Wednesday night at the Coliseum began with a bang and ended with a whimper, as the 51-45 Red Sox fell to the 26-71 Oakland A’s, 3-0.
The game devolved into chaos almost immediately. After reaching on a triple in the bottom of the first, Tony Kemp attempted to steal home, and got called out due to running too far from the base line. Oakland manager Mark Kotsay protested too much and found himself ejected.
Joe Jacques was lucky to escape the first inning. Not so much in the second, as the A’s, who entered the day with the 5th-fewest home runs in the Majors, took a 3-0 lead on a pair of home runs by Ryan Noda and JJ Bleday (with a runner on base).
“Didn’t get Strike 1 on a lot of guys, kind of fell behind, and both the homers were 2-strike pitches just left down the middle. And you know, if you leave it there, it’s gonna get punished,” Jacques told reporters. “Just gotta clean it up.”
Though Jacques started sporadically in college and the minor leagues, this 1 1/3-inning opener was his first career Major League start (and only his 11th career big-league game).
“It’s a little different,” he explained. “When your name’s called in the bullpen, you kind of get that adrenaline spike. It’s a little different starting, trying to time it out right. But regardless, just gotta get the job done, didn’t really get it done tonight.”
After the A’s brief offensive attack, things settled down. Too much.
While Chris Murphy, Joely Rodriguez, and Richard Bleier combined for 6 2/3 shutout innings, the Boston bats found themselves unable to get to Luis Medina. They hit him hard in his most recent outing, at Fenway on July 7. In that 6-inning relief appearance, the rookie right-hander allowed four earned runs on seven hits, a walk, and nine strikeouts.
This time around, the Red Sox had no answer for the 24-year-old former New York Yankees prospect. When Medina exited after 5 2/3 scoreless innings, the visiting team had only collected a walk and three hits, and struck out six times. By the top of the seventh, the Red Sox were 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position, with four men left on base.
By game’s end, they’d gone 0-for-5 with six men left on base. Chances were few and far between, but they’d had some, and squandered them all.
Masataka Yoshida’s two doubles were the team’s only extra-base hits of the night; the “rookie” leads the American League with 37 multi-hit games. Justin Turner also managed to extend his hitting streak to 14 games, the longest active streak in the majors. According to the team’s media relations, Turner is tied with Luis Aparicio (1973) for the second-longest hitting streak by a Red Sox player at age 38 or older; if he reaches 17 games, he’ll tie Ted Williams (1957) for the all-time franchise record.
Otherwise, the only positive developments on Wednesday night were on the pitching side. Murphy’s 4 2/3 innings was the longest outing of his fledgling Major League career, and he was in full control; the A’s only managed to get two hits and a walk from him, and fanned six times.
Fresh off stints on the injured list, Rodriguez and Bleier looked better than ever; the former needed nine pitches to get through a perfect seventh. In his first outing since May 21, Bleier worked around a leadoff double with a pair of strikeouts, intentional walk, and groundout to hold the A’s down in the eighth.
In a 162-game season, there will be games such as this one. In 2018, then-A’s pitcher Sean Manaea no-hit the Red Sox, and Boston went on to win 108 regular-season games and the World Series. And despite only notching their 26th win on Wednesday night, the A’s had already beaten each of the other four teams in Boston’s division this year.
1/162 isn’t the end of the world.
Still, in a stretch when the Red Sox are supposed to be proving to their front office that this is a team worth buying for at the upcoming trade deadline, every loss seems magnified.
However, while the Red Sox couldn’t catch a break in this game, they did get a reprieve on Tuesday night; every other team in the division lost, too, so the standings remain the same.