The Los Angeles Angels got their third straight win (!) behind a strong start from Walbert Urena.
Don’t look now, but the Los Angeles Angels now have a winning streak, as Walbert Urena pitched the Halos to a 5-1 win over the St. Louis Cardinals to give the Angels their third straight win.
This win wasn’t a nail-biter, either. The Angels put up five runs in the first off Cardinals starter Matthew Liberatore to suck the suspense out of this one, with the key hits being a two-run RBI double by Jorge Soler, a single from Vaughn Grissom that got another run home, and a two-run bomb from Jo Adell to give the Angels the early lead.
Urena made it stand up with another strong effort. He stranded two runners in the first, then went on to pitch six innings of one-run ball as he scattered six hits and struck out five while walking just one. He didn’t give up a run until the fifth inning, and relievers Mitch Farris, Chase Silseth and Ryan Zeferjahn all pitched scoreless frames to finish up.
The Angels gave Urena some extra rest going into this start, and it paid off, and manager Kurt Suzuki lauded his young starter along with the early offense.
"Coming out here, today especially, setting the tone right off the bat from the first inning. ... Ureña doing what he was doing, then for the bullpen to come in and shut them down -- it was a great team victory," Suzuki said in a piece written by Courtney Hollman of MLB.com.
This was one of the few games where the Angels lineup hit from top to bottom, as Adell noted.
"From the start of the game, we did our job collectively as a group," Adell said. "Everybody was pitching in and just waiting on pitches that they could handle."
Urena used some serious velocity to handle the Cardinals lineup. According to Hollman, the 22-year old Urena hit triple digits on the radar gun 16 times during this outing.
"I haven't seen him do that all year, so it was pretty neat," Suzuki said of Ureña's velocity. "He was commanding it. He was executing. He was attacking the zone. ... He was on the attack from the get-go, and that set the tone."
The rest also allowed Urena to do a mental reset, which is important pitching for a team like the Angels. He’s had his share of rough outings, and he noted the value of getting away for a bit.
"Those days made me feel better, just resting and resetting my mind with my family," Ureña said. "I feel comfortable. ... Especially today, I just felt like, 'OK, let's go and throw hard. You have the stuff, so just use it.’"
The stuff even played from the outfield, as Adell and Trout were able to see it from their positions in the field.
"He was unbelievable," Adell said. "Mike [Trout] looked over to me in the first and second innings and was like, 'This is, like, 100 mile-an-hour changeups. Disgusting.' You see some of the guys in the [Cardinals’] lineup that have played really well this season that were just baffled at what he was doing.
“And that's what he's capable of, is coming out and just giving us a performance like that. I mean, this stuff's unbelievable. So, it was sick.”
An Angels sweep would be even sicker, and the Halos will send Reid Detmers to the mound against Hunter Dobbins this afternoon to try and get it done.
