Angels’ bats go silent after Shohei Ohtani’s towering home run

SEATTLE — The Legend of Shohei Ohtani grew with a home run that most Angels fans didn’t even see on television.

Many of them certainly wished they wouldn’t have seen what happened the rest of the night.

Although Ohtani’s towering homer will be the lasting image of Friday’s game, the third-inning blast was the last run the Angels scored in a 7-3 loss to the Seattle Mariners.

An error led to two unearned runs and Angels relievers walked three others who scored, including two on Mitch Haniger’s tie-breaking grand slam against José Quintana in the eighth.

“Those are the kind of things that we can’t do, that no team can do,” Angels manager Joe Maddon said of the error and the walks. “We have such a small margin for error that we can’t do those things.”

Much has gone wrong for the Angels this year, with one of the most notable exceptions being Ohtani, who delivered yet another signature moment in his sensational season.

Ohtani’s homer was just the sixth ever to land in the upper deck of 22-year-old T-Mobile Park. That’s probably why the camera operator whose shot was shown on the Angels’ broadcast seemed to lose track of the ball, leaving viewers to wonder where it landed.

The drive measured by Statcast at 463 feet, the second-longest homer of Ohtani’s career. He hit one 470 feet in June at Angel Stadium.

“Statcast is wrong,” Angels starting pitcher Alex Cobb said. “I think that ball was well over 500 feet. … I know we talk about Shohei all the time, but we don’t talk about him enough. It’s just incredible. I was on the bench and my jaw dropped. I put a towel over my mouth. I can’t believe where that ball ended up.”

Ohtani’s major league-leading 33rd homer of the season was also his 16th in the last 21 games, the most in American League history over a 21-game span.

Coincidentally, Ohtani’s homer binge has lined up with David Fletcher’s hitting streak, which reached 22 games when Fletcher led off the game with his first homer of the season.

It’s the longest hitting streak in the majors this season and the Angels’ longest hitting streak since a Garret Anderson 23-game streak in 2008.

The homers were sandwiched around a run on a Juan Lagares RBI double in the second, putting the Angels up, 3-0.

But the Mariners got two runs back after third baseman Luis Rengifo’s two-out error in the fourth. Those unearned runs were all that Cobb allowed in his 5-1/3 innings.

Tony Watson issued a one-out walk in the seventh and it led to a run on a two-out single against Steve Cishek, tying the score.

In the eighth, Mike Mayers gave up a one-out walk and a two-out infield hit. Quintana, who had been demoted from the rotation to the bullpen last month, then lost a battle with J.P. Crawford when he held up his swing on a 3-and-2 pitch.

It was the third walk of the game issued by Angels relievers, continuing something that has been an issue all season.

“Sometimes we get a little more in nibble mode,” Maddon said. “I can’t give you a solid answer (for why). When you run into those problems you sit them down and talk about being more assertive and aggressive in the zone. It’s just part of some guys’ pitching DNA right now, and we’ve got to get it out of them, because they are hurting us.”

After Quintana walked Crawford, the lefty he was brought in to face, he had to remain in for the right-handed Haniger because of the three-batter rule that Maddon has railed against.

“The three-batter rule needs to go away,” Maddon said. “It puts you in a really tough spot. When you walk Crawford, you’d like to bring in a right-hander for Haniger and you can’t.”