Athletics looking to avoid 4-game sweep at outset
A’s are off to their worst start in 25 seasons at 0-3
OAKLAND >> The Oakland A’s are still searching for their first win of the 2021 season. They didn’t come much closer to one in Saturday’s 9-1 loss to the Houston Astros on Saturday afternoon.
They’re 0-3 to start a season for the first time since the 1996 season, when the team began the season at Cashman Field in Las
Vegas while Mt. Davis was being built at the Coliseum upon the Raiders’ Oakland return.
They have scored a total of seven runs through the first three games and allowed 26.
“We lost three games,” manager Bob Melvin said. “It’s been ugly. We haven’t played well yet.”
The trouble stems primarily from a stale offense. Despite a small surge on Friday that produced five runs on the back of some manufactured runs and Chad Pinder’s tworun home run, the A’s took a step back at the plate against Lance McCullers Jr. and an already-thin Astros bullpen.
“We made him work, without a doubt, made him throw some pitches but couldn’t get the big hit,” Melvin said.
The A’s finished the game with 11 strikeouts and just three hits. Matt Olson had two of those hits. They went 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position. Though peeved, they’re not overly concerned about the sluggish start with 159 games to go. Olson threw a kitchen sink of clichés to express the team’s lack of concern over the slow start at the plate.
“We’ll be fine,” Olson said. “A couple big situations we haven’t had the big hit. It’s fine. It’s game three. We have 159 more. Baseball happens sometimes. I don’t think we’re hitting the panic button over here. Need a couple knocks, balls to find the holes and get some runs across.”
The Astros, who used most of their bullpen in the first two games, rode reliever Ryne Stanek through two nohit innings. He struck out the side in the sixth and tossed a three-pitch seventh inning that included hitting Stephen Piscotty on the elbow.
That’s not the offensive production this A’s team is capable of, but indicative of the slow starts they’ve made a habit of over the last few seasons with this particular core of players. This may be the A’s first 0-3 start in 25 years, but they’ve gone 1-2 in eight of their last 10 seasons.
On Saturday, they scored one run on Mitch Moreland’s RBI single in the first inning, scoring Mark Canha from second base. It was all the A’s could do to capitalize on McCullers’ shaky start in which the offspeed specialist threw primarily fastballs that didn’t find the strike zone. McCullers went up 3-0 to the first four hitters, allowing two walks to start the game to Canha and Olson.
“Looked like he was struggling to find it at first,” Olson said. “We got some guys on and he found his way out of it. He has good stuff. After those first few innings, he was definitely a lot better with his command. But you give guys a while, his stuff is so good that it plays. We just didn’t capitalize on opportunities.”
Once McCullers found his slider and changeup, the A’s could only run up his pitch count with little to show for the effort other than a fifth inning departure.
They came close to a rally in the eighth inning with Canha drawing a walk, Olson singling and Matt Chapman drawing a walk, too. But pinch hitter Jed Lowrie against left-hander Brooks Raley struck out on a foul tip and Pinder hit a long fly out to the warning track.
Granted, the A’s were without some key bats. Ramón Laureano, who is 3-for-7 with a triple in two games, sat out Saturday with a jammed wrist, hurt sliding headfirst into first base on Friday night. They were also without catcher Sean Murphy for a second straight game after he suffered a right wrist contusion after getting hit by a pitch in the season opener.
The pitching was no help, either.
Cole Irvin, 27, tossed 4 1/3 innings with all four runs earned, striking out two with a walk in his A’s debut.
His start was muddied with one pitch that turned the game around, and it didn’t come from his glove. He handed off two runners on base to reliever Lou Trivino upon his departure in the fifth. Yordan Alvarez hit his second home run of the series off Trivino’s cutter left over the plate to turn a winnable 2-1 game into a 5-1 runaway.
For all the talk of outfielder George Springer’s departure to Toronto in free agency weakening the Astros offense,
Rookie of the Year Alvarez replenishes the lineup with plenty of power to all fields.
“He’s a tough guy to navigate around,” Melvin said. “The momentum shifted on one pitch.”
Aside from that gamechanging home run, Trivino put together a solid outing with four strikeouts through 2 2/3 innings. Those four strikeouts and 2 2/3 innings are single-game career highs for Trivino.
The game spiraled with Reymin Guduan on the mound. The new A’s reliever gave up four runs in what turned quickly into a garbage-time inning in which Melvin needed to preserve the rest of his arms. But the tumble resulted in the A’s bullpen allowing 10 runs in the ninth inning over these three games. They allowed just nine runs in the ninth inning in all of2020.
The A’s are prone to slow starts in this era, but they’re eager to turn things around and show out against some of their strongest competition during this 10-game stretch.
“We want to be playing the best dudes and see how we’re stacking up,” Olson said. “Not the best start, but we can compete with these guys and we will.”
Tidbits
Irvin recorded one 1-2-3 inning in his A’s debut. Safe to say he spent most of the afternoon navigating traffic. But the left-handed starter’s command was off, and the Astros aren’t ones to leave any mistake unchallenged.
“When you give up six free bases, you make it harder on yourself to get through five, six innings to give the bullpen a chance to keep it close,” Irvin said. “I’m frustrated with the free bases. I did great in terms of battling and getting through it, but there were pitches I had to execute and left pitches up.”
Irvin earned the final rotation spot over Daulton Jefferies and A.J. Puk in part because of his stellar command that translated into a 10-strikeout outing against the Los Angeles Dodgers starters in a spring training game. But Houston knocked him around with hard-hit balls, a good amount of contact hit with more than 100 mph exit velocity.
“That’s super, super unlike how I pitch,” Irvin said after the game. “Just super frustrated.”
Andrus made a highlight play to preserve Irvin’s only clean inning, doing his best Matt Chapman impression when he snagged Aledmys Diaz’s drive into the leftfield gap and turned it into a smooth 6-3 putout. Irvin let out a celebratory scream and gave a fist pump.
“He was juiced on it. I was juiced,” Irvin said. “I was trying to ride that momentum, ride that energy.”
Positive mojo was hard to come by, but the A’s will have another crack at the Astros on their home turf today. Sean Manaea will try to stop the bleeding and prevent a fourgame sweep against Jose Urquidy to usher in a visit from the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers.