Bleday, bullpen help secure 3rd win in a row
Those boycotting the Oakland A’s this season are missing a good show.
The players, who aren’t responsible for the A’s decision to leave Oakland after this season, are interesting and, get this: They’re pretty good.
After Tuesday night’s 5-2 victory, the team with by far baseball’s lowest payroll is 14-17 and in third place in the AL West, ahead of the Angels (who now will be without Mike Trout for at least several weeks) and the former division-ruling Astros. A crowd of 3,876 was on hand to watch the A’s win for the fifth time in six games; they have 66 games remaining at the Coliseum before they head to Sacramento for the next three years.
“Winning is way more fun,” outfielder JJ Bleday said. “You can just tell the vibes in the clubhouse, coming to work early and getting our work in, it’s just a difference in mindset. We’ve got a lot of fun veteran guys around here to kind of help mellow things out and it’s just a night-and-day difference from this year compared to last.”
Lefty Alex Wood, one of those veterans, started Tuesday and said of the A’s little roll, “There’s a really strong will to go out there and play well and try to win every night. You could see it in every guy out there.”
Bleday ruled the night, sizzling a homer into the red beer seats down the right-field line to give Oakland the lead with one out in the fifth and adding a two-run shot in the seventh, his first career two-homer game.
The A’s bullpen, which worked five scoreless innings in relief of Wood, has been so remarkable that Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley has taken note. He came to Tuesday’s game and made a point of going to the clubhouse to meet closer Mason Miller and setup man Lucas Erceg. “Really impressive,” Eckersley said of both.
Erceg dazzled in the eighth, striking out the side on 14 pitches, half of which registered 97 mph or more. Miller, who took New York by storm last week, K’d the side in the ninth, hitting 100-mph-plus eight times. Miller is perfect in eight save opportunities.
Oakland’s bullpen hasn’t allowed a run in the past six games and eight of the past nine. Mitch Spence, though he doesn’t have the gaudy numbers of, say, Miller, was the key man Tuesday, with three scoreless innings.
Were the A’s defense as reliable as the bullpen, the A’s might be at .500 or better. On Tuesday, the team showed what that might look like, especially in the outfield, where Seth Brown made two tricky catches in left after long runs and Lawrence Butler made a sliding grab of a liner by Connor Joe despite being blinded by the stadium lights.
“For him to get the glove there was another big play,” manager Mark Kotsay said. “If you erase the first week of the season, I think we’ve played exceptional defense.”
The Pirates got a tremendous effort from second baseman Jared Triolo, who leaped for a liner by Darell Hernaiz and tipped it in the air, then caught it himself. Joey Bart, the former Giants catcher, nailed quicksilver Esteury Ruiz trying to steal second in the eighth.
Joe hit a two-out homer off Wood in the first, and the A’s answered with two in the second. Shea Langeliers doubled to open the inning, Abraham Toro singled and with one out, Hernaiz singled in Langeliers. Tyler Nevin drove in Toro with a two-out hit.
Alika Williams made it a 2-3 game with a sacrifice fly in the fourth.
Nevin also singled in the seventh, and Bleday followed with his second homer — which came off a left-hander, Josh Fleming. Bleday entered the game batting .087 against lefties, with zero homers.
“If you can hit a lefty, then you can hit a righty,” Bleday said. “Facing lefties just kind of helps clean things up mechanically and just helps you stay on the ball a little bit better and eliminate some thinking.”
Oakland’s $83 million payroll is $32 million less than the Marlins, the next-closest team on the low-spender list, and the A’s total attendance in 15 home games is 88,571; they’re coming off a road trip in which they routinely saw crowds of 30,000-40,000 per game.
“It wouldn’t hurt to have some more fans in the stands to just kind of pump up the energy a little bit after being on the road in Baltimore, New York,” Bleday said. “I mean, those stadiums are packed houses. But we can’t really control that. We’ve just got to keep playing our game and hopefully, they come to watch.”