t like to do.”
Anderson added that Olivares is an aggressive hitter, who swung at the first pitch in all three of their meetings, so he should have not have given him anything so close.
Just like that, Anderson gave up more than he had in any of his previous six starts in what was shaping up to be a bounce-back season.
Anderson responded to the grand slam by retiring the next 10 hitters, which at least gave the Angels some time to catch up, but all they could manage was Zach Neto’s third homer of the season.
Pirates right-hander Mitch Keller threw a complete game. While the Angels have recently lamented their ability to hit some unspectacular pitchers — like Carlos Carrasco and Ben Lively over the weekend in Cleveland — they did acknowledge that this time some of their struggles were because of Keller.
“He was on today,” Schanuel said. “Definitely came with his stuff. He was throwing everything for strikes and definitely controlling the zone.”