Who would have thunk it? After the bad stretch we’ve been in since, well.. opening day really, (although I was going to say the six game losing streak), who would have thought we could pull out a 4-0 win like that?
Tonight I ran into a problem with my computer at home – I had a hardware failure, and had to spend the night figuring out why a data drive failed, and my USB mouse/keyboard were no longer working. Figuring that out took longer than I was expecting, but while doing that, I had the game on the mlb gameday audio on my laptop.
So I was listening to the game while I was getting annoyed at my hardware problems. But this was probably good, as there wasn’t a lot of action in this one in terms of offense. The A’s had a total of 9 hits, but weren’t able to put a run across the board. All the A’s hits were singles, according to the box score. The Rangers had less hits (six), but were able to get a fourspot in the top of the sixth, which was the only scoring for the entire game for both teams. The funny thing is that only one of the four runs was earned, and listening to Eric & Victor on this one they say that the other one was sort of “unearned” because we shouldn’t have been put in the position to get them – one of those “mental error” type of things. The game winning hit was a two run single by Sammy Sosa, who finally came through with the bases loaded after a few failed attempts recently. The big “hit” of the night was Marlon Byrd, who got three hits himself (and the other RBI besides Sosa’s 2), and the entire rest of the team only got three. So he had a good night.
Mike Wood started this game in a spot start function. He did pitch five scoreless innings on just five hits, but also gave up five walks. Too many walks. Obviously, the rest of our pen got some scoreless innings in, with a shutout, but it seemed odd that Gagne got a save in a 4-0 score. I did miss the bottom of the ninth due to my needing to down my net connection at the time, so it must have been one of those deals where it’s a save based on the guy on deck.
Still, it’s nice to see a win, but we need way too many of these for it to matter much, I suppose.