Athletics even the series with a 4-3 win

The Morning After: The A’s rebounded nicely from an opening series loss to take game 2 against the Giants in a 4-3 fashion.  The box score rarely tells the whole story so let’s get to it.

Brett Anderson’s final line was 8 hits, 3 earned over 3.1 innings.  Anderson tossed 54 pitches, 33 of them for strikes. I was hoping to see the lefty build on his performance against Cleveland during his last start (0 earned over 5 innings), but this was a definite step backwards.

A lot of contact given up and a lot of hits. To be fair, there were a few seeing-eye ground balls that made their way through the infield, but Anderson wasn’t fooling anyone out there tonight.  Anderson has given up 36 hits and 16 earned runs in 23.2 innings so far. It’s time to find a better option if this team is going to push for the Wild Card. Anderson being in the vicinity of serviceable isn’t going to get it done.

The bullpen was up to the task tonight.  Petit relieved Anderson and delivered a scoreless effort until the 7th inning when he was pulled for pinch-hitter Mark Canha. In his first MLB pinch-hit appearance, with the A’s down 3-2 and Phegley on base, Canha absolutely demolished a ball left up in the zone by Tony Watson. It was a no-doubter that cleared the left field wall and landed about half way up the seats giving the A’s a 4-3 lead. That was all the offense the Athletics would need.

Trivino came in the bottom half of the inning and shut the Giants down over the next two innings. Trivino tossed 35 pitches and was left in a little longer than usual but after the bullpen meltdown the night before, I understood the decision.

Treinen entered in the 9th and made things interesting with a couple of walks, but worked his way out of it with a scoreless save dropping his ERA down to a miniscule .96 in the process.

The series is now notched up at 1-1 with the final game in SF before the All-Star break starting tonight at 7:05 PDT.