Exactly 40,065 showed up for an Oakland home game, a sentence that seemingly hasn’t been written since the 1980s, the long-gone decade the team celebrates with iconography around every crevice of the green and grey fortress. In a season where sub-10,000 attendance days have been the norm, seeing the Coliseum teem with fans from both sides of the Bay was a welcome change of pace. The East Bay contingent left the unhappier half after the A’s (41-67) dropped the weekend opener 7-3 to the Giants (52-55).
“Before the game I was like, this is the most people I’ve ever seen in the stadium,” starting pitcher Adam Oller said. “I think today was the first time at the Coliseum I had to cover my ear to hear the pitch com.”
Adam Oller was quite fortunate to exit the first inning with only one earned run to his name. The starter with a 7.68 ERA loaded the bases with two walks and a single, but worked himself out of trouble. The only run he allowed in the first was off a Brandon belt walk. In the second, he gave up another run when Joc Pederson lined a ball into right and drove LaMonte Wade Jr. across the plate.
Both teams spent the next couple innings putting runners on second, but neither club could drive them across. Stephen Piscotty, who up to that point was struggling through an 0-15 cold streak, got his first hit since the team’s series in Chicago, but was not driven in. The A’s left eight runners stranded on the basepaths. Oakland’s scoring punch came in the bottom of the third, when Sean Murphy popped a ball over the infield to drive in Nick Allen from the top of the diamond.
“You’ve got to get a big hit with two outs and guys on base, and we just weren’t able to come through today,” Oakland manager Mark Kotsay said.
It extended Murphy’s hitting streak to four games and added onto his AL lead in RBIs for a catcher with his 39th of the year. The normally-solid Carlos Rodon threw a wild pitch after that, but rebounded with a strikeout to end the inning with his lead intact. Oller and Rodon continued to duel until the top of the fifth, when Oller finally slipped up.
“The biggest thing I’m frustrated about is that I was up 2-1, 2-2 on a lot of guys, and I walked away with one strikeout,” Oller said. “I had plenty of opportunities to put guys away, and I didn’t.”
When the ball left Wade Jr.’s bat, he and the 40,000 at the Coliseum knew the ball was destined to land over the right field wall. The two-run shot ended Oller’s day and gave the Giants a 4-1 lead. The team bashing against Oakland bore little resemblance to the team that had just been swept by the Dodgers at Oracle Park a few days prior. Oller was saddled with his fifth loss of the year, still stuck on one win on the season. Rodon picked up his 10th of the season.
Kirby Snead’s first lefty pitch ended in a similar fashion against a right-handed pinch hitter. J.D Davis belted his sixth home run of the season by depositing the pitch over the centerfield wall. Brandon Belt’s RBI single finished the scoring for the inning. After Joey Bart hit his ninth home run of the season to extend the Giants lead to 7-1, the two fan bases competed to see which one could scream who they were were root, root, rooting for louder during the seventh inning stretch.
In the late stages of the game, Ramon Laureano made one of the better plays of the season. He fell down while tracking a Yermin Mercedes popup, and still found a way to glove the ball while sitting down to end the top of the ninth. Skye Bolt hit a two-run home run in the next inning to make the score more respectable, but his first hit in his last 10 at-bats was not enough to spark an improbable rally.
“It was great to see Skye run into one right-handed and drive a baseball out of the ballpark,” Kotsay said. “This offense has been performing pretty well.”
The two teams will play again on Sunday, and Kotsay named Adrian Martinez as the starter. Had Frankie Montas not been traded to the Yankees, he would have started. The Giants are predicted to start Logan Webb.
Source: www.mercurynews.com