Moved out of leadoff spot, Neto responds with 2-run shot

CLEVELAND -- At some point after the Angels’ loss to the Guardians on Tuesday night, manager Kurt Suzuki approached Zach Neto to let him know that he wasn’t going to be hitting in the leadoff spot on Wednesday.

Instead, Suzuki scratched Neto’s name into the No. 6 spot in the lineup, one that Suzuki referred to as the “RBI spot” while discussing the move pregame.

After Neto’s performance on Wednesday, it may be more apt to call it the “two-RBI spot,” as the 25-year-old shortstop walloped a two-run home run in the fifth inning to account for all of the Angels’ offense in a 4-2 loss.

“For me, the biggest thing was to try and take the pressure off him,” Suzuki said of the move pregame. “That’s a lot of pressure -- and when you’re scuffling and not playing how you want to play, this is a way to let him start having fun and not feel like the weight of the world is on him.”

Neto entered Wednesday’s game hitting .196 (21-for-107) over the past calendar month. Vaughn Grissom started at leadoff in Neto’s place and went 0-for-2 with two walks.

“I don’t make the lineup,” Neto said following the loss. “I just hit where I’m supposed to and just play my game.”

Lineup positioning aside, Wednesday’s homer was an obvious step in the right direction for Neto, who is on pace to have the worst slugging percentage (.386) of any of his full big league seasons. He also entered play on Wednesday with a 4% drop-off in his barrel rate from last season (10% compared to 14% in ‘25) along with a nearly 10% drop-off in hard-hit rate (37.3% compared to 46.6%).

But none of those mattered on his home run swing, as he waited back on a cutter over the middle from Guardians starter Parker Messick and sent it 361 feet into Progressive Field’s home run porch.

Neto also added a 96-mph single against Messick in the seventh inning, marking his first multi-hit game since he snapped his 0-for-23 funk with a two-hit game against the White Sox on May 5.

“He had some great at-bats today,” Suzuki said. “It’s definitely nice to see that.”

Reid Detmers turned in another up-and-down start for the Angels, though the middle innings provided both him and the Angels some positives.

His first inning went poorly, as he surrendered two runs (one on a leadoff home run from Angel Martínez) and got smoked in the left hamstring by a 90-mph comebacker from Chase DeLauter.

However, he was able to stay in the game, setting down six straight batters at one point across the fourth, fifth and sixth innings. Detmers also racked up six strikeouts -- the third-most he’s had in a start this season.

“I didn’t know how long he was going to last but I thought he sucked it up and gave us everything he had,” Suzuki said.

Detmers compared the Guardians’ approach to the Blue Jays’ in his last start, as he felt both teams were trying to lay off offspeed pitches. He attacked them with his fastball in the middle innings (five whiffs), which helped him settle in.

“That really freed up some stuff and made the innings a lot quicker,” Detmers said.

With the loss, the Angels have now gone 5-17 in the 22 games they’ve played since they went over .500 with a win over the Padres on April 17 -- a stretch that both Detmers and Suzuki classified as a “grind.”

Things aren’t going to get much easier for them either, as they welcome the defending champion Dodgers to Angel Stadium for a three-game series starting Friday.

“Inside this clubhouse we’re together and we have our heads down every day trying to get better,” Detmers said. “It sounds cheesy, but it’s ‘trust the process.’ There’s still five months to go. There’s still plenty of time. It’s going to equal out eventually.”