In the Face of an Angel Crisis, Joyner and Parker Strike Back : Baseball: They combine for three home runs to keep Twins from a sweep at Anaheim.

ANAHEIM —  The crisis loomed on Tuesday, and the Angels crumbled. They lost their seventh consecutive game, outplayed, out-thought and outhustled by the Minnesota Twins.

Manager Doug Rader saw it. Wally Joyner and Dave Parker saw it. Heck, the family of four in the upper deck saw it.

The crisis loomed on Wednesday, bigger than the day before.

And the Angels, whimpering through the home stand, finally struck back. Joyner slammed two home runs and had a sacrifice fly, finishing with five runs batted in. Parker, disgusted with himself and the Angels, hit his 10th home run of the season. Behind Jim Abbott’s sterling pitching performance, they powered the Angels to an 8-1 victory, denying the division-leading Twins a sweep.

It was a sign of life from a team that a day before had looked as if it was packing up for the winter.

“I thought (Tuesday) was disappointing,” Joyner said. “The first couple of innings, we were very flat. We didn’t play very well and we played catch-up the rest of the game.”

Tuesday, the Angels watched runs score that shouldn’t have--because of an error that squelched a double play, because of a passed ball, because the Angels slept while a Twin scampered home from third behind their backs.

The Angels may have hit last place in the American League West Sunday, but they were still falling Tuesday night.

On Wednesday, they got back up.

“It’s like we hit bottom,” Parker said.

Whether they can sustain what they started Wednesday is another matter. As one of the oldest baseball truisms goes, it’s only one game.

“We put forth a great effort today,” Parker said. “We hadn’t been getting results, and it snowballed. It creates a miserable situation. I just hope we’ll click it in and move on up in the standings.”

Joyner hit his 14th and 15th homers of the season, hitting two in a game for the first time since Oct. 3, 1987, the waning days of the year he hit a career-high 34.

“It was a good game for me,” said Joyner, who has driven in eight runs in the past two games, and leads the team with 74. “I hope I can remember what I’ve gone through and put it in my memory bank.”

What the Angels have struggled with lately is one of the game’s confounding paradoxes. The harder you try to hit the ball hard, the harder it is to do it.

Their slide to last place began as a power drought, when they went 11 games without a homer beginning with the game before the All-Star break. In barely a month the Angels were choking on everybody else’s dust.

“I think maybe we were trying to do too much, trying to make things happen instead of letting things happen,” Joyner said. “You see a pitch that’s good to hit, and maybe you try to do too much with it.”

The struggle is to find the golden mean between too much and too little effort.

“If it were easy, everybody would say, ‘I’m not going to carry the team today,’ and go have a good game,” Joyner said.

Today, the Angels have a day off. They can’t extend their winning streak, or start another losing streak.

“It could help; it could hurt,” Joyner said.

Parker knows that streaks swing both ways.

“Baseball’s a funny game,” he said.

The Angels would like a chance at another laugher.