Gore fans 11 as Nats shut down A’s
MacKenzie Gore tied a career high with 11 strikeouts, CJ Abrams hit an RBI triple and the Washington Nationals beat the Oakland Athletics 3-1 on Saturday.
Gore (2-0) tossed five scoreless innings, throwing 90 pitches and striking out the last five batters he faced. He struck out the side in the fifth before giving way to the bullpen. Nationals pitchers combined for 18 strikeouts. Kyle Finnegan recorded his fifth save of the season.
Abrams, who has hit safely in eight of the past 10 games, had a one-out RBI triple in the third inning to give the Nationals a 1-0 lead. Luis García Jr. made it 2-0 in the sixth with an RBI double.
Jacob Young knocked in an insurance run in the ninth with a two-out double after Abraham Toro cut the deficit to 2-1 in the seventh with an RBI double.
The Nationals, nearing the end of a week-long Bay Area trip, took two out of three in San Francisco earlier in the week and got back in the win column after dropping the final game against the Giants and the series opener at Oakland on Friday.
The A’s announced a season-low 3,330 fans in attendance on a cold weekend afternoon, the second time in nine home games this year that the team — which is leaving Oakland after this season — drew fewer than 4,000 fans.
Oakland had won five of six entering the game following a 1-7 start to the season, and can still win its third straight series with a victory today.
A’s starter Joe Boyle (1-2) allowed one run on five hits in five innings.
Brewers 11, Orioles 5: Jake Bauers hit a tiebreaking three-run homer in the fourth inning and Milwaukee slugged its way to another victory in Baltimore.
The Brewers have scored 58 runs in their past six games, with at least seven in each of them. That streak ties a franchise record set in 1982 and tied in 1989.
Milwaukee spotted the Orioles a 4-1 lead in the second inning, but didn’t stay down for long on a day when the wind at Camden Yards seemed to suit the hitters better than the pitchers. Rhys Hoskins also went deep for the Brewers,
and Ryan Mountcastle, Jordan Westburg and Adley Rutschman homered for Baltimore.
Elvis Peguero (3-0) pitched 1 scoreless innings, the first of five relievers who kept the Orioles off the scoreboard.
Dean Kremer (0-1) allowed six earned runs and 10 hits in four innings.
Milwaukee starter DL Hall, a former Norfolk Tide, permitted five runs and eight hits during 3 innings. Hall was part of the offseason trade that sent ace righthander Corbin Burnes from the Brewers to Baltimore.
Late Friday
Brewers 11, Orioles 1: Freddy Peralta struck out 11 in six outstanding innings, and Milwaukee hit three home runs in a rout of Baltimore that included a bench-clearing incident in the sixth inning at Camden Yards.
Gary Sánchez, Willy Adames and William Contreras went deep for the National League-leading Brewers. They scored three runs each in the second, fifth and sixth to take the series opener.
A big draw of this series was the “Jackson vs. Jackson” matchup of two top prospects. That didn’t amount to much in Friday’s opener.
Baltimore’s Jackson Holliday, the game’s top-ranked prospect by MLB Pipeline, struck out in all three of his plate appearances. Milwaukee’s Jackson Chourio, ranked No. 2, went 0 for 6 with three strikeouts of his own.
Holliday was making his home debut for the Orioles, with a crowd of 32,205 on hand. Fans gave him a standing ovation before each at-bat — and many remained standing while he was at the plate — but the infielder is struggling at the start of his career. He’s 0 for 11 with seven strikeouts in three games after being promoted from the Triple-A Norfolk Tides.
Athletics 2, Nationals 1 (10 innings):
Lawrence Butler hit the game-winning RBI single in the 10th inning and had a solo home run to power Oakland to a walk-off win over Washington in California.
Max Schuemann scored the winning run in his major league debut after entering as the automatic runner on second base to begin the 10th inning. The 26-year-old utilityman was called up on Thursday to replace injured outfielder Brent Rooker.
The Nationals tied the game in the top of the ninth inning on a solo shot from Jesse Winker off A’s right-hander Dany Jiménez.