Slugging Shea takes A’s to the moon

The Oakland Athletics beat out the Chicago White Sox in a full-game slugfest. Eight homers were hit, and fortunately, the A’s were responsible for five of them.

It wasn’t always nice for the green and gold though. The game started off in the bottom of the 1st with Andrew Benintendi performing some loud lefty-on-lefty action. On the fifth pitch of the at-bat, the outfielder hit a solo homer over the right field fence off A’s starter Ken Waldichuk to give the Sox a quick 1-0 lead.

The A’s lineup punched back with some noise of its own in the top of the 4th. After Seth Brown hit a groundball single, Brent Rooker hit what would’ve been (*spoiler alert*) his first of two homers in the game. The go-ahead hit, however, was stolen by White Sox young phenom Luis Robert, Jr with a leaping catch over the wall. But the A’s persisted as Tony Kemp sent a groundball double into right field to put a pair on base. Then the man of the night, Shea Langeliers, stepped up to the plate riding a hot-streak that includes two homers in his past three games. He made it three for four with a swing off an 86 mph sweeper from Sox starter Jesse Scholtens that sent the ball swiftly into the Sox bullpen, making it a 3-1 game.

The Shea-show was temporarily halted by a 5th-inning Waldichuk implosion. The lefty helped keep the slugfest going, allowing a pair of homers that brought the White Sox back into the frontrunner position with a 5-3 lead.

Oakland countered, once again, in the top of the 6th, first with a Rooker revenge homer way past Robert in left-center field, depriving him of a chance to commit robbery. Langeliers followed that up with a cutch solo shot of his own to tie the game at five a piece.

Zack Gelof, usually the center of attention, wasn’t gonna allow Langieliers to have it all tonight. In the top of the 7th, with Ryan Noda on first base and one out to go, the rookie phenom knocked a shot over the hottest spot of the night in left, scoring two runs that gave the A’s their first lead of the night at 7-5.

Kemp capped off the quintet of homers with a solo shot close to the right field foul pole and finish the game at 8-5 for the A’s. The team took game one of the three-game set and will continue tomorrow with Zach Neal making a spot start against last year’s AL Cy Young runner-up finisher Dylan Cease. Definitely a fair matchup.