Angels Go Shopping and Can’t Buy a Win

If shopping is the intention, New York’s the place--especially when your name’s Mike Port and your baseball team is in sore need of a new look for summer.

All the fashionable labels are here: Winfield, Mattingly, Henderson, Righetti. Even the wholesale stuff--numbers like Roberto Kelly, Al Leiter and Jay Buhner--can look enticing when your nose is pressed against the window and the pants pockets are pulled inside out.

But they charge through the nose here, and although Port spent most of Sunday’s game--which the Angels lost, 9-2--talking shop with New York Yankee General Manager Lou Piniella, he came away the same way the Angels did on the field: Empty-handed.

“(Piniella) had some ideas about our club and I had some ideas about his,” said Port following the Angels’ loss in front of 51,006 at Yankee Stadium. “But the ideas of what each of us needs do not match.”

And what, precisely, do Port’s Angels need?

Where do we start?

“Today, pitching and hitting,” Port noted wryly. “Two days ago, it was something else. And yesterday, it was something else again.”

The Yankees are in position to help. With the best record in the American League East, they are loaded with talent--especially hitting talent--and are looking for only a shortstop and a starting pitcher to fit the final bricks into the foundation.

The Angels don’t have enough starting pitching themselves, so that’s out of the question. But they do have two capable big league shortstops in Dick Schofield and Gus Polidor, and it is believed the Yankees are interested in the former.

Port was asked if he would consider trading Schofield, heretofore advertised as the Angels’ shortstop for the ‘90s.

“Given the right deal, I don’t consider anybody on our club untouchable,” Port said. “I’m keeping as open a mind as possible.”

Along with, however, a cautious eye.

“A lot of clubs would like to help us--’Hey, we’re just the people to help you,’ ” Port said. “Given our distressed situation, people are looking for fire sales.

“But, since I’m the general manager of the team in the position we are, now is the time not only to get things done, but to also be wary. I’d rather do nothing than to do something impulsively and be wrong.”

So, Sunday, Port decided to do nothing, which was in keeping with what the Angels were doing on the field.

The Angel offense managed a grand total of four base runners against Charles Hudson (4-1), the Yankees’ “utility pitcher,” a middle reliever making his third spot start of the season.

Angel pitchers Chuck Finley (2-6) and Willie Fraser surrendered all 9 New York runs in just 2 innings, Finley wrapping 4 runs around a fourth-inning balk. Fraser gave up a 3-run home run to Claudell Washington and a 2-run home run to Dave Winfield in the seventh inning.

Surprisingly, the Angel defense was charged with no errors, but it also had a hand in the team’s 8th loss in 11 games.

With Don Mattingly on third base and Buhner on second following Finley’s balk in the fourth inning, Jack Clark bounced a chopper to Angel third baseman Jack Howell. Howell gloved the ball and running to his right, stepped on third and fired home. His throw was off line, Mattingly scored, Clark was safe at first and New York was on its way to a 4-run inning.

Howell’s play immediately posed two questions:

Had he mistakenly thought there was a force play at third base?

And why hadn’t he gone for the sure out, early in a 0-0 game, and thrown to first?

No, Howell said, he hadn’t lost track of the outs and the situation. “His momentum just took him into the bag,” Angel Manager Cookie Rojas said. “Instead of stumbling over the bag, he stepped on it and threw home.”

So why throw home?

“Those situations are tough,” Rojas said. “Rather than get the one sure out, he went home and the throw was off the base. But, we can’t afford to give them any runs, the way we’re hitting. . . . He thought he had a chance at the plate and if it was a good throw, he might have had him. But the way he was moving, he had to throw off-balance.”

One out later, Gary Ward broke his bat on a Finley pitch and sent the ball skittering just inside the first-base line, past a diving Wally Joyner, for a run-scoring single. Mike Pagliarulo followed with another RBI single, making it 3-0, and Rojas pulled his pitcher.

Ray Krawczyk came on to make it 4-0 on a sacrifice fly by Joel Skinner, but then shut down the Yankees until the seventh inning. That’s when Rojas shut Krawczyk down and turned to Fraser--who immediately turned a 4-2 game into a 9-2 rout.

Fraser surrendered a single to No. 9 hitter Rafael Santana and then threw a wild pitch, setting up an intentional walk to Mattingly. Pinch-hitter Washington followed with a long home run to right and, after a walk to Clark, Winfield delivered an even longer home run--sending it cascading into the monuments beyond the left-center-field fence, about 430 feet from home plate.

“You could tie those two home runs together and they would stretch to Havana,” Rojas said.

The way things are going for the Angels, they might be tempted to check that one out for themselves. But now, Baltimore beckons, home of the one-time 0-21 Orioles and maybe, just maybe, a chance for the Angels to right themselves.

“We need to break out against them,” Rojas said. “And we need more than a two- or three-game winning streak. We need to string together five, six, seven wins.”

Then, again. . . .

“They beat Dave Stewart the other day, so I don’t know,” Port said. “Everybody has certain capabilities.

“We’re looking for the key to get us back in the right direction and whether that key is in Baltimore or wherever, I’m not particular. All I know is that we have to find it . . . and find it soon.”

Angel Notes

Did Cookie Rojas move too soon in replacing pitchers Chuck Finley in the fourth inning and then Ray Krawczyk in the seventh? Krawczyk, who worked 2 scoreless innings, skirted the issue but Finley, who was pulled from a 3-0 game after 3 innings, admitted that “I was surprised the hook came.” After a balk moved Don Mattingly to third base and Jay Buhner to second in the fourth inning, Finley thought he pitched well. Said Finley: “I got one guy (Jack Clark) to hit a grounder to third--and got no outs out of it. I gave up a broken-bat single (to Gary Ward). And (Mike) Pagliarulo’s single wasn’t hit that hard. The game right there is still 3-0. A ground ball and I get a double play and I’m out of the inning.” Rojas, however, believed Finley became flustered after the balk, his fifth in eight starts. “Balks hurt Finley,” Rojas said. “How many times this year has he given up runs after a balk, three or four? As young as he is, it messes him up.” As for replacing Krawczyk with Willie Fraser in the seventh inning, Rojas said: “Krawczyk did his job. I wanted Fraser to hold them for that one inning and then go to (Bryan) Harvey in the eighth. But this was one of those days when Fraser didn’t have it.”

The Angel offense managed four hits against Yankee starter Charles Hudson--two singles by Dick Schofield, an eighth-inning single by Mark McLemore and a two-run home run by Brian Downing. It was Downing’s third home run of this three-game series--and the third home run of his career at Yankee Stadium. Before Friday, Downing had not hit a Yankee Stadium home run in 15 major league seasons. “I’ve never hit here,” Downing said. “This is one the parks I’ve struggled in. But Sparky Lyle, Ron Guidry and Dave Righetti might have had something to do with that.” Asked to explain this sudden power surge, Downing simply said: “This is just one of those three-game spans where you’ve got it going. You get in these little streaks, where it seems that you’re right on most of the pitches. But I was swinging through those same pitches the last three weeks.”