A’s shut out by White Sox in haze of Bassitt injury
The Oakland A’s lost to 9-0 to the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday night, but baseball was a secondary concern on this day.
While the A’s suffered their sixth shutout, the game’s starter Chris Bassitt was in the hospital after taking Brian Goodwin’s line drive to the side of his face. Bassitt left Guaranteed Rate Field on an ambulance after the second-inning incident; the 32-year-old was bleeding heavily from his face, but stood up on his own power and was ‘conscious and aware,’ the A’s said in a statement.
“Bass is conscious,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said after the game. “He was the entire time. We don’t think the eye is a problem at this point. It felt like it was below it. He’s got some cuts. They had to do some stitches. He’s in a scan and we’ll know more about potential fractures tomorrow or later tonight.”
Melvin took no further questions from reporters after the statement.
Bassitt’s teammates looked on horrified as their team leader writhed in pain on the mound. Seeing him carted off weighed heavy.
“There was a dark cloud around that game the whole time,” White Sox manager Tony La Russa told reporters after the game. “We’re all really hoping he escaped with just a bruise.”
Goodwin, who’s line drive came off his bat at 100mph, tweeted that Bassitt was “in my prayers for sure brother.”
Bassitt left with the bases loaded in the second inning. On short notice out of the bullpen, Burch Smith couldn’t hold the line in the aftermath of the traumatic scene. An
drew Vaughn hit a tworun single. Jake Lamb, an Athletic for a short time, hit a three-run home run — the traditional pyrotechnics added insult to injury. Jose Abreu added a threerun home run off Smith in the fourth inning.
The A’s were shut out and had four hits total, striking out six times and hitting into four double plays. As the game wore on, manager Bob Melvin pulled starters Matt Chapman, Starling Marte and Jed Lowrie from their posts.
Mitch Moreland, a closer during his time at Mississippi State, pitched the eighth inning to bring some levity to the dugout.
Bassitt’s injury was not the first time an A’s pitcher absorbed a line drive from a White Sox Batter. Nearly 40 years ago to the day, Chicago’s Harold Baines hit a line drive that broke A’s reliever Bo McLaughlin’s left cheekbone and his eye socket in five different places during a game at he Coliseum. La Russa was the skipper for Chicago that day in 1981, too.
In 2012, then-A’s pitcher Brandon McCarthy was hit in the head by a liner off Los Angeles Angels’ Erick Aybar and had to undergo surgery to repair a skull fracture and brain contusion.