Friday: A’s 0-3 Giants

Saturday: A’s 2-5 Giants

Sunday: A’s 1-7 Nate Schierholtz

Oh, man. An in the park home run? IN. THE. PARK. It’s fair to say, this wasn’t  a great weekend for the A’s. They went down to a combination of poor hitting, poor fielding, some bad luck, and a pretty impressive San Francisco Giants team. Now, I catch a Giants game now and again, when they don’t clash with the A’s (or Greek, obviously. A man’s gotta have his priorities straight, right?). This is the first time this year I’ve watched three consecutive games, however, and I must admit, I liked what I saw. Whilst this lineup is never going to pound teams into submission, they field well, run aggressively, and their starting pitching is lights out. Bruce Bochy seems to take a lot of criticism for some decisions that he makes, but on this weekend’s evidence, he’s got the team playing hard, aggressive baseball. Did I mention that Nate Schierholtz rounded the bases whilst Jack Cust was scrabbling around trying to find the ball in right field? In a nice bit of symmetry, Schierholtz also had an outfield assist in the first game when Kennedy was thrown out at the plate. That was part of the story of the weekend – nothing that the A’s tried to do worked, and everything the Giants tried did.

And boy, can they pitch. Lincecum was not perfect in his complete game shutout, but hey. I guess we’ll forgive him that. The Giants were able to jump on one bad pitch from Vin Mazzaro, and there it was. Mazzaro was once again very impressive, with perhaps the most telling part of his outing being his two perfectly executed sacrifice bunts. Not bad for a guy who’s never had a big league at bat. And against Tim Lincecum, at that.

Josh Outman, on the other hand, was less able with the wood in hand, but he produced another quality outing before he was blooped / Crosby-ed to death in the seventh inning.

I really, really don’t want to say anything more about Sunday, except that it was painful, Matt Cain is Good At Baseball, and Brett Anderson still has a way to go before he’s a good major league pitcher. With Gio Gonzalez, Dana Eveland and Sean Gallagher showing what their capable of in Sacramento, he may get sent down if he continues to struggle like this.

What else can you say about the weekend? Well, it’s probably sealed Matt Holliday’s being traded this summer (rather than waiting for the compensation draft picks next year) – could he be headed to the Giants? They’re atop the National League wildcard chart, so… who knows?

The A’s have the day off to regroup as they head down south to face the Los Angeles Dodgers. Dallas Braden gets the chance to be the stopper as he goes up against young LA pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who has real talent, but has had a mixed season, thus far. Rather like some A’s rookies I could name…