At least the White Sox lost the fun way.
After two mostly enjoyable victories to open this series in Anaheim, the Angels cleaned some Sox clocked with the middle of their order.
Mike Trout had a monster game, Shohei Ohtani hit his ninth homer, and Albert Pujols hit his 630th as Los Angeles defiled the craft of righties James Shields and Chris Volstad.
At one point, this game was another taut affair. Trout and Pujols hit solo shots off Shields in the first and second innings around six strikeouts, but the Sox briefly tied it with teamwork in the fourth.
The Sox fared better the second time through against Tyler Skaggs after striking out in seven of their first nine trips. Leury Garcia dropped a single into center to spoil the perfect game, and Jose Abreu doubled him to third with a shot to the right-field corner. Avisail Garcia followed with a hot shot to short, but it skipped past Andrelton Simmons for an error on which Leury scored. Abreu took third, and he scored on Yoan Moncada's game-tying sac fly.
Shields preserved the tie through four thanks to a TOOTBLAN by Pujols, but he didn't get such help in the fifth. David Fletcher started that inning with a single, Kole Calhoun drove him home with a double, and Ohtani belted his second homer of the series to make it a 5-2 game.
It didn't get any closer. Volstad eventually came in and allowed one of Shields' two inherited runners to score, then gave up five of his own runs in the fifth, including a three-run shot by Trout. After being held hitless through the first two games (with a lot of walks), Trout went 3-for-4 with two homers, a double, an HBP, four RBIs and three runs scored. Hector Santiago struck him out his last time up.
The Sox didn't have much outside of their initial foray. Matt Davidson doinked a homer off the right-field scoreboard in the final frame, giving him his team-leading 15th. Otherwise, the Sox were outhit, outwalked, and out-everything else. Or elsed.
Bullet points:
*Leury Garcia was charged with an error when his attempt to get Trout at home skipped past Omar Narvaez.
*Narvaez's eight-game hitting streak came to an end with an 0-for-4, two-strikeout night.
Record: 36-65 | Box score
