ANAHEIM —Ron Washington certainly didn’t plan on needing two team meetings in a four weeks to talk to his players about getting out of a rut of miserable baseball.
After the Angels were blown out, 11-5, by the Minnesota Twins on Sunday afternoon, the manager addressed the group, just as he did after they gave up double-digit runs in losing the first two games of the season.
At that time, Washington was able to tell the players that it was just two games, but this time the Angels have lost four in a row and nine of 10. They dropped to 10-18 after getting swept by the Twins, including allowing 16 runs on Saturday.
“The thing that was disheartening is to watch us just fall apart on the defensive side, fall apart on the offensive side, fall apart in the pitching department,” Washington said. “The three things that are necessary to be successful, we fell apart this weekend doing.”
Washington didn’t have to single out any of his players because it has been a group failure.
“I’m not going to throw any of my players under the bus, because I know how hard they work,” Washington said. “But I’m disappointed and I know they’re disappointed and we have to do better. We can do better and we will do better.”
Catcher Logan O’Hoppe, who accepted responsibility for many of the pitching failures with his game-calling, said the group has to find its way out of this slump.
“We’ve got a lot of figuring out to do,” O’Hoppe said. “A lot of figuring out to do. It’s tough going through it, but I have faith it’s what we have to go through for good things in the future. A lot of opportunities to grow. We’ve just got to take a step back and, and really assess where we’re at and go from there.”
The Angels sent their best starter to the mound on Sunday in hopes of beginning a winning streak.
Left-hander Reid Detmers, who carried a 2.12 ERA to the mound, was charged with five runs in five-plus innings, all of them scoring after he started the game with three perfect innings.
Detmers gave up a run on three hits in the fourth and then four runs in the fifth.
“Just kind of didn’t lose command, but lost feel for certain pitches,” Detmers said. “The slider didn’t feel good today. I tried using it and kept leaving it up or bouncing it, not competitive pitches.”
Just after Detmers put the Angels in a 5-0 hole, they quickly jumped to the aid of their teammate. Although the Angels didn’t have a baserunner against Twins right-hander Pablo López until the fifth inning, they had a lightning-quick four-run rally.
O’Hoppe doubled with two outs in the fifth. Jo Adell ripped a line drive off the glove of third baseman José Miranda, stretching it into a double as the ball trickled into left field. Luis Rengifo then hit a first-pitch two-run homer, and Nolan Schanuel followed by yanking a homer just inside the right field pole.
Just like that, it was 5-4 and the Angels had a chance to win.
But that disintegrated in the seventh, when Luis Garcia entered.
The right-hander had not allowed a run in his previous nine games, and he’d gone 32 consecutive batters without issuing a walk.
Garcia walked two of the first three hitters of the inning, sandwiched around a bloop single. Garcia then gave up a two-run double to Alex Kiriloff. Two more runs scored before Garcia was pulled with the Angels down 9-4.
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The Twins tacked on two unearned runs against Zac Kristofak in his major league debut.
The first batter that Kristofak faced reached on an error by second baseman Brandon Drury. It was one of three errors the Angels made on an ugly afternoon.
When it was over, Washington closed to the clubhouse for a little longer than usual to talk to the players.
“The message is start believing in yourself,” Washington said. “Start believing in your teammate and quit being selfish. It’s easy to get selfish when you’re not performing the way you expect yourself to perform. And there’s a lot of guys in there that are not performing up to their expectations.
“Now, having said that, in the game of baseball, that happens. There’s no need to start feeling sorry for yourself when things are not going the way you would like them to go. So we’ve just got to keep getting after it the way we are getting after it. And at some point, the character that’s in that room has to come back and show up.”