Athletics 7, Astros 6: Down Six Nothing After Four, and Somehow This Broken Season Found Its Best Inning of the Year
Bryan Basso lasted one inning. Jack Perkins walked five men and struck out six anyway. And down six to nothing in the fifth, with a hundred and thirty two losses of history telling everybody in that dugout exactly how this was supposed to go, they scored six runs and then Max Muncy won it in the seventh. Fifty one and eighty.
I need to tell you about the fifth inning, but I have to tell you about the first four innings first, because that's the part that makes the fifth inning make sense.
Bryan Basso got the start in the rubber match and got through exactly one inning of it. Three runs, four hits, done. Jack Perkins came out of the bullpen to eat the rest of the game and instead of eating it quietly he walked five different Astros, including two intentional passes to Yordan Alvarez that I understood and hated in roughly equal measure, and let Houston tack on three more. Six to nothing, Daikin Park, a Sunday getaway game with absolutely nothing on the line for either team except pride, and this team hasn't had much of that to spare this year.
| Team | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | R | H | E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athletics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 10 | 1 |
| Houston | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 8 | 0 |
Here's where a team with fifty losses and a whole city's worth of resentment aimed at it usually rolls over, and here's where this one, for one inning, didn't. Brian Serven led it off with a three run homer, his fourth of the year, and the deficit was suddenly a game instead of a formality. Lawrence Butler doubled in a run. Tommy White drove in two more. Six batters, six runs, and a ballpark full of Astros fans that had been settling in for a laugher went dead quiet. Six to six.
Then the seventh inning, and Max Muncy. He took a 2-1 fastball from Houston reliever Steven Okert four hundred and nine feet to center field, his seventh homer of the year, and for the first time all afternoon the Athletics were actually ahead. Blewett threw a clean seventh, Luis Medina worked around a single in the eighth, and Harris struck out two in the ninth to close it. Seven to six. Final.
| Pitcher | IP | H | R | ER | BB | SO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bryan Basso, ATH | 1.0 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Jack Perkins, ATH | 5.0 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 5 | 6 |
| S. Blewett, ATH | 1.0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Luis Medina, ATH (W) | 1.0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| H. Harris, ATH (S) | 1.0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
Jack Perkins deserves a real sentence here, not just a line in a box score. Three to nine on the season, and he came out of that bullpen down three nothing and threw five innings, six strikeouts, and kept the deficit at six instead of letting it get to ten or twelve, which on this pitching staff this year was a live possibility. The walks weren't pretty. The stat line isn't pretty. But he held a rope long enough for six other guys to climb up it, and that matters more than his ERA is ever going to admit.
That win drops Houston into a tie atop the American League West with Texas, which is a nice enough consolation prize for us to hand out on our way back to Sacramento. We don't have a division race. We don't have a wild card chase. We've Max Muncy hitting one four hundred and nine feet in a stadium that will forget this game by Tuesday, and a fan base three time zones away that won't.
Fifty one and eighty. That's still bleak, and I'm not going to dress it up as anything else. But down six nothing in the fifth inning of a meaningless Sunday getaway game, with nothing on the line and no reason at all to keep swinging, they kept swinging. That's the whole review. The roster is on the depth chart page, what we actually lost when this team left Oakland is laid out on the legacy page, and the rest of this long, strange season is on the A's page.
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