San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A’s 13, White Sox 2:
Oakland scores seven runs in the first inning, highlighted by Franklin Barreto’s three-run homer.
A’s second baseman Franklin Barreto tends to chase breaking pitches out of the strike zone — but this one curled right across the plate, kneehigh and tantalizing.
Soon, the ball soared over the leftfield wall.
Barreto shed his recent offensive struggles Saturday, launching a threerun homer to punctuate Oakland’s sevenrun first inning. The outburst propelled the A’s to a 132 rout of the visiting Chicago White Sox.
Chris Bassitt threw six scoreless innings as the A’s won for the ninth time in 11 games. They moved to 5241, a seasonhigh 11 games over .500.
Barreto’s blast, off White Sox reliever Ross Detwiler, gave the A’s at least one homer in a seasonhigh 14 consecutive games. They’ve hit 149 on the season, tied with the Yankees for thirdmost in the American League.
But the homer by Barreto — and, to some extent, his fifthinning walk — carried wider implications. The A’s are giving him an extended run as their starter at second base (and possibly showcasing him for a trade), hoping he will adapt to majorleague pitching.
“Now that they’ve given me this opportunity, I’m going to take advantage of it,” Barreto said through a translator.
The equation begins with pitch selection, as manager Bob Melvin made clear before the game. Barreto likes to swing, but he needs to pick his spots more judiciously; he’s walked only seven times in 178 majorleague plate appearances, against 72 strikeouts.
Saturday’s game suggests he’s finally making progress.
“It’s just a matter of focusing on good pitches that you can actually take advantage of — the pitches you want to swing at, not the ones the pitcher wants you to swing at,” Barreto said.
Marcus Semien and Matt Chapman opened the first with consecutive doubles. Then Matt Olson and Khris Davis provided patience, taking walks from White Sox starter Dylan Covey. Robbie Grossman, batting with the bases loaded and one out, shrewdly bounced a tworun single through the vacant left side of the infield, stretching the A’s lead to 30.
The advantage reached 40 on Chris Herrmann’s RBI single and ballooned to 70 when Barreto went deep.
“For his size and stature, he has as much power as anybody,” Melvin said. “He’s a very talented guy. It’s just about giving him some playing time, getting him comfortable and letting his talent level take over.”
The early cushion gave Bassitt full license to challenge the White Sox. Bassitt extended Oakland’s habit of forcing opponents to earn their runs; A’s starters have walked only five hitters in 46 innings over their past eight games, including Bassitt’s two Saturday.
One important element: He used his changeup more often. Bassitt typically throws the pitch two or three times per start, but teammates Mike Fiers and Brett Anderson told Bassitt he needed to make an adjustment after his last start. Bassitt surrendered six runs July 6 against Seattle, throwing mostly fastballs and cutters.
So he mixed in about 15 changeups Saturday, and that made all the difference.
“That’s a realistic approach, to put a pitch in hitters’ heads,” Bassitt said. “I haven’t done that all my career, because I haven’t had to. It got to the point where every team has seen me enough times and they have a good game plan for me.
“BA and Fiers said it’s time to bust it out, and that’s kind of what happened.”