Jeff McNeil Hit a Ground Ball Sixty Feet and We Beat the Blue Jays

Bases loaded, two out, a soft roller to short, and 7,467 people in a minor league park in Sacramento got a walk off. A's 6, Blue Jays 5.

Eighty four degrees in Sacramento at first pitch and I had the game on the laptop in the garage with the door open because the house was still too hot to sit in. That's where we are with this franchise now. That's the ritual.

And they beat Toronto. A team fighting for something, with Dylan Cease on the mound, in front of 7,467 people, and we won it in the ninth on a ground ball that went about sixty feet.

Henry Bolte was the best player on the field and nobody saw it

He walked three times and homered. One official at bat where they actually let him swing at a strike, and he put it in the right field seats in the fifth for his ninth of the year. Three runs scored. On base four times out of five.

First inning he leads off and gets on, Gelof doubles him in down the left field line, Muncy brings the second one home. Third inning he's on again, Gelof gets him home on a fielder's choice, Carlos Cortes lines a single to right and Gelof scores. Fifth inning he does it himself.

Bolte is hitting .275 with a .753 OPS in 102 games. That's a big league outfielder in the middle of a 58 win season and he plays like the score matters, which is not nothing when you're playing home games in a park with a berm.

Zack Gelof drove in two and is up to 17 homers. Cortes went 2 for 2. Six hits total for the night, and five runs out of them, which tells you Toronto handed us a few. Three errors. I'll take them.

We beat Dylan Cease and I want that on the record

Five innings, four hits, five runs, four earned. This is a guy carrying a 2.40 ERA into the game.

Jacob Lopez wasn't much better on our side, honestly. Six innings, seven hits, four runs, two homers, one strikeout, and he still gave us six and kept us in front for most of them. Okamoto took him deep in the seventh, then Lukes and Clement singled and Gimenez doubled one into the left field corner and it was 5 to 4 and I got up and walked to the end of the driveway.

Luis Medina came in and got five outs and I sat back down.

The ninth, twice

Hogan Harris throws a pitch to Andres Gimenez leading off the ninth and it goes to right center and it's 5 to 5. Blown save. In September. In a season that has been over since roughly the third week of May.

I'm not even angry about it anymore. That's the part that gets me. There was a version of me in 2019 who would have thrown something. Now I just say okay, out loud, to nobody, and keep watching.

Bottom of the inning. Muncy pokes a soft ground ball past the third baseman. Walton walks. Alika Williams bunts and they get the lead runner at third, which felt like the whole season in one play. Heim lines out. Two down.

Bolte walks. Fourth time on. Bases loaded.

Jeff McNeil grounds one toward short, slowly, the way McNeil has been grounding balls slowly toward middle infielders for a decade, and Gimenez has nothing. Walton scores. Toronto challenged the play at first and it was upheld, which meant standing there for two minutes waiting for New York to tell us we'd won a baseball game.

We had won a baseball game.

Harris blew the save and got the win, which is the most 2026 Athletics sentence I can produce.

58 and 87 and I still watched every inning

I know what this is. I know it's a placeholder season in a placeholder ballpark on the way to a place none of us asked for. I've written about it enough that people I know have stopped bringing it up around me.

But Bolte reached four times, a rookie infield beat a playoff club's best starter, and McNeil put the winning run across with two outs in the ninth. If you were watching last night in Sacramento, or in a garage in the East Bay with the door open, you got a genuinely good one.

Compare that to the night before, when Bryan Woo one hit us for eight innings and nobody on our side reached second base. I'll take a walk off ground ball over that, all week, in any park you want to put us in.

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