By Art Spander
Special to Newsday
OAKLAND, Calif. — The headline Monday was on crime. "Nation's robbery capital: Oakland."
The headline Saturday was on disenchantment. "A's, Oakland remain far apart on lease."
And, of course, there are the sewage problems at the stadium and the continued intent of the owner to shift the franchise 50 miles south to San Jose.
Copyright © 2013 Newsday. All rights reserved.
By Art Spander
OAKLAND — No tarps on the upper deck. Revelation. No runs for most of the game. Ruination. The O.Co Coliseum could barely hold the excitement. Detroit’s Max Scherzer had very little trouble holding the Oakland A’s.
The game was everything it was supposed to be, a matchup of two of baseball’s best teams, a matchup of two of baseball’s best pitchers. “You figure the runs were going to be stingy,” said Tigers manager Jim Leyland, “and they were.”
Scherzer, the major leagues’ only 20-game winner during the regular season (he was 21-3), wasn’t at all stingy with strikeouts. He recorded 11. His backups, Drew Smyly and Joaquin Benoit, added five more.
When a team strikes out 16 times in any game, especially one in the postseason, it’s not going to win.
And in Game 1 of the best-of-five American League Division Series on Friday night, the A’s did not, losing 3-2 to the Tigers, who scored all their runs in the first inning.
Oakland’s 40-year-old starter, Bartolo Colon, couldn’t retire any of the game’s first three batters, giving up a double to Austin Jackson, hitting Torii Hunter with a pitch and then allowing a single by Miguel Cabrera.
What an awful way to begin for 48,401 fans, the largest baseball crowd in Northern California since a Giants-A's game in 2004 in Oakland drew more than 52,000. That was before the A’s had the absurd idea of covering seats in the upper deck and so-called Mount Davis, to make people believe, ostrich fashion, that those seats didn’t exist.
In last year’s playoffs, the tarps stayed on. This time, wisely, management opened up the place, and the people filled it. Unfortunately, except for a Yoenis Cespedes monster two-run homer in the bottom of the seventh, the crowd had no reason to do much than chant every now and then, “Let’s go Oakland.”
Pitching wins, especially in the postseason — yes, there are exceptions, such as the Red Sox and Pirates on Friday — and for the Tigers and Scherzer, pitching won. Now, Detroit follows tonight with Justin Verlander, last season’s Cy Young Award winner.
“We tend to strikeout some,” said A’s manager Bob Melvin. Some? How about a lot?
The trouble with a strikeout is it does nothing for the offense, doesn’t move a runner, doesn’t force a fielder to make a play that he may botch, doesn’t get a guy home from third with one out. Think of it. Of the 27 outs made by the A’s, half were on strikeouts.
“We’ve been a little bit on and off with that over the course of the season,” conceded Melvin. “But Scherzer is a strikeout guy. He’s a swing-and-miss guy ... He has a gap (a differential in velocity) between his fastball and his two off-speed (pitchers). He can pitch up and down, which he did.”
Scherzer insisted that every game was the same to him, that it was no big deal he was chosen for the first game of the playoffs. Leyland believed otherwise.
“He was thrilled to get Game 1,” said the manager, who tends to be wonderfully forthright. “He was locked in all night. He was awful determined. I think it meant a lot to him, even though he said it didn’t matter which game he pitched. And he responded like we expected him to respond.”
Mixing fastballs, change-ups and curves, keeping the A’s guessing when they weren’t lurching.
“You go on your instincts,” said Scherzer. “Today we noticed my fastball seemed pretty good, and my change-up seemed pretty good, so early in the game we featured those two pitches a lot.”
Then, contradicting his manager, Scherzer said, “I don’t get caught up in the hoopla, worry about where I’m pitching or if I’m pitching Game 1 or Game 5. When you’re pitching against the A’s, you have to bring your game. And tonight I was able to pitch effectively and pitch well against their left-handed hitters, and that’s the reason why I had success tonight.”
It was a righthanded batter, Cespedes, only a few days ago a doubtful starter because of shoulder soreness, who ended Scherzer’s shutout and the despair among the A’s partisans.
“It got to 2-2,” said Scherzer of Cespedes’ at-bat in the seventh. “And I didn’t know what pitch to go with, and I thought if I went with my fastball I could make him go away (hit the ball to right). The pitch caught too much of the plate, and he took it deep, and that’s just something that happens.
“It’s baseball. It’s pitching, and you move on. From there I was able to settle down and get three big outs in that situation. The crowd was roaring, and the crowd was on their feet, and to get those outs was big, because I was then able to pass it on to the rest of the (bull)pen.”
Which did what bullpens are supposed to do, shut down the batters and, in the process, shut down the crowd.
A's, Max Scherzer, Tigers, Yoenis Cespedes Email Article By Art Spander
SAN FRANCISCO — The man never deals in extremes. Well, almost never. Bruce Bochy is the essence of composure. His words carry the reassurance of someone who understands the wonderful — and painful — unpredictability of baseball, a game of fortune as well as skill.
Yet Bochy realized, as did so many others, that his San Francisco Giants were on an edge, faced with as many questions as they had problems, faced with the secondary issue of losing dominion over the Bay Area as well as losing another game to a team unrelentingly determined to claim the territory for themselves.
Three in a row the Giants had dropped to the Oakland Athletics, and suddenly the fourth game, the last game on the schedule between them this season of 2013, became enormous. For the Giants.
“I thought (Thursday) was really critical,” Bochy conceded not long after the Giants did at last beat the A’s. “We had to find a way to win this game. There was pride involved in there.”
They won, 5-2, won at home, at AT&T Park, where they usually win but lost, 9-6, Wednesday night after losing Monday and Tuesday at Oakland.
They won because Barry Zito was able make just enough of the right pitches at the right time, after making seemingly far too many wrong ones. They won because the big hit, absent of late, a two-run double, was delivered by Brandon Belt in the sixth inning. They won because the bright sunshine and light wind of an all-too-typical late spring afternoon by the Bay caused havoc for A’s fielders.
They won, and then they bused to the airport for an immediate trip to St. Louis, where Friday they open a series against the Cardinals, arguably the best team in the majors — or anywhere else.
“And if this game had gotten away from us,” said Bochy, “it would have been a very long flight.”
He meant mentally, but you knew that, with a lot of doubt and confusion, maybe the Giants would be wondering what had happened, the way their fans — and there were 41,250 of them, the 195th straight sellout — would be wondering what had happened.
Pitching failures, injuries, illness. And losses in eight of their previous 12 games, including the three against the A’s. These were the Giants, the defending World Series champions? Yes. And no.
A.J. Griffin, who as Zito grew up in San Diego, pitched beautifully for Oakland. He didn’t give up a hit through three innings, gave up only one through five. “Great, hit the spots,” Bochy said of the opponent. “A great curve ball. Good command.”
Then the manager, a onetime catcher, made the ultimate observation of the sport, to wit, “The pitcher on the mound sets the tone.”
It was true for Griffin. It was no less true for Zito who, like some medieval knight trapped in a maze, kept finding the escape route.
In the first, the A’s had runners on second and third with nobody out. And didn’t score. In the second, they had runners on first and second with two outs and scored only a run. In the fifth, they had runners on first and second with one out and didn’t score.
“The key was we didn’t get down the way we had the last few games,” said Bochy. “Barry kept dodging bullets. He was amazing. He made pitches when he had to. The A’s are a tough team, a good team. We needed this game.”
Zito turned 35 two weeks ago. He’s been in the majors since 2000. He won a Cy Young Award, with the A’s. He’s been booed by Giants fans. He’s been cheered by Giants fans. He hardly needed anyone giving him an explanation of the game’s importance. Or his performance.
“Way too many walks,” said Zito. Six, to be specific, in six innings. Actually in five, because in the sixth, he retired the A’s in order for the only inning. “I was able to come up with stuff when I had to.”
Too many walks, very few hits, three, all to Coco Crisp. Zito, as Bochy put it, was Houdini, a magician, making base runners disappear, or at least keeping them stranded.
“Pitching is not always about location,” Zito reminded. It’s about speed and effectiveness and — when a batter misses a fat one — about fortune. It’s about courage, about, as the saying goes, hanging in there.
“This was a big series,” agreed Zito. “Big crowds in both parks. It was nice for us to take one.”
It was essential.
“These games are fun,” said Belt, the lefty who hit the lefty — reliever Hideki Okajima. “They bring a lot of energy for both clubs. We did just enough to win the ball game.”
Which is all that counts.
By Art Spander
OAKLAND — There was no magic. The Michael Kickham debut wasn’t Hall of Fame stuff, wasn’t even enough to get the San Francisco Giants a win.
These are the majors. These guys are the best. “Mistakes here,” conceded Kickham, “are magnified.”
For an individual. For a team.
The Giants are not doing very much right these days. Across the Bay from their home park, at the O.co Coliseum, against the Athletics, they’ve done everything wrong.
So the A’s made it two in a row over the Giants, one in a row over the rookie Kickham up from the minors, beating San Francisco, 6-3, Tuesday night. That follows a 4-1 win Monday.
The best team in Northern California at the moment, and maybe for a period longer than that, is Oakland. The A’s have won five in a row, 10 of their last 11.
The Giants are the defending World Series champions, but that was then, this is now, and now is a team whose strength, starting pitching, is no longer its strength. And whose weakness, offense, is magnified.
Angel Pagan, the table setter, the leadoff man, is ailing. Without him in the lineup the Giants seem flat, the middle of the order ineffective. Pablo Sandoval, with the flu or a virus, something keeping from his best, was 0-for-3, and is 2 of his last 21. Buster Posey didn’t have a hit in either game at Oakland.
“We got guys struggling at the plate,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said in a statement impossible to deny. “Our offense is not scoring runs. Give their pitchers credit.”
The A’s starting pitcher Tuesday night, when again Oakland sold out the restricted-seat Coliseum, was Jarrod Parker. He gave up a run in the first and another in the sixth. Two runs allowed in seven innings.
Giants pitching used to do that. A’s pitching is doing it now.
“It was exciting catching him and watching him,” Derek Norris said of Parker. “He’s a potential Cy Young winner.”
So Norris was a bit carried away. That is allowable. He hit a two-run homer off Kickham in the second. And he was superb at the most important job for any catcher, making sure his own pitcher is in control.
The interleague series goes west Wednesday and Thursday, if not very far, to the other side of the bridge, San Francisco, where the Giants have a winning record, as opposed to the losing one they have on the road, where they’ve dropped seven out of eight.
Tim Lincecum starts for the Giants, and as things go these days that’s hardly a sure thing. He’ll probably last longer than Kickham, whose contract was purchased from Triple-A Fresno only hours before his first pitch Tuesday. He’s the fill-in for Ryan Vogelsong. He went 2 1/3 innings. He’s not the savior.
“He showed really good stuff early,” said Bochy. Yeah, like one inning, the first, when the 24-year-old Kickham retired the A’s on eight pitches. Wow! And then whoops.
A strikeout to open the second, after which Oakland’s Jed Lowrie singled. Then a strikeout. But on a 3-1 count, Norris smashed one into the left field seats.
“It was a decent pitch,” said Kickham. “But it came on a hitter’s count.”
And the hitter hit, but if Madison Bumgarner can’t beat the A’s — although Monday he didn’t pitch badly — it’s difficult to fault Kickham for not beating the A’s.
“His stuff was impressive,” said Bochy, maybe trying to make himself feel as good about the defeat as Kickham. “He just started missing by a little bit. A couple of mistakes.”
One, insisted Bochy, after the Giants lost for the fourth time in six games, was not the decision to elevate Kickham to the big-league team. Kickham can get wild on occasion, but some of his fastballs reached 94 mph. Still, out of 65 pitches in fewer than three full innings, he had only 36 strikes.
“It was awesome just to get the opportunity to put on a Giants jersey,” said Kickham, who has been in pro ball only since 2010. “It’s a great opportunity. (The game) didn’t go how I wanted, obviously, but it was something to learn from.”
Before the game, Bochy described what he liked about Kickham, his repertoire, his manner.
“It’s a big day for him, as it is for anyone his first big-league game,” said Bochy. “He probably could use another year at Triple-A, but he’s here. We’ll know more about him after the game.”
They do. So do the Oakland A’s.
By Art Spander
The Sports Xchange
OAKLAND — Someone wondered before the first pitch what Oakland Athletics' manager Bob Melvin was going to do about Yoenis Cespedes.
The second-year major-leaguer from Cuba was hitting below the dreaded "Mendoza Line" of .200, at .198. Or as the players say, he's on the wrong interstate, I-98.
Copyright 2013 The Sports Xchange