Entering tonight's oh-so-invigorating game against the Boston Red Sox, the A's sported a rather unsightly 40-15 runs allowed/runs scored ratio, allowing eight runs for every three that the A's would push across the plate. However, the last time that the two teams met, it was in mid-May, and the A's were in the midst of one of their worst stretches in what has been a memorably bad baseball season. There are lots of new faces currently on this Athletics' team, symbolizing a youth movement that will lead the A's to a better tomorrow, and with new face and surprise ace Andrew Triggs starting for the A's, tonight seemed as good as any other for the A's to make a statement that they wouldn't let the Red Sox walk all over them anymore.
A's lost 16-2. Eight runs for every one the A's would push across the plate. A rate three times worse than before.
Joey Wendle collected his first major league hit in a pinch hit AB in the bottom of the eighth inning by smoking a line drive to center field after smoking a foul ball earlier in the at bat. He is hitting the ball extremely well thus far at the big league level, even if the numbers don't show it yet. Stephen Vogt hit an RBI double. These were all the nice and good things that happened in game for the lovely Oakland A's.
These are all the bad things:
- Due to a non-baseball team playing a non-baseball game in a baseball stadium, there were unruly chalklines across a torn-up infield. The outfield grass was browning and dying because of the seats placed on top of them when spectators come to watch non-baseball games.
- An overworked-but-would-never-admit-it Marcus Semien continued to show that he was tiring as the season enters its final month, makes a throwing error on a routine ground ball in the first inning. David Ortiz would drive in the runner on a two strike fastball.
- Andrew Triggs would exit the game after one inning pitched due to back tightness. It is not the shortest start for an A's pitcher this season. Zach Neal would relieve Triggs in the second. A's pitching depth is stretched to the limit on the first day rosters can expand to allow for more relief pitchers.
- A Brett Eibner error in right field would ultimately lead to a second Red Sox run in the third inning. While the A's fall behind, the team is hitless, the lone baserunner being a walked Billy Butler.
- With two outs in the fifth inning, after having pitched three and two-thirds innings on a day where Triggs was expected to log in six or seven innings, Zach Neal ran out of steam and surrendered four consecutive hits, two singles and then two doubles and before Daniel Coulombe could enter the game to put an end to the inning Boston had added four more runs to their tally.
- The very next inning, Coulombe would load the bases on three consecutive singles and then walk in a run. Coulombe would be relieved by J.B. Wendelken, and Wendelken gave up a single and a home run. By the time the third out was recorded in the sixth, six runs had scored and the score was twelve to two.
- Butler fulfilled his own stereotype by grounding into a rally killing double play that was aided by his own personal slowness in the bottom of the sixth inning.
- After a scoreless seventh inning, despite his best efforts to add more blemishes to the game totals, Wendelken would ruin highly touted top Cuban prospect's Yoan Moncada's first professional plate appearance by being completely unable to locate his pitches and walking the young phenom on a slew of easy-to-lay-off pitches.
- Wendelken would be relieved in the eighth inning, but not before he could incite one more rally, this one aided by the shoddy blocking defense of catcher Matt McBride and two balls he could have kept in front of him that he let skirt on by.
Daniel Mengden will be taking the mound tomorrow to try and right the ship for Oakland.
