Royals 4, Athletics 3: They Carried a Two Run Lead Into the Ninth in Kansas City and Gave It Back on a Catcher Interference, Two Singles and a Walk Off
Eight and a third innings of actual competent baseball, and then a ninth inning that had everything: a catcher reaching into a swing, a bases loaded walk, and Bobby Witt Jr. ending it in front of twelve thousand people.
Three to one going to the bottom of the ninth in Kansas City. Two outs from a win. And the Athletics found a way to lose it that I genuinely haven't seen a team find in years, because it didn't start with a home run or a bad pitch or a rocket down the line. It started with a catcher sticking his glove into somebody’s swing.
Four to three. Twelve thousand and nine people in the building. Forty nine and seventy seven.
| Team | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | R | H | E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athletics | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 1 |
| Kansas City | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 9 | 0 |
The ninth inning, slowly, because it deserves to be typed out slowly. Vinnie Pasquantino flies out. One away, two to go, three to one. Then Salvador Perez comes up and reaches first base because Jonah Heim committed catcher interference. Not a hit. Not a walk. A catcher put his mitt where a bat was going. In the ninth inning. Of a game they were winning.
Michael Massey singles. Carter Jensen walks to load them up. And Tyler Tolbert, who's on that roster for his legs, hits a ground ball through the left side and two runs score and the game is tied. Isaac Collins lines out for the second out, which for about ninety seconds felt like it might matter, and then Bobby Witt Jr. does what Bobby Witt Jr. does and drops a single into left field to end it.
Hogan Harris: two thirds of an inning, three hits, a walk, three runs. That's the whole loss. Somebody hand him the ball with a two run lead and six outs of margin and by the time he left the ballpark was screaming.
| Pitcher | IP | H | R | ER | BB | SO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brady Basso, ATH | 2.1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Jack Perkins, ATH | 3.2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| Drew Rom, ATH | 0.1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Luis Medina, ATH | 1.1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
| Hogan Harris, ATH (L) | 0.2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Elvis Alvarado, ATH | 0.1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Daniel Lynch IV, KC | 4.0 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Mason Black, KC | 3.0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| Alex Lange, KC | 1.0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Carlos Duran, KC (W) | 1.0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
And the maddening thing is that they pitched well for eight innings. Brady Basso gave them two and a third of nothing. Jack Perkins came in and threw three and two thirds with one hit and four strikeouts, which is the best relief outing this team has gotten in weeks. Luis Medina walked three men in an inning and a third and somehow got out of it. Six innings of shutout relief work, thrown away in ten minutes by the seventh arm out of the pen.
The offence, which is the other half of this. Five hits. Five, in nine innings, against a Kansas City staff that isn't scaring anybody. Jeff McNeil had two of them and an RBI. Tommy White singled in a run in the first, and that same first inning ended with McNeil thrown out at the plate from left field, which set the tone for a night where nothing was ever going to be easy. The sixth inning gave them two more, one on a McNeil single and one on a Max Muncy walk with the bases loaded, and that was the last thing this lineup did all night.
Lawrence Butler is hitting .211. Max Muncy is hitting .213. Jonah Heim is hitting .213 and just cost them a game with his glove. Darell Hernaiz went nought for four. The whole roster is on the depth chart page, and it doesn't read any better than it plays.
Now the part I actually can't get past. Twelve thousand and nine people were at that game, and every one of them was in Missouri. Not one person in Oakland was watching a home game, because there's no home. This franchise plays its home schedule in a fourteen thousand seat minor league park in West Sacramento while a dome goes up on the Las Vegas Strip, and it plays its road schedule as a team with no city name on the front of anything that means a thing to anybody. Sutter Health Park is the factual version of that arrangement. Bay Area Villains is how it feels.
I'm not going to pretend to be sad about a walk off loss for this organisation. I'm not. The people who ran it out of Oakland earned every empty seat, every four to three, every ninth inning like that one. But there are still ballplayers on that roster who did nothing wrong, who threw eight good innings on a Tuesday in Kansas City, and they're the ones who have to fly to the next city and do it again for nobody. What the Bay Area lost is the column about what got taken here, and nights like this are the receipt.
Forty nine and seventy seven. The road they're on ends in a dome on the Las Vegas Strip in 2028, and until then this is what it looks like: good pitching, no offence, a ninth inning that finds a brand new way to end, and a crowd that belongs to somebody else. The rest is on the A's hub.
For what it's worth, the Giants didn't exactly cover themselves in glory either. One run in Cleveland. It was a rough night to be a baseball fan in this part of the world, or in whatever part of the world this team is supposed to belong to now.
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