MUSIC TO SOME EARS SANTANA'S PERFORMANCE GETS MIXED REVIEWS IN ANGELS' WIN.

Byline: TONY JACKSON 

Staff Writer

ANAHEIM -- Ervin Santana was viewed from two different dugouts and through two different prisms Friday night.

One vantage point was that of an appreciative manager who had been waiting for an effort like this from his promising young right-hander, and the other was that of a frustrated, veteran second baseman who liked Santana's performance about as well as he likes interleague play.

Either way, though, the result was the same: Santana, whether he was magnificent or mediocre, was effective enough to pitch the Angels to an all-too-easy 9-1 victory over the Dodgers in front of a sellout crowd of 44,342 -- the biggest regular-season audience in the four-decade history of the ballpark presently known as Angel Stadium.

Not that Santana didn't have plenty of advantages before he took the mound.

He was facing a team that didn't figure to further inflate his already- gaudy home run figure -- he came in tied for the major-league lead with 11 dingers allowed.

He also was facing a team that had, and still has, stranded more baserunners than all but one other big-league club.

But mostly, Santana was facing a team that hates interleague play, and more specifically interleague road games. Going back to 2005, the Dodgers now have lost 18 of their past 19 in American League parks.

And while Jeff Kent, the aforementioned, discontented Dodgers second baseman, isn't the sort of guy who would be aware of such a statistic, he still got the general idea.

"Watching video of the ballgame, (Santana) was all over the place," said Kent, who went hitless in four at-bats, including a popup to end the fifth inning against Santana with runners on the corners.

"The catcher would set up outside, and he would throw the ball in. He would miss with a slider, but he was missing (out of the zone), not (in the zone). It's hard to pattern a guy who isn't hitting his spots. You go in with a game plan and an idea of what a pitcher does, and he doesn't do it.

"But he did what he did good enough to put us down."

From there, Kent went on to make his usual speech on the evils of interleague play. But more on that later.

Angels manager Mike Scioscia, who had watched every one of Santana's eight previous starts and witnessed every pitfall that went into his ugly 5.51ERA, offered a far different interpretation of his pitcher's six-inning performance.

"Ervin's stuff was outstanding early on," Scioscia said. "It was the best stuff we have seen from him in a long time, and we needed it. He threw some tough pitches in some tough situations ... and he did a good job against that lineup."

The Angels (25-18) maintained their three-game lead over second-place Oakland in the AL West, while the Dodgers (25-17) saw second-place San Diego pull within two in the National League West.

The game probably was closer than the final score would indicate.

Dodgers right-hander Brad Penny (5-1) failed to become the club's first pitcher to win his first six decisions since Kazuhisa Ishii in 2002, not because he pitched poorly, but because the balls the Angels hit off him seemed to find holes while the balls the Dodgers hit off Santana (3-5) didn't.

And the Dodgers stranded 10 more runners, leaving them just one behind Philadelphia for the major-league lead.

The Dodgers hung around through five innings, but in the sixth, all those missed opportunities finally caught up with them.

Penny gave up hits to five consecutive batters to begin the inning, after which manager Grady Little finally came to get him. The Angels scored five in that frame alone, putting the game away, and Penny wound up being charged with eight earned runs, matching his total for his previous eight starts.

"There weren't any hard-hit balls," Penny said. "But they just found holes. I wasn't locating as well as I have been in the past. I was around the plate. I wasn't horrible. But this is a game of inches, and everything they hit seemed to fall in."

Not so for the Dodgers, who saw Kent smoke a line drive into the glove of shortstop Orlando Cabrera in the first, Andre Ethier get robbed of a tying double on a leaping catch by first baseman Casey Kotchman in the fourth and Juan Pierre blister a ball straight into second baseman Maicer Izturis' mitt in the fifth. All three plays came with runners on base.

In the end, though, Kent didn't blame it on the Dodgers' inability to hit Santana, Penny's inability to keep the game close or just dumb luck. One game into the Dodgers' 15-game interleague schedule, Kent simply let it be known -- as he admittedly does every year -- that he isn't all that excited about the next 14.

"I don't like interleague play," he said. "It's great for the fans, but it's hard for the players to get motivated. It's hard to get pumped up. There is no rhythm to the game for the players. For Brad, it looked like he couldn't get into any kind of rhythm in the game. He didn't have any snap on his fastball or a lot of his off-speed breaking stuff.

"I grew up in this game not playing interleague, and all of a sudden, it's force-fed to you. This is the soapbox I am standing on. I just wish it was a little more old school.

"It's just too bad we're chasing the dollar rather than the integrity of the game."

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CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- color) Dodgers second baseman Jeff Kent can't hang on to a flyball hit by the Angels' Vladimir Guerrero on Friday in Anaheim.

(2) The Angels' Casey Kotchman scores past Dodgers catcher Russell Martin on a sacrifice fly by Shea Hillenbrand.

(3) Dodgers starter Brad Penny allowed eight runs, all earned, in five- plusinnings Friday night.

Chris Carlson/Associated Press

Box:

DODGERS at ANGELS

- Tony Jackson