Poor Chad. He reverted to the walk-a-thon tendencies of last year and it burned him right off the top. And the A's offense was pretty easily kept in check by Minnesota tonight outside of the one inning in which Bobby Crosby, Shannon Stewart and Mark Kotsay all went the opposite way. Of course, they wound up scoring two runs that one inning.
When your 3-4-5 hitters lines look like this:
R H RBI
0-1-0
0-0-0
0-0-0
You're not going to win too many games.
On a different note, I don't know that I've seen too many double plays on a hanging slider before. I thought that Calero was going to come back throwing effective sliders, but that pitch to Hunter does not make me hopeful. Maybe he just needs to get some of the rust off, but yikes.
On the brightest note of the evening (in my opinion), Andrew Brown (you know the guy we got for Milton Bradley) looked really good in relief of Jay Marshall. He struck out Punto on a really nice breaking ball and got Castillo to ground out. You can never have enough depth as we've all learned very painfully this year.
So the A's now sit one game below .500. An inauspicious start out of the All Star break.
