There’s No Getting By Langston : Angels: The left-hander pitches a three-hitter in a 1-0 victory over the Brewers.

It’s a good thing they didn’t build Anaheim Stadium in Santa Ana. That neighboring city recently passed a law against sleeping in parks, and there might have been numerous arrests at the Big A Saturday night.

An announced paid crowd of 21,945--large by this season’s standards--dozed as Angel left-hander Mark Langston and Milwaukee right-hander Ricky Bones quieted batters on both sides.

A pitchers’ duel. Remember those?

Most Angel fans don’t, and apparently one-run games don’t arouse much interest when fans are used to balls bouncing off seats and fences and baserunners churning up orange dust inning after inning. Saturday night’s 1-0 Angel victory was the first time fewer than five runs were scored in Anaheim since the Oakland Athletics beat the Angels, 2-0, on May 2.

Tim Salmon led off the second inning with a double off the glove of diving Milwaukee center fielder Darryl Hamilton, took third on J.T. Snow’s fly ball to right and scored on Garret Anderson’s fly to center.

And they were done. The attendance quiz on the scoreboard elicited as big a reaction as Greg Vaughn’s ground-ball final out.

But former pitching coach and current Angel Manager Marcel Lachemann saw a thing of beauty.

“A good, old-fashioned 1-0 pitchers’ duel, yeah, that’s nice to see,” he said. “Especially when you have the one.”

Langston, who won seven games last year, is 8-1. But he really earned this one, going nine innings and giving up only three singles. No Brewer reached second base and he struck out a season-high nine.

Bones (4-7) was almost as impressive. He also gave up three hits, although two were doubles.

“I pitched good, Langston pitched great,” Bones said. “I did my job. He did his job better.”

Langston has won five consecutive decisions and the Angels, who were averaging more than seven runs per game in his first 14 outings, are 12-3 in his starts this season.

“My fastball has been there for the last three or four starts,” he said, “but my breaking ball finally showed up tonight. So much of the year, the team has really picked me up.

“I’m sure this team has given me more runs than any pitcher in the American League, and I’ve been a little sloppy and given up some runs I shouldn’t have.

“So this is a big mental lift for me. I was really mentally there. Every pitch had a purpose.”

The first four pitches of the ninth inning--all balls--provided a few moments of doubt in the Angel dugout, but Langston rebounded to get Hamilton on a short fly to right, Kevin Seitzer on a strikeout and Vaughn on a bouncer to third.

Lachemann said he had a feeling in the fifth inning that the game might come down to a one-run margin in the ninth, but he wasn’t ready to bring in all-star closer Lee Smith, who has 20 saves, even after Langston walked Jeff Cirillo to open the inning.

“It was the way the game was flowing, they weren’t scoring and we weren’t scoring and there weren’t many chances,” Lachemann said. “You got the big guy [Smith] out there and the guy on the mound dealing like that.

“But I had sort of already made up my mind. That’s the best I’ve seen Mark in a long, long time. He had total command of all three pitches. If Seitzer comes up with a man in scoring position, I would have to think about going to the big guy. Seitzer’s the only guy who has really hit Mark.

“Then he strikes him out, so it’s a good thing I didn’t make a move.”

The Angels also got a boost from an unexpected source when Jorge Fabregas threw out two Brewers attempting to steal. Angel catchers had failed to catch a basestealer in the last 13 attempts, but Fabregas caught catcher Joe Oliver on what had to be a broken hit-and-run play in the second and shortstop Jose Valentin on a straight steal attempt with two out in the eighth.

The crowd responded with polite applause. Tough room. Victories are nice, but at the Big A, big is clearly better.