Sebastian Rivero starting his Sunday mayhem against Dodgers starter Emmett Sheehan in the second inning . . .

Baseball’s first June weekend finished rather eventfully. Especially if you wore Dodger uniforms, in your own playpen, facing the patsies from down the freeway who came into Sunday’s game hoping to find some way to avoid being swept in your season series.

Who knew? All the Angels had to do was trust in the bottom of their batting order. Except for Zach Neto hitting a three-run homer late in the game, the top five in the lineup might as well have taken the day off, for all that they weren’t hitting.

Cue Dolly Parton: Working six to nine—what a way to make a living.

The box score for the Angels’s less-than-likely 13-5 demolition of the Big Bad Dodgers Sunday afternoon only hints at the bottom boys’s destruction: 13-for-15 with four walks, ten runs scored, and ten driven in. Shall we go into the details? Of course we shall. The stars of the show: Jo (Heads Up) Adell, Nick Madrigal, Jose Siri, and Sebastian Rivero.

Adell—4-for-5 including a second-inning single and run scored; a fourth-inning leadoff single and run scored; a base hit setting up first and third and another run scored in the fifth; and, a one-out yank into the left center field seats with one on in the seventh to start putting the game out of the Dodgers’s reach.

Madrigal—1-for-3 with three walks: a walk in the second after an overturned pitch call on the twelfth pitch of his plate appearance, and a run scored; a walk after Adell’s infield hit and a run scored; a walk in the fifth, though he was thrown out at the plate trying to score behind Adell and Wade Meckler; and, a base hit and run scored in the seventh.

Siri—a walk to load the pillows for Rivero’s two-run single in the second; a sacrifice bunt with nobody out to set second and third up for another Rivero two-run single; and, his own two-run single in the fifth, the one on which Madrigal got thrown out trying to make it a three-run job. Siri also singled in the seventh, setting Madrigal up to score from second on another Rivero single.

Are you getting the impression that that’s all just the prelude to the main event? Good. Because Rivero certainly was the main event at the bottom of the heap. You might have forgotten his .220/.264/.260 slash line watching him Sunday. He went from the Mendoza Line to the Carnival Cruise Line.

Second inning: Two-run single. Fourth inning: Two-run single. Sixth inning: Leadoff single. Seventh inning: One-run single. Ninth inning: RBI double. And, as the invaluable Sarah Langs unearthed, Rivero’s five hits and five steaks out of the number nine lineup slot is only the fifth since ancient Yankee pitcher Johnny Murphy did it in 1936.

The three in between, says she: Scott Fletcher, 1992 (on 28 August, same day as Murphy in ’36); Jackie Bradley, Jr. (seven ribs), 2015; and, Austin Wynns (six ribs), 2025. Wynns is the only one of the quintet to nail more than five hits (he had six) cooking his ribs.

The Angels needed something, anything, from somewhere to avoid the sweep, on a weekend when the once-redoubtable Mike Trout—still second on the team in WAR this season—had a weekend slump on his hands. (Hitless in thirteen tries including six strikeouts.)

They got to batter five of seven Dodger pitchers on a day their own starter Jose Soriano got spanked for five runs (four earned) in six innings before their bullpen worked three shutout innings of three-hit ball to finish off. Not even back-to-back Dodger bombs in the sixth (Dalton Rushing, a three-run job; Ryan Ward, a solo) could keep the Angels bottom in its seat.

Suddenly, nobody’s going to say backup catchers aren’t supposed to turn up looking like reincarnated Benches, Berras, or Fisks anymore. It was as if Rivero wanted to tell his fellow bottom-of-the-order boys, “You’re not blocking me at this party’s door.”

Batting six to nine—what a way to make a living. Makes you wonder why the Angels didn’t think of that cup of ambition sooner.