Right-hander Grayson Rodriguez battled his way through his return from the injured list on Friday night.
Coming back from lower back tightness, Rodriguez pitched 5 ⅓ innings and allowed three earned runs on six hits and a walk, but didn’t strike out a single batter in the Angels’ 4-3 win over the Twins in Minnesota.
The pure stuff from Rodriguez wasn’t out of the ordinary; his velocity was down a tick at 95.5 mph, but given it’s his first start back from injury, it shouldn’t cause concern yet.
But because of the dip in velocity, he didn’t fool many hitters. Rodriguez didn’t strike out a batter and only got eight whiffs out of the 43 swings he induced.
The Twins put a lot of balls in play, and a fair amount of them were hit hard. Rodriguez allowed 10 hard-hit balls (95 mph exit velocity or higher) out of 21 balls put in play.
Rodriguez ran into trouble right away, as Trevor Larnach hit a leadoff double in the first inning and scored on Kody Clemens’ sacrifice fly.
He cruised through the next four innings before getting put back on the ropes in the sixth inning. After getting the leadoff man out, Rodriguez allowed a double and a single to put runners on the corners with only one out.
The Angels elected to go to the bullpen, and left-hander Samy Natera Jr. allowed an RBI double to Brooks Lee and then the second run scored on a ground out to shortstop.
Offensively, the Angels did their damage in the middle innings.
Vaughn Grissom led off the fourth inning with a solo shot for his fifth home run of the year. Grissom is now 7-for-12 in his last three games.
Jorge Soler followed Grissom’s homer with a double and then reached third base on a ground out to first base. He scored when right-hander Zebby Matthews committed a balk.
In the fifth inning, Wade Meckler led off with a single and then Tyler Heineman singled on a well-executed bunt to make it first and second with no outs. Zach Neto then singled to load the bases and Nolan Schanuel singled in a run. Grissom hit a sacrifice fly to score the Angels’ fourth run of the game, which ended up being the game-winner.
The Angels are now 38-57.
