Red Sox 4, Athletics 2 (10): Jacob Lopez Deals, the Offense Sleeps, Extras Bite Again
Two solo homers and eight strikeouts from the starter should be a decent Wednesday in West Sacramento. Instead the lineup went quiet for eight innings, the tenth arrived, and Andruw Monasterio ended it with one swing.
Across the bay, the Giants were busy hanging sixteen runs on the best team in baseball. In West Sacramento, the Athletics played the other kind of baseball game: the kind where the starter does everything right, two guys hit the ball over the fence, and the other seven innings of offense simply do not show up. Red Sox 4, A's 2, in ten innings, and the team that left Oakland is now 45-63 and losing games in ways that feel almost artisanal.
Jacob Lopez deserved a great deal better, which is becoming the standing headline of his season. He went 5.1 innings, struck out eight, scattered seven hits, and the only real damage against him was a Jahmai Jones solo homer in the fifth. That is a quality outing against a Boston lineup that had been swinging it well all series, and he walked off the mound in position to win. The bullpen behind him was genuinely good too — Brady Basso, Hayden Juenger and Elvis Alvarado combined to hold the line into extras, with Alvarado striking out two in a clean ninth. For nine innings, the pitching did exactly what you ask of it.
The hitting is another conversation. Jonah Heim got the scoring started in the second, launching his eleventh homer of the year 418 feet to center, and Lawrence Butler answered Jones in the fifth with a 422-foot blast of his own to make it 2-1. Both balls were crushed. Both were solo shots. And that was the complete offensive output: two swings, two runs, and nothing else across ten innings. Heim finished with three hits and Jeff McNeil added two, but nobody could string anything together, and when Nick Sogard singled home Caleb Durbin in the sixth to tie it at two, you could feel the game settling into the exact shape it eventually took.
Extra innings in this sport are a coin flip, and this roster keeps calling it wrong. Jose Suarez came out for the tenth, inherited the free runner, and left a pitch out over the plate that Andruw Monasterio — a utility infielder who came in with five homers on the year — hit out to left-center for a two-run shot. 4-2, just like that. Aroldis Chapman, who is somehow still throwing gas at 38, got the win, Greg Weissert closed out the bottom half, and the A's went down without much argument, Tommy White taking a called third strike along the way. It is the second time in nine days this team has lost an extra-inning game on one bad swing allowed, and at some point that stops being bad luck and starts being who you are.
The frustrating part, if you can still summon frustration for this operation, is that the series is right there. They split the first two, played Boston dead even for nine innings on Wednesday, and have gotten real starting pitching all week. But 45-63 teams lose games like this, which is precisely why they are 45-63. The finale against the Red Sox goes Thursday in Sacramento, and Lopez's eight strikeouts and two majestic solo homers will be a footnote by then. Meanwhile, the actual Bay Area baseball team just scored sixteen. Draw whatever conclusions you like.
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