Hit Parade Marches On for Angels

The Angels scored only 12 runs Wednesday night, barely enough to eke out a victory, so Manager Terry Collins juggled his lineup for Thursday’s game.

He couldn’t order a new pitching staff, so this must have been the next best thing.

The new-and-improved batting order--with Orlando Palmeiro moving to the leadoff spot, former leadoff batter Darin Erstad dropping to No. 5, Troy Glaus sixth and Garret Anderson seventh--immediately paid dividends. The Angels scored seven runs in the first and five in the third en route to a 17-1 victory over Toronto in front of 18,346 at Edison Field.

“I’m not sure how much it had to do with it, but everybody did what you want them to do,� Collins said. “This way, we’ve got guys who can get on base at the top of the order and the run producers in the middle.�

On this brisk evening, just about everyone wearing periwinkle was a run producer, a run scorer or a combination of both. The Angels had 15 hits, four of which were home runs. And a night after squandering a 10-run lead before winning, 12-10, the Angels got a solid start from Ken Hill and sharp relief pitching from Mike Magnante and Shigetoshi Hasegawa to win going away.

Blessed with that 10-run advantage Wednesday night, Angel starter Tim Belcher apparently made the mistake of simply throwing the ball over the plate and daring the Blue Jays to hit it . . . which they did unmercifully until chasing him from the game.

Hill went to the opposite extreme--he gave up only four hits in seven innings but walked eight--and came precariously close at times to suffering a similar fate. Toronto left two runners on in the first and sixth and the bases loaded in the third and fifth.

“I was fighting myself and, sure, it’s frustrating to walk eight guys, but the bottom line is they only scored one run and we won the game,� said Hill, who earned his first career victory over Toronto. “But after what happened [Wednesday] night, I wasn’t going to just lay it in there. I knew I had to stay focused and keep pitching my game.�

The Angels, meanwhile, were spinning around the bases at a dizzying pace.

Toronto rookie right-hander Roy Halladay, who was 2-0 and had not given up an earned run in 20 innings, surely wasn’t planning on finishing the season with an 0.00 earned-run average, but he probably wasn’t expecting this kind of a correction this quickly. His ERA is now 4.43.

Palmeiro, who had two hits, a walk, was hit by a pitch, drove in a run and scored three, reached base in the first, working Halladay for a walk after fouling off a couple of pitches. Randy Velarde followed with a run-scoring double, Mo Vaughn had an RBI single and, one out later, Erstad singled. Glaus walked and then Anderson gave the Angels a 3-0 lead with a sacrifice fly to center.

Halladay hit Matt Walbeck to load the bases and then No. 9 batter Andy Sheets hit back, slamming his first career grand slam over the wall in dead center.

“I knew I hit it hard,� he said, “but I didn’t think I hit it that well.�

Anderson led off the third with a double to right and Walbeck walked. Palmeiro’s one-out single scored Anderson and Velarde belted his first homer, a prodigious 425-foot three-run drive to left. After Vaughn struck out, Tim Salmon hit his club-leading seventh home run.

The Blue Jays scored their only run off Hill in the fourth when designated hitter Kevin Witt hit his first major league homer. But the Angels added a run in the fifth on Vaughn’s run-scoring single, two more in the sixth on Troy Glaus’ towering shot into the Toronto bullpen in the sixth, another on Salmon’s RBI single in the seventh and yet another in the eighth when a sacrifice fly earned Sheets a career-high five RBIs.