Diamondbacks 15, A's 5: The Fifth Inning Went On Long Enough To Grow a Beard

Seventeen hits, five home runs, a seven-run fifth, and a reliever who gave up eight earned runs while recording two outs. This is the franchise that left Oakland, and it is playing exactly like a team that deserved to.

I want to be fair here, so let me start with the fair part: for four and a half innings this was a baseball game. It was 2-2. Gage Jump was surviving. Jeff McNeil had put one over the wall in right. Jonah Heim had two hits and had already scored. If you had walked away right there you would have gone to bed thinking the A's were competitive in Arizona on a Wednesday night.

Then came the fifth, and the fifth is why we do not walk away.

Seven runs. Gabriel Moreno hit a two-run shot to break the tie. James McCann hit a two-run shot, the 100th home run of his major league life, and got to have that moment against this pitching staff. Ryan Waldschmidt hit a two-run shot for the first home run of his entire career, which is a beautiful thing for a young man and a genuinely humiliating thing to surrender in the same inning as the other two. Three homers. One inning. And that was on top of Corbin Carroll and Nolan Arenado already going deep in the fourth off Jump.

Five home runs. Seventeen hits. Fifteen runs. Season highs for Arizona in all three categories, and the A's were the ones kind enough to host the party. Merrill Kelly gave up two runs in five innings and got to watch the rest from the dugout with his feet up.

Jump wore it for four and two-thirds and six earned, which is bad but survivable. What happened next is the part that tells you what this organization actually is right now. Yehizon Tur came in, recorded two outs, and gave up eight earned runs. Two outs. Eight runs. That is not a bullpen, that is a fire drill. Hunter Juenger eventually came in and threw two and a third with one run, and by the ninth Carlos Cortes, who had already gone 0-for-4 as a hitter, was on the mound getting an out because there was nothing left to protect and nobody left to protect it with.

The offense did what it does now, which is put up numbers after the outcome is decided. McNeil homered. Heim singled McNeil home in the seventh. Lawrence Butler singled in a run in the ninth and there was a sacrifice fly behind it, so the box score reads five runs and the game read like a rout, because it was one. Langeliers with two hits, Heim with two hits, and none of it landed anywhere near the result.

So Sacramento is 43-59 and loses the series to a Diamondbacks club that just went four games over .500 for the first time since the start of June. Arizona is going somewhere this summer. The A's are going to Minnesota on Friday after an off day, playing in a minor league park in a city that is not their home and not their future, waiting on a Vegas building that keeps being a rendering.

We watched this franchise get walked out of Oakland. We are not going to pretend a 15-5 night in Phoenix is a tragedy. Fifty-seven seasons on the other side of the bay, and now they are somebody else's problem in somebody else's ballpark. Bay Area baseball is at Third and King. The rest is just a scoreboard.

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