The A's and Barry Zito with a 2-3 record and a 3.75 ERA take on the Mariners and Jamie Moyer with a 1-3 record and a 3.29 ERA.
Two soft throwing lefties with ERAs under four. Should be an interesting evening at the Coliseum. Zito is 1-1 with a 0.87 ERA in May, compared to his 5.93 ERA in April which was obviously a losing battle after his opening night debacle.
Moyer has been like fine wine and just continued to get better. He's been really good this year so far, but he's like Zito in that he can live and/or die with that evening's home plate ump. Last night, the game looked like it could be a high scoring affair and it wound up being so. Tonight it looks like it could be low-scoring. We'll see if it follows the script.
The A's starting lineup looks like this:
Kotsay
Kendall
Chavez
Thomas
Crosby
Swisher
Payton
Kielty
Scutaro
If you're wondering why Kendall is up near the top of the lineup, it's his .333 batting average against Moyer. Scutaro also has a 1.309 career OPS against Moyer and Swisher has yet to get a hit off of the old man. Course, he's only had four career ABs, but if we know one thing about Macha is that he loves to look at past numbers against starting pitchers.
The M's throw out this group:
Suzuki
Lopez
Ibanez
Sexson
Everett
Beltre
Johjima
Bloomquist
Betancourt
None of the Mariners have really raked Zito, except Ichiro who has three bombs off Barry...yet he also has seven strikeouts in 21 career ABs.
LET'S GO OAK-LAND!!!!!!!
