The Athletics ended their five game losing streak last night with a nice offensive performance over the Indians. The score was 9-0 by the second inning and Jack Cust belted his thirteenth homerun and he drove in five in the win. Six players had multihit games and all nine regulars got at least one hit in the game. Shannon Stewart had a game high four hits and three runs and Lenny DiNardo was able to coast to his second win of the season.
The bad news is, while the A’s were busy losing, the Mariners were busy winning, the A’s now sit three games back of them in second place and eight games back of the Angels for first. And this also takes into account the Angels embarrasing sweep at the hands of the Royals. And five games seperate them and the Indians for the Wild Card so the A’s have their work cut out for them.
They can make one of those games up against the Indians this afternoon as the finale in their four game series starts in less then an hour. Joe Blanton will take on a suprisingly good Paul Byrd.
Rich Harden came back on Monday and then had to leave the game. He’ll be shut down until at least this weekend but this is pretty discouraging because an almost healthy Harden would make a great compliment to the Blanton/Haren duo.
Shannon Stewart has seven hits and five runs in the past two games and he has nine hits in the past three. So just against the Indians, he’s seen his batting average rise almost twenty points. Hopefully that trend continues today.
Nick Swisher hasn’t a hit homerun since June 16th so we’re talking about an almost two week drought. This would be a nice day to end that run with one, or maybe even two or three long balls. He’s also seen his OPS dip well below .900 since the series with the Mets and it’d be nice if he could get back to what he was doing in May (.333/.444/.563).
I love these player profiles that Baseball Prospectus does and this week they take a look at A’s reliever turned starter Chad Gaudin. You get a run down on everything and everything the guys done, both in the majors and the minors.
