Saturday night was one night the Angels could well afford Shohei Ohtani having an off night. One RBI single in seven plate appearances might be cause for small alarm ordinarily. But who the hell needed Ohtani, on a night that the Angels dropped a 25-1 avalanche atop the walking-wounded Rockies in Coors Field?
The Rockies went into the game knowing they'll miss right fielder Charlie Blackmon another few weeks, hitting the injured list with a broken right hand, after he tried playing through it following the hand having been hit by a pitch in Kansas City. They were already missing Kris Bryant with a heel injury. Not to mention three key starting pitchers including Germán Márquez and Antonio Senzatela.
But nobody saw Saturday's kind disaster coming when the Angels opened a 2-0 lead after two full innings.
They spent the second inning nailing a pair of back-to-back base hits before Rockies starter Chase Anderson plunked Angels right fielder Mickey Moniak on 0-2 to load the pads, and David Fletcher slashed a two-run single on the first pitch — all with nobody out.
Anderson looked re-grouped after he induced a double-play grounder and caught Ohtani himself looking at a full-count third strike. You'll find fewer more grave instances of looks being deceiving than what the Angels did to him in the top of the third.
It only began with future Hall of Famer Mike Trout leading off by hitting a 1-0 pitch over the center field fence, then with Brandon Drury hitting Anderson's very next pitch over the left center field fence, and then with Matt Thaiss hitting Anderson's very next pitch over the right field fence.
Three pitches. Three thumps. To think the fun was just beginning for an Angels team whose past few seasons have been anything but in the end.
Not even the most cynical observer of the thin-aired yard known as Coors Field expected what happened after Thaiss completed his circuit around the bases, and after Anderson walked a man, induced a force out at second, surrendered a base hit, and induced a pop out around the infield:
* Taylor Ward singling home new Angel toy Eduardo Escobar, acquired from the Mets a day or so earlier and going 2-for-4 in his Angels premiere.
* Ohtani singling Moniak home and sending Anderson out of the game in favor of Matt Carasiti.
* Trout walking to re-load the pads.
* Drury sending a 2-run single up the pipe.
* Thaiss walking to re-set first and second.
* Hunter Renfroe yanking a bases-clearing double, one of his team-leading 5 hits on the night.
* Esobar singling Renfroe home.
* Moniak sending a two-run homer over the right center field fence.
The third-inning carnage ended only when Carasiti got Fletcher to ground out right back to the mound. And wouldn't you know that at least one Twitter twit harrumphed about the injustice of it all after Moniak connected: "21st-century MLB, taken to its most absurd extreme. This is one example of why I can't get that excited about homers, anymore."
Not even over three straight to open an inning in which only 5 of the 13 runs scoring in the frame scored by way of home runs and half the hits were singles? Not even over 5 runs scoring off singles and three off a double? Not even 10 of the 13 Angel runs of the inning coming home with 2 outs?
You want to harrumph about something, harrumph about why the Rockies were caught woefully unprepared and left two relievers in to take 15 for the team. Not just the 6 Carasiti surrendered of his own, as well as adding 2 to Anderson's jacket, but poor Nick Davis starting in the top of the fourth.
The Angels slapped him silly for 8 runs on 7 hits, including back-to-back 1-out RBI singles followed by an RBI double, another bases-loading walk, a 2-run double, and Fletcher hitting a 3-run homer. Then Davis got Ward to ground out and struck Ohtani out swinging to stop that inning's carnage.
Davis survived a pair of two-out singles in the fifth. I confess — I couldn't resist tweeting at that point: "With apologies to the Roaring Twenties, after five it's Angels 23, Rockies skiddoo."
The Rockies' right-hander wasn't quite so lucky in the sixth, but he might have felt just a small hand of fortune: the worst the Angels did to him in that inning was a double (Moniak) and a single (Fletcher) to open the inning with first and third, before the Angels' 24th run scored on a force out at second.
That would be the same way the Angels got their 25th and final run of the night two innings later, with Karl Kauffmann on the mound for the Rockies. The only thing spoiling the Angels' smothering shutout would be Rockies center fielder Brenton Doyle leading the bottom of the eighth off with a 1-0 drive over the center field fence off Angels reliever Kolton Ingram.
Just days earlier, the Angels were humiliated by back-to-back shutouts courtesy of the Dodgers. Now, they ended Saturday night setting a franchise record for runs in a single game — a franchise record they broke by one, having scored 24 against the Blue Jays in an August 1979 game. They also became the first in Show in the modern era to score 20 or more runs in a two-inning span.
All that on a night when the only Angels not to get any hits were one pinch hitter and two mid-to-late game insertions. And, when they secured themselves in second place in the American League West — 6 games behind the division-leading Rangers.
"Today," said Moniak postgame, "was just one of those days, where everyone was feeling good and we were getting the right pitches to hit." That may yet qualify as the understatement of the season.
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