Royals 9, Athletics 7: A Five Run Lead in the Eighth Inning in Kansas City Turned Into a Seven Run Inning the Other Way
On Tuesday they handed back a two run lead in the ninth. On Wednesday they handed back a four run lead in the eighth. Same ballpark, same opponent, two nights, two ways to lose a game they had already won.
Five to one in the eighth inning. That's where this team was on Wednesday in Kansas City, with six outs to get and a four run cushion and a starter who had already done his job. They lost nine to seven.
Seven runs. In one inning. In the eighth. Twenty four hours after giving Kansas City a two run ninth inning lead back on a catcher interference and a walk off. Two nights in the same building, two leads carried into the last third of a game, two losses. I don't know what to tell you about this organisation that the scoreboard hasn't already said twice.
| Team | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | R | H | E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athletics | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 7 | 11 | 0 |
| Kansas City | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 7 | X | 9 | 11 | 0 |
The eighth inning, batter by batter, because you should have to read it the way we had to watch it. Hayden Juenger comes in. Maikel Garcia hits a line drive to centre that Lawrence Butler gets a glove on and turns into a triple. Vinnie Pasquantino lines a single to right and it's five to two. Salvador Perez walks. Two on, nobody out, and Juenger leaves the game without recording a single out.
Drew Rom comes in. Carter Jensen flies out to centre and the runner moves to third, which is the only competent thing that happens for the next fifteen minutes. Tyler Tolbert walks. Kyle Isbel grounds a single through the left side and it's five to three with the bases loaded. Isaac Collins hits a sacrifice fly and it's five to four. Then Bobby Witt Jr. comes up and they walk him on purpose to load the bases again, which is a decision I understand on paper and hated in my chest.
John Rave doubled into the right field corner and cleared them all. Three runs. Five to seven. Then Maikel Garcia, who started the whole thing with the triple, singled in one more. Nine to five before anybody in the visiting dugout had figured out what was happening.
Drew Rom: one inning, three hits, two walks, four earned runs. Hayden Juenger: no outs recorded, two hits, a walk, three earned runs. Between them, seven runs on eleven batters in a game the Athletics had led by four. That's the entire story and everything else in this recap is decoration.
| Pitcher | IP | H | R | ER | BB | SO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jeffrey Springs, ATH | 5.2 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| Scott Blewett, ATH | 0.1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Elvis Alvarado, ATH | 1.0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Hayden Juenger, ATH | 0.0 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| Drew Rom, ATH (L) | 1.0 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 0 |
| Seth Lugo, KC | 6.0 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 0 | 3 |
| Alex Lange, KC | 1.0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Craig Kimbrel, KC (W) | 1.0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Steven Cruz, KC | 1.0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
Jeffrey Springs did his job and got nothing. Five and two thirds, five hits, two runs, three walks. Not brilliant, not a problem, exactly the start you need when your lineup gives you five runs. He left with a four run lead. He isn't the reason anybody lost this game and he'll still wear the taste of it on the flight out.
And for once, the offence wasn't the villain. Eleven hits. Eleven, from a team that managed five on Tuesday. Two in the first: Henry Bolte scored on a Jeff McNeil double, and Zack Gelof singled McNeil in. Three more in the fifth on a Bolte single, a McNeil single and a Gelof force out. Bolte finished two for five with two runs. McNeil went two for four with two driven in. Gelof drove in two. Donovan Walton had two hits and scored twice.
Max Muncy hit a two run home run in the ninth off Steven Cruz, his sixth, which cut it to nine to seven and gave about forty seconds of false hope to whoever was still awake for it. He was two for four with two runs and two runs batted in. On a night when this lineup did everything it has been failing to do all season, they lost by two.
That's the part that should bother the people running this thing. This roster isn't good, and everybody who reads this site knows I don't think it's good. But on Wednesday the offence produced eleven hits and seven runs on the road, and the starter handed over a four run lead in the sixth, and the bullpen still found a way to give the game away in a single inning without so much as a home run being hit. Seven runs on singles, walks, a triple, a sacrifice fly and one double. Nothing exotic. Just an inning of arms that couldn't throw a strike anybody couldn't hit.
Forty nine and seventy eight. Two straight blown leads in Kansas City. Eleven thousand five hundred and seventy nine people in the building, none of them in Oakland, none of them anybody this franchise can call its own, because there's no home to be at. A minor league park in West Sacramento is where the home games are, a dome on the Las Vegas Strip in 2028 is where the road ends, and in between are nights like this one, in front of nobody, thrown away by a bullpen nobody would recognise on the street.
I've said before that I'm not going to pretend to grieve for the people who took this team out of Oakland. I'm not. But Jeffrey Springs didn't do that. Henry Bolte and Jeff McNeil didn't do that. They played a good baseball game on Wednesday in Missouri and lost it anyway, and then got on a plane. What the Bay Area lost is the longer column. This is just the receipt for one more evening of it. The rest is on the A's hub and the depth chart page.
And if you want the strange symmetry of the day, the Giants won one to nothing in Cleveland on a single ground ball and seven scoreless innings of relief. One Bay Area team scored seven and lost. The other scored one and won.
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