Bottom of Lineup Comes Up Big

With the heart of the Angel lineup on something of a sabbatical this homestand, it was left to the bottom of the order to pump some life into a team with a faint playoff pulse.

Bengie Molina, the Angels’ No. 7 hitter, had three singles, and Adam Kennedy and Benji Gil, the team’s eighth and ninth hitters, knocked in all five runs Tuesday night to lead the Angels to a 5-2 victory over the Tampa Bay Devil Rays before 15,689 at Edison Field.

Tim Belcher limited the Devil Rays to two runs on five hits in seven innings, and closer Troy Percival picked up his 29th save, as the Angels remained six games behind Seattle in the American League West and pulled to within 5 1/2 games of Cleveland in the wild-card race with 17 games left.

“It’s nice to see the bottom of the lineup produce a bit,” said Kennedy, whose two-run triple in the seventh scored the tying and go-ahead runs. “The top of the lineup has been carrying us all year. It’s great to take some pressure off them.”

In five home games against Baltimore and Tampa Bay, Darin Erstad, Mo Vaughn, Tim Salmon, Garret Anderson and Troy Glaus have combined to go 16 for 72 (.222) with just five runs batted in.

Glaus had two singles and scored two runs Tuesday night, and Anderson sparked a three-run rally in the seventh with a single, but it was Molina, Kennedy and Gil who did most of the heavy work.

After Anderson and Molina singled in the seventh, Kennedy tripled to the gap in right-center, his 10th triple of the season, to turn a 2-1 Angel deficit into a 3-2 lead. Gil followed with a suicide squeeze to make it 4-2 and improve the Angels’ success rate on squeeze plays to .500 (three for six) this season.

Glaus’ single and Molina’s hit-and-run single in the seventh set up an Angel insurance run, which Kennedy knocked in with a single to right to make it 5-2. Glaus and Molina singled to open the fifth, with Glaus later scoring on Gil’s RBI dribbler to first.

Glaus also made three outstanding defensive plays, back-handing Mike DiFelice’s grounder down the line and throwing him out in the seventh, charging Jason Tyner’s slow roller and throwing him out in the eighth and bare-handing Steve Cox’s chopper and throwing him out in the ninth.

Glaus is second in the AL with 41 home runs, but neither he nor the Angels had to go deep to win Tuesday night.

“You’re not always going to have the middle of the lineup hitting balls out of the park,” Manager Mike Scioscia said. “For us to score five runs without a homer is a huge lift. In the dog days, sometimes your offense will stall a bit, so you need to execute some little ball like we did tonight.”

A performance like Belcher’s doesn’t hurt, either. In his second start since returning from a two-month stint on the disabled list because of elbow problems, Belcher (4-2) was extremely pitch-efficient, needing only 74 pitches through seven innings.

The veteran right-hander walked one and struck out one and made only one glaring mistake, an 88-mph, waist-high, down-the-middle fastball that Greg Vaughn drove over the center-field wall for a two-run homer in the second. But Belcher hardly flinched, retiring the next 11 batters.

“It doesn’t pay to get wrapped up in a mistake like that,” Belcher said. “Since coming to the American League I’ve learned to not get upset about giving up even four runs early. So many games in this league can resemble beer-league softball, where guys are just hammering out runs, so it doesn’t make sense to get upset about a two-run homer.”

Nor does it make sense to wonder where the Angels would be if Belcher, who has started only six games this season, including a six-inning, three-run effort in a 6-4 win over Detroit last Thursday, was healthy all year.

“This is the way we know Tim can pitch,” Scioscia said. “Of course, if we had him for 30 starts we would have been excited about that, but if Tim was here, maybe we wouldn’t have seen what Seth Etherton and Matt Wise could do.

“That’s really digging for a silver lining, but you could say, ‘What if’ for an hour, and it wouldn’t change anything. We have him now, and we hope he can continue to pitch like this.”