Another One Of Those

Oakland has always been a bastion of all things a little offbeat when it comes to Baseball. Their 70s-era teams were generally a bunch of brash, bushy ruffians, guys like Jim Hunter, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers and, of course, Reggie Jackson. They did things differently and won 3 consecutive World Series championships in the process. Since then, they've had the Bash Brothers, and now continue to be entrenched in the Moneyball era, thanks to their intrepid GM Billy Beane and his continued penchant for finding cheap ballplayers that somehow win when all banded together. The A's have won over the past decade or so with more regularity than you'd think, all the while adhering to the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Particularly when those parts involve things like overgrown beards, using WHAM! as your at-bat music, and playing in a ballpark with excessive amounts of foul territory, thanks to it being the last multi-sport stadium currently in use, and an inscrutable name that nobody can figure out (and that sometimes has plumbing revolts that can cover the clubhouses in sewage). Somehow, this has led to the A's having the best record in Baseball for a majority of the season, and though they've slumped recently, they're still right in the thick of the AL West race, coming into Tuesday night's affair with a 73-51 record.

This whole long preamble is sort of meant to mask having to talk about said game on Tuesday night, a 6-2 Oakland win that I didn't bother to stick around for the end of. I already went through my sleeping pattern adjustment and the fact that 10pm West Coast starts don't really work for me anymore. I managed to get through the first 4 innings of the game, and although I didn't go to sleep directly after that, I'd seen all I needed to see. By that point, Dillon Gee had suffered through his 4th inning meltdown, surrendering a 3-run triple to Coco Crisp that for all intents and purposes put the game out of reach, and Scott Kazmir, whom the Mets roughed up but good back in June (but in typical Mets fashion they could do nothing with last night), took things from there.

The Mets once again did not hit much at all, save for a Travis d'Arnaud Home Run off of Kazmir, and this seems to be nothing new of late. However, in checking the box score this morning I do see that the Mets had 7 hits in last night's game, a significant step up from the 4-a-game run they were on in the Cubs series. Still, averaging between 4-7 hits per game isn't going to do anybody any good, and if it keeps up when the Mets aren't on the West Coast, maybe I'll start going to bed even earlier.