Three Solo Homers Was the Whole Night and Toronto Took the Series

Ninety two degrees, 7,632 people, three solo home runs and nothing else. One night after a walk off, the A's went quiet again. Blue Jays 4, Athletics 2.

Ninety two degrees in West Sacramento at first pitch. Ninety two, in September, and 7,632 people sat out in it. I was not one of them. I was home with the air on, so I haven't earned the right to complain about much tonight.

Blue Jays 4, Athletics 2. We hit three solo home runs and scored exactly nothing any other way, and that sentence is the whole season in one line.

The second inning was over before it started

Jack Perkins gets two outs into the second and then Josh Smith puts one 361 feet over the wall in right. One batter later Kazuma Okamoto hits his thirtieth of the year, 387 feet to left. Back to back. Two pitches, two runs, and you could feel the little ballpark go flat.

Okamoto has thirty home runs. Thirty. On a team that flew here to beat us in a minor league park in a heat wave.

Perkins went five, gave up seven hits and four runs, and his ERA is 6.53 now. I'm not going to hammer a guy who takes the ball every fifth day for a 58 win club in a lost season. But four runs on a night when two was going to be too many is four runs.

Cortes and Walton kept it from being a shutout

Fourth inning, Carlos Cortes gets one out to right, 388 feet, his ninth. Seventh inning, Donovan Walton lines one 369 feet the same direction, his sixth. Both solo. Both with the bases empty, which by then felt like a rule somebody had written down and taped to the dugout wall.

Six hits all night. Henry Bolte had two of them and Bolte has been doing that a lot lately. Gelof drew a walk and struck out twice. Butler, White, Williams and Heim went a combined 0 for 13.

Jose Soriano threw seven for Toronto and the only damage was those two swings. Then Spencer Miles came in and struck out three of the six men he faced. That's the night. We hit three balls hard enough to matter and never once had anybody on base when we did it.

The bullpen threw four scoreless and it didn't matter

This is the part that gets me. Chad Roycroft, two clean innings. Gus Hartlieb, two more, one hit, one walk, two strikeouts. Four scoreless out of a relief corps that has been lit up all year, on the one night the offense had nothing at all.

That's September for a 58 and 88 team. The pieces show up on different nights and never on the same one.

Toronto put eleven hits on the board and only got four runs out of them, which is the only reason this was still a two run game in the eighth. Guerrero went 2 for 4. Kirk singled a run home in the sixth and Smith grounded into a double play that scored another, because the Blue Jays can afford to trade outs for runs and we can't.

One night after the best win of the month

Monday night Jeff McNeil hit a ground ball sixty feet and we won it in the ninth. Loudest that place has been in weeks. Tuesday we hit three solo homers and lost by two.

58 and 88. Twenty six and forty five at home, in a ballpark that holds a fraction of what the Coliseum did, in the second of three summers here before Las Vegas takes them. I keep saying I'm going to stop watching. I keep not stopping.

Bolte's at .278 with a .359 on base. Walton's on base .380. Cortes has nine homers. There are three or four guys on this roster worth caring about, and the whole trick of the next two years is guessing which of them is still here when this team finally plays a game that means something.

Ninety two degrees. Seven thousand people. Three solo homers. That was a Tuesday.

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