The A's Got Swept, Lost Their Sixth Straight, and Watched a Kid Homer on His First Swing
Framber Valdez retired the first eleven. Detroit hit three home runs, including a 425-foot pinch-hit shot from a rookie in his first major-league at-bat. The Athletics scored once, lost 4-1, and got swept out of Comerica. This is what rock bottom looks like when it keeps going.
There is losing, and then there is whatever the Athletics are doing right now. Thursday afternoon in Detroit the Tigers finished off a three-game sweep with a 4-1 win, and if you are keeping count at home, that is six losses in a row for a franchise that plays its home games in a Triple-A ballpark in Sacramento while it waits on Las Vegas. Six straight. There is no bottom to this. There is just the next game, and the next loss, and another road city getting to feel good about itself at the A's expense.
The tone got set immediately, because it always does with this team. Framber Valdez retired the first eleven Athletics he faced. Eleven up, eleven down, and the only reason the perfect-game chatter did not start is that he plunked Shea Langeliers with two outs in the fourth. That was the whole threat. For the afternoon, Valdez allowed three hits, walked nobody, and struck out nine. He was in complete control from the first pitch, and the A's never once made him uncomfortable. When a lineup goes down in order that many times in a row, it is not bad luck. It is a bad offense meeting a good pitcher, and only one of those things was going to give.
Detroit did its damage the easy way, over the fence. Jake Rogers led off the scoring with a solo homer off Blake Perkins in the third, his second in as many games. The A's actually clawed even in the fifth, and I will give them this one sentence of credit: Henry Bolte legged out an RBI on a fielder's choice, a grounder to first that he beat into a run through sheer effort. One to one. For about half an inning, it was a game.
Then Zach McKinstry hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the fifth and it was over, because of course it was. That is the pattern with a team like this. You scratch and claw and manufacture a single run through hustle, and the other side answers with one swing. The A's earn their runs the hard way and give them back the easy way, and the scoreboard tells the difference every night. McKinstry's shot put Detroit back in front, and the Athletics did not seriously threaten again.
The part that ought to sting the most came late, and it came from a kid nobody outside of Toledo had heard of. Eduardo Valencia, called up from Triple-A that very day, came off the bench and launched a 425-foot pinch-hit home run to center field in his first major-league at-bat. His first swing in the big leagues, and it left the yard against the Athletics. That is the kind of thing that happens to teams that have stopped scaring anybody. You become the backdrop for other people's best days, the answer to a trivia question about somebody else's debut. Valencia will remember that swing for the rest of his life, and it happened against the A's, because these days everything good seems to happen against the A's.
Perkins took the loss and fell to 2-5, and honestly the pitching is not really the story here, the same way it is never quite the story. Three home runs will beat you, sure, but you do not get swept and lose six in a row because of a couple of solo shots. You lose like this because the offense cannot string anything together, because you go down eleven in a row against a good starter, because your one run of the day comes on a fielder's choice. The A's are not getting beaten by some fluke. They are getting beaten because right now they are not a good baseball team, and the standings and the losing streak are just being honest about it.
And that is the whole ugly story of this franchise in 2026, told in one afternoon. A displaced team playing in a minor-league park, no home to call its own, losing six in a row on the road while a rookie christens his career at its expense. Nobody in Oakland asked for this, nobody in Sacramento truly wanted it, and the product on the field is giving no one a reason to look past the mess off it. Six straight losses. Swept in Detroit. Beaten by a kid's first big-league swing. The A's will play again tomorrow, and if you have watched this stretch, you already know how it is going to feel.
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