The Angels have found a little rhythm, and Walbert Urena was the one who kept it moving Tuesday night in a 5-1 win over the Cardinals.
Los Angeles backed Urena with a fast start, scoring five times in the first inning against Matthew Liberatore and turning the game into a comfortable one early. Jorge Soler delivered the big blow with a two-run RBI double, Vaughn Grissom added a run-scoring single, and Jo Adell capped the burst with a two-run homer that put the Angels in command before the Cardinals could settle in.
From there, Urena handled the rest. He worked six innings and allowed one run on six hits, striking out five and walking one.
The Cardinals had two runners on in the first, but he escaped that jam and didn’t give up a run until the fifth. Mitch Farris, Chase Silseth and Ryan Zeferjahn each followed with scoreless innings to close it out.
Manager Kurt Suzuki pointed to both the early offense and Urena’s tone-setting outing as the backbone of the win.
"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.
Adell echoed that view, crediting the way the Angels attacked the game together from the opening pitch.
"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."
The velocity was a big part of the story, too. Hollman reported that the 22-year old Urena hit triple digits on the radar gun 16 times in the outing, and Suzuki said that kind of heat stood out.
"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."
Urena said the extra time off helped him clear his head before taking the mound.
"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.’"
Adell also saw the power up close from the outfield, and Mike Trout was quick to notice it as well.
"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.”
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