The A's Lost, In Ways That Defied Belief

The A's In Late Innings

I'm all kinds of numb from this game, considering it was one of the most heart-breaking losses and excruciating experiences of my life as a fan... but, well, I write a blog and have to fill it and so on, and so on. Let's just get into it.

> SP Jon Lester is, we are told and with all kinds of prior experience, a dominant post-season pitcher. So I didn't just see him spit up 6 ERs while national television still fellated him as if he we were in the same world as people like Clayton Kershaw and Felix Hernandez.

Not to sound too bitter about this, but when your best offensive player is a .260 hitting outfielder with moderate power, and the biggest worry is to keep the other team's low OBP guys off the bases because they can steal a lot of them...

Um, no.

Don't let the door hit you on the ass, Jon.

> Brandon Moss held off from surgery so he could play in the post-season, and nearly dragged the team to a win tonight with two no-doubt home runs with five RBIs. It won't be remembered, of course, because that's not the way things work, but he deserved so much more.

> Ron Darling, in his bid to be the next Tim McCarver, talked about how it was a lucky break for the A's to lose C Geovany Soto early in this one, as if C Derek Norris was a better choice to handle Lester.

The Royals, of course, handed out batons at first base and more or less stole their way back into this game in the eighth and ninth innings, 90 feet at a time.

> My laundry blew two saves tonight, for the record. That's hard to do, but anyone who watched the last two months of the season knew that Sean Doolittle wasn't right.

> That might have been the first big hit of Albert Callaspo's like as an A, and, well, yeah. Moving on.

> Adam Dunn's career ends with a playoff game where he didn't start and didn't pinch hit, and I can't say I missed him. It's not like Sam Fuld didn't play his little heart out.

> Would Yoenis Cespedes have caught the ball that Fuld and Jonny Gomes turned into a triple in the 12th? Maybe. But since Lester blew the game tonight, yes, yes, a million times, yes.

> Royals' manager Ned Yost could have won this game with a lot less stress if he had just used his best pitchers in the 6th, when he had a lead to protect and chose instead to go to Yordano Ventura, who was clearly not ready for this level of pressure and inherited innings hijinks. But hey, better lucky than good. And speaking of luck...

> I stopped counting on how many lucky hits the Royals got in the late innings, or how the mere presence of Soto might have changed this game by a lot.

> Finally... I had given up on this A's team for weeks now, but of course, not really. That's not how baseball works, and it's not as if the Angels in the next round are the '27 Yankees.

They are, however, really going to look like them against the Royals.

Well, so much for baseball. Hans, bring on the funny!