Well that sucked.
Seriously, that was hard to watch. The quick summary is Hyphen missed his spots a few times tonight, our offense was mediocre, and Oakland clawed back from 3 separate deficits to earn its second walk off victory in as many nights.
Baseball is a tough sport to follow for 162 games. We are attempting to do it here on this blog, and already I’m thinking this will take years off my life. In the NFL you play 16 regular season games, so losing a tough one can only happen once a week. Not the case in baseball, where there’s a game almost daily. This is good when trying to get past a tough loss like this one, but the point is, we have to pace ourselves as fans. It really is a marathon season.
That being said, these April games seem a little more important than usual because the last thing this team needs is to be 10 games below .500 when it finally gets healthy in June. Not a good sign when we can’t win with our 2 and 3 starter either, considering our 4 and 5 aren’t very promising.
This afternoon the M’s have a shot at salvaging a split in this opening series. It would be nice to walk away with a split, and pretty bad to lose 3 in a row to this team. I really don’t think Oakland is good, but you have to give credit to a team that makes the most of its hits, and capitalizes on its opportunities. I doubt this timely hitting can sustain the A’s all year, but for a few nights it has been their winning recipe.
Hero: Milton Bradley. I don’t care that some think he should have caught Suzuki’s game winner, the bottom line is Milton hit a 2 run dinger, his first hit as a Mariner, and when you hit home runs for this team, there’s a good chance it’s enough to earn our stud performer. He also had 2 nice catches in the field.
Goat: Rob Johnson. 0-3, 3 K’s, 1 passed ball, at least another 3 drops.
Some bullets:
- Every time I watch a Mark Ellis at bat, he singles to right field.
- For the second year in a row, the M’s have had back to back 1 run losses in games 2 and 3. Last year, Minnesota gave us the painful losses thanks to some Brandon Morrow implosions.
- I don’t understand carrying Eric Byrnes, Ryan Langerhans, and Mike Sweeney. One of them should go.
- The attendance for game 2 was 18,000. The night before it was 10,000. I can hardly blame Oakland fans though, considering the stadium is a dump and across the bridge is AT&T Park, which is a gem.
- I thought Mark Lowe pitched well tonight. That slider he threw to strike out whoever it was flat out stank! (as Dave Niehaus would say)
- Eric Chavez looks like Orlando Bloom.
-Dan
andrewlong7
dpscansen
Joe Loughery
Matthew
The Good Guys Sports Blog 
Um, i have a correction to this post. Eric Chavez looks like Johnny Depp.
No, I definitely see more Orlando Bloom.
Sorry to post right after you… I guess the fact that both games sucked massively makes then fit into a nice neat package of suckiness.