Ervins

Ervin Santana shuffled into the Angels' clubhouse shortly after 4 p.m. wearing an oversized gray T-shirt, blue jeans with patches on both legs and a wry smile. It's a wardrobe that really hasn't changed much over the last month. But, until Wednesday, everything else about Ervin Santana had. The Angels pitcher entered the day riding a historic run, having gone 5-0 with a 1.09 earned-run average since the All-Star break. He had allowed less than a baserunner an inning, opponents were hitting just .202 against him and he followed his no-hitter in Cleveland last month by going at least eight innings and giving up fewer than two runs in each of his next three games.

The Angels needed to stop the bleeding Wednesday night, and in right-hander Ervin Santana, one of baseball's most dominant pitchers since early July, they had the perfect tourniquet. Or so they thought. As good as Santana has been, he could not prevent the Texas Rangers from winning the third game of a critical four-game series. One strike away from escaping a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the eighth inning, Santana gave up a broken-bat, two-run, tiebreaking single to Ian Kinsler, and the Rangers held on for a 4-3 victory in Angel Stadium.

There are occasions in baseball that define players beyond their salaries or statistics, moments that are about emotions and not numbers. For one night, Vernon Wells could escape the constant reminders of how low his batting average is, or how high his salary is. On this night, he had the happiest of homecomings. "It's something I'll be able to tell my kids about," Wells said, "when they forget I played this game. " First game back in Toronto, after 12 years with the Blue Jays.

Ervin Santana has showcased pinpoint accuracy in his last four starts, all wins, one of them a no-hitter. But in the Angels' 2-1 win Sunday against Seattle, the right-hander showed just how precise he can be. The play occurred in the third inning when Seattle called for a squeeze bunt. Jack Wilson sent a dribbler down the first base line and Santana ran to field it while Kyle Seager hustled home. Standing off-balance, Santana fired to Bobby Wilson, throwing the ball to a spot that made it easy for the catcher to tag out Seager.

It was supposed to be a waste pitch for Brian Duensing, an 0-and-2 fastball the Minnesota Twins left-hander tried to elevate out of the strike zone in hopes of getting Mark Trumbo to chase. Two little problems: The pitch, although letter high, wasn't high enough, and it certainly wasn't fast enough. The Angels first baseman pulverized it, sending it half-way up the rock pile beyond the center-field wall for a three-run home run. Trumbo's fourth-inning shot traveled an estimated 457 feet, the longest in Angel Stadium this season, even longer than Josh Hamilton's 449-foot blast for the Texas Rangers on July 19, and it pushed the Angels toward a 5-1 victory over the Twins.

Reporting from Cleveland — As the ball dropped into center fielder Peter Bourjos' glove, Ervin Santana thrust his arms into the air and looked for someone to hug. But the man he most wanted to embrace wasn't there. So Santana honored him the best way he knew how. "I want to dedicate this no-hitter to my cousin, who just passed away," an emotional Santana, his eyes red and his voice cracking, said after throwing a no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians in the Angels' 3-1 win Wednesday afternoon.

Baseball season challenges our attention span. It can be a 162-game drone. In Los Angeles, multiply that by two. Before Wednesday, the Dodgers were a well-documented disaster, the stories more about loans and bankruptcy than wins and losses. As for the Angels, most of the time they were more confusing than compelling. You'd get solid pitching and little hitting, day after day. Texas went on a hot streak and the Angels seemed unable to close the gap. It was a team of Jered Weaver and Dan Haren, and had their last names rhymed properly it would have been the 2011 version of Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.

Reporting from Cleveland — Bobby Wilson caught the first pitch of Ervin Santana's no-hitter shortly after noon Wednesday, local time. But he started working on it almost seven months ago in Arizona. "Those long days of spring training, when we're sitting back behind the plate going over where they want to throw the pitch, where they want you to set up. This is what we work for," Wilson said. "This is our ultimate goal [in the] the pitcher-catcher relationship. That's something that we talk about every single day. "And today it worked out. It's amazing.

Reporting from Baltimore — No team in baseball has been better over the last 5½ weeks than the Angels. But on the mound, at least, it's been pretty much a two-man show, with the team winning 80% of the games started by Jered Weaver and Dan Haren but struggling to keep its head above water when anyone else is pitching. On Friday, in 104-degree heat and sweltering humidity, Ervin Santana made a bid to narrow that gap, holding the Baltimore Orioles hitless into the sixth inning in a 6-1 Angels win that was a lot closer than the score would suggest.

The interleague portion of the 2011 schedule ended Sunday for the Angels, who were sorry to see it go. Where else can you get three hits in a game and still win, as the Angels did Sunday when Russell Branyan capped a three-run seventh inning with a two-run home run to give the Angels a 3-1 victory over the Dodgers? Ervin Santana (4-8) gave up one run and six hits in 72/3 innings for his first win since May 25, and Bobby Abreu sparked the winning rally with a double as the Angels moved into a first-place tie with the Texas Rangers in the American League West.