Red Sox 13, A's 1: Fourteen Strikeouts, Two Hits, and a Ninth Straight Loss
Payton Tolle struck out fourteen of them in six innings and didn't walk anybody. The Athletics put two baseballs in play that landed safely all night. Boston hit fifteen. Nine losses in a row, 45-71, and the schedule doesn't care how you feel about it.
Two hits
Two. That's the number. Thirty-seven thousand people at Fenway watched a big league lineup collect two base hits in nine innings, and one of them left the yard, so functionally this offense produced one single all night. Payton Tolle struck out fourteen Athletics in six innings without issuing a walk. Fourteen. That's a career high for him and it should be, because a night like that against a competent lineup happens maybe twice a season. Against this one it happened on a Friday in August with no drama attached to it whatsoever.
Jack Perkins got three innings and gave up five runs on five hits. Boston put up a five-spot in the second, tacked on more in the fourth, and rolled to fifteen hits. Jarren Duran hit a two-run homer. Wilyer Abreu drove in three. The catcher had two doubles. By the middle innings it was a batting practice session that happened to have an umpire standing there.
The one thing that happened
Tyler Soderstrom got hold of one in the fifth and put it 387 feet into the seats for the only Oakland run. Soderstrom has been one of the few guys on this roster who shows up regardless of the score, which on this team is its own kind of achievement and also its own kind of warning, the good ones here always look like this right before somebody decides they're a trade chip.
That's the whole recap. One swing. There's no second thing to write about, because there was no second thing.
Nine in a row, and this is what the deadline bought
Nine straight losses. Forty-five and seventy-one. They haven't won a game in August. They got swept in Detroit 32-7 across three days, dropped a series in Cincinnati where they were a swing away in two of them, and now they're getting no-hit-adjacent at Fenway by a guy most of the country couldn't pick out of a lineup a month ago. The Red Sox are on a nine-game winning streak. The Athletics are on a nine-game losing streak. The two are playing each other. That's how it went.
And I want to be precise about the anger here, because it isn't about Perkins and it isn't about Kotsay and it isn't about a bad week. It's about an organization that pulled this franchise out of Oakland, parked it in a minor league park in Sacramento, sold the fan base a Las Vegas fairy tale, and then put a roster on the field that in the second week of August is losing 13-1 with two hits. They took the team away and they didn't even bother to build one worth taking.
I turned it off in the sixth. I never turn it off.
There are real players here. Butler is real, so is Soderstrom, and so is Jacob Lopez on the right night. Ginn has a future. Every year there are four or five guys worth watching in this uniform, and every year the machinery around them makes sure it adds up to 65 wins and a shrug. That isn't bad luck at this point. That's the business model.
They play again Saturday. The streak will be ten or it won't, and either way nobody in the building that signs the checks is going to lose a minute of sleep over it.
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