Oakland A’s Game #98: A’s take care of business against Seattle Mariners

The Oakland A’s have lost a few games lately but they played like a full contender on Thursday and not a moment early.

The A’s visited the Seattle Mariners and scored a 4-1 win, putting them some distance in the standings between them and their closest competitor for second wild card spot.

*** Click here to revisit tonight’s game thread! ***

Like the whole year, the evening in Oakland started with a brilliant pitching performance. Sean Manaea faced the Mariners in June and threw a shutout, and he extended that goalless streak to 15 innings against Seattle before hitting the 7th tonight.

The left was almost literally unbeatable. He faced 28 thugs and hit 13 of them at career level, and during the first six frames the Mariners only made second base once and never got to third base. The only harm against him was a solo homer by a catcher Tom Murphy who did the 7th, reducing A’s advantage to 2-1 at this point.

• Manaea: 7 ip, 1 run, 13 Ks, 3 BB, 1 HBP, 1 HR, 3 hits, 106 pitches, 90.2 mph EV

Seattle hit a few balls hard when they managed to make contact, but that was a rare feat and pretty much all it deserved to fall for a hit. Manaea dominated for the second time in as many attempts against this rival of the AL West Division.

How much did he dominate? His 13 strikeouts have been the most since left-handed in a game Vida blue In 1976, official goalscorer David Feldman reports, and Manaea becomes the first A pitcher to score 13 strikeouts while allowing one run or less since then Todd Stottlemyre in 1995 (according to MLB statistics). He reached the top at 96.0 mph, his fastest single place of the season and the first time since 2016 that he had reached that mark.

But since we’re all very award-winning, it’s not over until the other team cracks their bullpen. Fortunately, Oaklands Relievers were almost perfect tonight, pulling back six of the seven batter they faced with just one mixed groundball single. The 8th inning started Sergio Romo, who is officially good again if you hadn’t noticed and is maybe the best setup man on the team, and the 9th came on Lou Trivino for saving.

After the Angels were also silenced earlier this week, A staff have only allowed two runs in the last three games combined. Even better, their line-up offers support again.

If you can’t blow it, make it

A hallmark of the A’s recent break-in was an inefficient line-up that struggles to get down to the ground and can’t cash in there. If they don’t blow things up, the rating can get cold. But not only did they score enough goals tonight, they also scored in a particularly encouraging way.

The first run was sheer stupidity with little balls, with three happy contacts and a bit of a rush to put it together. With two outs in the 5th inning, Elvis Andrus barely knocked a tricky flare off the end of his stick. It sounded awful, but somehow he found RF for a single lawn and then promptly stole second to get into goal position. Mark Canha came next, hitting a grounder in the middle that the fielder couldn’t quite handle (decided an infield hit but should have been a mistake), and then Ramon Laureano hit a tough grounder in the middle who hit the pitcher and didn’t bounce off anyone.

Any of the hits from Andrus, Canha or Laureano could just as easily have ended the inning, but a little BABIP and a gift from the opponent added up to a free run. You could write some of this off as luck or remember that there is no BABIP without Balls In Play, which is another way of saying you make a lot of contact instead of hitting and good things will happen.

The second run came in the 6th Mitch Moreland has been hot since he got back from the injured list, and he launched a doppelganger that hopped in the wall. Sean Murphy followed by another double to collect it.

• Moreland, since IL: 4-for-15, HR, 3 doubles, 5 BB, 1,117 OPS, 97.8 mph EV

For Murphy’s part, he’s running faster than anyone else on the A’s in runs and it’s nowhere near that. He leads the club by a wide margin for the percentage of their baserunners he races in, and he’s one of the MLB leaders when it comes to bringing the runner home from third with less than two outs (though this was not the case in this situation). asked, with Moreland second).

Seattle had one of those runs in the 7th, thanks to its own catcher Murphy (Toms Homer before Manaea), but Oakland responded by establishing insurance.

In the 8th game, the A got their first two batter on base, and for the second game in a row, Andrus put down a mixed bag. It worked perfectly once again as the runners advanced (to move the lead man to third with an out) and the next batter went to load them. Laureano just had to get in touch, and he did it with a bloop single. Laser had 2 RBIs tonight, one on a grounder from the pitcher and another on a 68 mph jamshot. Good things happen when you don’t strike.

When Laureano made it safely there was still only one on the board and still a runner on third base, and Matt Olson delivered with another productive contact, this time a rocket into the outfield for a sack fly. The whole sequence went weak single, weak single, sack colored, weak single, sack fly to bring two huge runs home and turn a nail biter into a barely safe situation.

Oakland put 18 runners on the base in that game, and at that kind of volume, even hitting .250 with runners in scoring position means you’ll get four such hits (in 16 tries, not including Olson’s sacfly, who too is a success). Of course you could always do better, but they did a lot and for every bit of luck they got there was a lot of hard work to create the opportunity in the first place. Those BABIP grounders in the 5th didn’t matter if Andrus hadn’t stolen second, and in the 8th they played with the situation in mind by maximizing their chance of a crucial insurance run rather than for an unnecessarily crooked number pray – and at the same time, they got the crooked number anyway.

This is the full, multi-faceted A-lineup we’ve been waiting for, and it has now been shown at least three games in a row. Hopefully it’s a new trend and not a short mirage!

wild West

Oakland currently holds second place in the wild card, trailing the Mariners and Yankees with 4.5 games each, with a week to close. This is a good time to make a statement and put down one of those beacons of hope, especially if such a setback could convince them not to be a buyer at all in the days to come.

But otherwise it’s too early to watch the scoreboards and the main focus is still on our own team. The rotation is just amazing, the bullpen has got some new life and the suddenly healthy lineup has shown us all the things we wanted to see from them. Ride the wave!