Angels take advantage of mistakes to win 3rd straight game

Jeff Fletcher, The Orange County Register on Jul 30, 2025

Published in Baseball

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ANAHEIM — The Angels are not going quietly into the deadline.

The Angels won their third straight game, beating the Texas Rangers, 8-5, on Tuesday night to give General Manager Perry Minasian a little more to think about with one game to go before Thursday’s MLB trade deadline.

While the short winning streak has created good feelings, it has only marginally helped the math.

The Angels are 53-55 and four games out of the third American League wild card spot, which could be just close enough for the Angels to avoid a sell-off, or even to become unlikely buyers.

They have to leapfrog four teams to get into playoff position, though. The Angels also still have a negative-63 run differential, which doesn’t suggest they can play two months of the kind of baseball it would take to get into the postseason for the first time since 2014.

Two of the teams ahead of the Angels are the Seattle Mariners and Rangers. The Angels just split a four-game series with the Mariners and have now won the first two of this three-game series against Texas.

This one got spicy in the eighth inning, when the benches cleared after the Angels’ Zach Neto and Mike Trout were both hit by pitches. There was shouting, but order was quickly restored, and the Angels finished off the victory without further incident.

Prior to that, the Angels built the victory by taking advantage of the Rangers’ defensive mistakes and escaping with minimal damage despite allowing 14 hits and making two errors of their own.

The Rangers had five misplays, only two of which were scored errors.

The Angels scored one run on Jo Adell’s bloop single in the first, and then a second run came home when right fielder Adolis Garcia’s throw bounced off first baseman Ezequiel Duran’s glove.

Adell led off the fourth by hitting a ball down the left field line. It should have been a double, but it rolled past left fielder Sam Haggerty and was ruled a triple. Adell then scored when Garcia dropped a routine fly ball. That was not ruled an error because the Rangers still got a force at second on the play.

In the bottom of the sixth, the Angels scored four runs to take a 7-4 lead. Yoán Moncada’s two-run pinch-hit single snapped a tie. The Angels then added an insurance run when Haggerty slipped trying to field a Zach Neto hit, allowing Moncada to score all the way from first.

(The Rangers’ defense wasn’t all bad. Garcia robbed Nolan Schanuel of a two-run homer in the fifth.)

The Angels’ bullpen then held the lead over the final three innings to secure the victory.

Left-hander Reid Detmers worked a scoreless seventh and right-hander Connor Brogdon allowed a run in the eighth on Kyle Higashioka’s second homer of the game.

The Angels added an insurance run on a Schanuel sacrifice fly to give closer Kenley Jansen a three-run cushion before he took the mound in the ninth, working for the third day in a row.

Angels starter Yusei Kikuchi struggled through 5⅓ innings, allowing 10 hits and throwing 105 pitches. He ended up being charged with four runs, three earned, but it could have been worse.

Garcia hit a pair of fly balls to the warning track with runners on in the first and third innings.

The Rangers also made two outs on the bases. Haggerty was thrown out at third by left fielder Taylor Ward, and Wyatt Langford was picked off second by Kikuchi.