Barreto adjusts, blasts game-winner
Oakland’s All-Star gave a little advice to the team’s youngest player Tuesday, and both provided all sorts of offense to a team starved for runs lately.
The A’s belted four homers in a 7-6 win over the White Sox — including two by Yonder Alonso, who is heading to his first AllStar Game next week, and the game-winning shot in the ninth by rookie infielder Franklin Barreto. The A’s snapped a six-game losing streak, as well as an eight-game home losing streak that matched their longest in the past 35 years.
The chat Alonso had with Barreto after the 21-year-old struck out in his first at-bat proved fateful. “He said I was a little tardy, and I felt it, too,” Barreto said of his swing, via interpreter Juan Dorado. “Pitches were getting ahead of me. So I tried to get ahead of the ball.”
Alonso said he didn’t want to take any credit for Barreto’s day. “I was just trying to give him a few pointers here and there,” Alonso said. “God, he’s special. He took it all in, made an adjustment, and you saw the ability that he has.”
On his next time up, with two outs in the fourth and Jaycob Brugman at first after a walk, Barreto whacked an RBI triple. And in the ninth, he stepped up against Tommy Kahnle and hit a 3-2 fastball over the wall in left.
“If you watched that at-bat unfold, he got more and more confident as the at-bat went along,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said. “That will happen when you see some pitches, foul some pitches off. You’re not going to throw it hard enough to get it past him if he’s looking for a fastball.”
“It’s nice to see a little guy with pop like that,” Alonso said. “He definitely got it.”
Barreto said it was his first walk-off homer, including back home in Venezuela. He got his first celebratory whipped-cream pie in the face as a reward while doing the postgame TV interview.
Entering the day, Oakland had scored just 10 runs over the previous five games and was batting .155 in that span. Leadoff man Matt Joyce hit a two-run shot in the third off James Shields to snap an 0-for-11 stretch, and Alonso belted a solo shot leading off the fourth — his first homer since June 15 — and added a two-run drive with two outs in the fifth. Alonso has 19 homers; his previous career high was nine.
On June 24 at Chicago, Barreto, Brugman and Matt Olson each hit his first bigleague homer off Shields.
The A’s did not commit an error Tuesday, and second baseman Jed Lowrie made a particularly nice play going toward the middle on a grounder by Tim Anderson in the third. In the seventh, with a man at second and two outs, reliever Ryan Madson made a terrific play on a comebacker by Jose Abreu, knocking it down, scrambling for the ball and throwing from the ground for the out at first.
Madson, who entered the game with one on and no outs, also recorded a strikeout in his perfect inning of work, and Sean Doolittle worked the eighth, needing just 11 pitches, nine strikes, in a 1-2-3 inning. Santiago Casilla allowed three singles in the ninth, including a game-tying single to left by Melky Cabrera with two outs.
Rookie right-hander Daniel Gossett started for Oakland and allowed a two-run shot to Cabrera in the third and a three-run homer by Abreu in the fifth. Gossett has allowed seven homers in five bigleague starts spanning 26 innings after giving up just four in 11 starts and 602⁄3 innings at Triple-A Nashville.
“It’s nothing I’m excited about,” Gossett said. “I’ve just got to go back to pitch sequencing and pitch quality and learn from it what I can.”