Nationals 23, A's 4: Oakland Opens the Second Half With an Embarrassing Blowout
Twenty-three runs. In a minor-league park the A's call home. If the first half was a mirage, the second half opened with the sun coming up on the desert, and it was not pretty.
Across the bay, the Giants opened the second half with a clean shutout in Seattle and a grand slam that had their fans dreaming again. Out in West Sacramento, the Athletics opened theirs by getting run out of their own ballpark 23-4 by the Washington Nationals. Twenty-three. I have watched this franchise do a lot of ugly things in a lot of ugly buildings over the years, but hanging a two-touchdowns-and-then-some crooked number is a special kind of low, and the fact that it happened at Sutter Health Park, the temporary minor-league stopover this ownership dragged the team to, only makes it sting more. This is what the "plan" looks like in the middle of July.
Gage Jump drew the assignment and never had a chance to settle in. Washington got to him early, kept getting to him, and by the time the A's went to the bullpen the game was already tilting toward laughable. Then the relievers took turns. Jose Suarez, Justin Sterner, Yunior Tur, one after another, and the Nationals treated all of it like batting practice. By the sixth inning Washington had already piled up fourteen runs. Fourteen. That is not a bad start turning into a bad night, that is a total staff-wide surrender in front of whatever crowd bothered to show up on a Friday.
Andres Chaparro was the wrecking ball, and he did not stop swinging. He took Oakland deep in the fifth for a two-run shot, then came back in the seventh and did it again, a multi-homer night against a pitching staff that could not find a way to get him out or pitch around him. Harry Ford chipped in the first home run of his career in that same fifth inning, because of course the A's are the team you circle on the calendar when you want to do something for the first time. And just to make sure nobody left early thinking it might get respectable, Daylen Lile launched a three-run homer in the ninth to push it to 23. When the other side is still stepping on the gas in the ninth inning of a 20-run game, the message is clear, and it is not a kind one.
If you are digging for anything green and gold to hang onto, there was a little. Tyler Soderstrom stayed hot and put a two-run homer into the seats in the fourth, his fifteenth of the year, and the kid remains one of the very few reasons to keep an eye on this roster. Shea Langeliers added a solo shot in the ninth, his twenty-second, long after the outcome had been settled. Two of the organization's genuine young building blocks did their part. That is the cruel little joke of this season: the pieces you are supposed to be excited about keep producing, and the team around them keeps embarrassing them. Four runs is not nothing, but four against twenty-three is not a competitive baseball game. It is a scrimmage where only one side showed up.
Here is the part I keep coming back to, and I have written it before because they keep earning it. I spent the whole first half warning that the flashes of decent baseball from this team were a mirage, that the record was going to catch up to the roster, and that the deeper problems, the stadium mess, the gutted payroll, the fans in the actual Bay Area who were shoved aside, were not going anywhere. A nine-game losing streak into the break started to prove the point. A 23-4 faceplant coming out of it drives it home with a sledgehammer. This is not variance. This is what a poorly built, poorly supported team looks like when a real major-league lineup shows up hungry.
And the timing could not be more pointed. Same day, same league, same start to the second half. The Giants take the field in a big-league ballpark, get seven shutout innings and a grand slam, and walk off winners with their fans buzzing. The A's take the field in a Triple-A park they were exiled to and give up 23 in front of a fan base that is still, understandably, furious about how they got here. If you want a single afternoon that captures where these two franchises sit right now, you got it on July 17. One team is trying to give its people something to believe in. The other keeps finding new ways to test how much its people will take.
Soderstrom and Langeliers are worth watching. That is the honest bright side, and I will keep saying it, because those two deserve better than the situation they have been handed. But two home runs in a 23-4 loss is not a silver lining, it is a receipt. The second half started, and the Athletics picked up right where the first half left off. If this is the reset, it looked an awful lot like the same old thing, only louder.
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