"It was like a twilight zone thing at the beginning because I was like, what is he doing? He never throws this many changeups."
The Oakland A’s continue to dance on the slimmest margin for error. Two wild pitches and two mistake pitches resulted in a 4-3 loss to the Seattle Mariners on Friday night in Seattle. It was the 31st one-run game for the A’s, and the 16th they have lost.
Jake Diekman’s two wild pitches produced Seattle’s go-ahead run in the seventh inning. The first, when Diekman flung his frisbee slider into the dirt, sent Mariners pinch-runner Dylan Moore from second to third. The second wild pitch brought him home.
“With sliders, he’s trying not to hang them,” manager Bob Melvin said. “And he probably tried to make too good of pitches and they ended up being tough blocks.”
Diekman threw three wild pitches in the inning. The A’s threw five in all — Frankie Montas and Yusmeiro Petit each had one — to set an Oakland record.
“All of us know that Jake is great at what he does and tonight he was a little off,” left fielder Mark Canha said. “And as an athlete and teammate you fully understand where you’re going to have nights like that where you’re off and that’s part of baseball. Everybody can empathize with that because everybody has been there. He slipped a little and a teammate looks like that and says we got your back and continue to have confidence in him and keep going, because Jake is nasty. He’s been so good for us this year and he’ll be good the next time.”
Eighteen strikeouts
The A’s struck out 18 times on Friday, four more than their season high and one short of the team record set in 1997, also against Seattle.
Twelve of the A’s 18 strikeouts came against Mariners’ left-handed starter Yusei Kikuchi, who has given the A’s fits in years past with his devastating cutter. But Kikuchi switched it up on Oakland’s lineup by throwing his changeup (which he typically only throws 8 percent of the time) 29 times. He threw his cutter, which he usually throws 40 percent of the time, just seven times.
“Tonight it felt like one of those nights for me, felt like an off night,” Canha said. “It was like a twilight zone thing at the beginning because I was like, what is he doing? He never throws this many changeups. What’s going on?”
Canha struck out looking at a changeup in his first at-bat and Kikuchi struck out eight more A’s on his changeup. Matt Olson managed to dig a changeup out from the bottom of the strike zone for his 26th home run and the A’s second run. Matt Chapman found a fastball down the middle of the plate for his solo home run, the A’s first run. Both home runs chipped into the Mariners’ early three-run.
Canha tied it up 3-3 in the fifth with an RBI double that scored Jacob Wilson. Third base coach Mark Kotsay put on an aggressive send for Wilson that paid off when Mariners catcher Raleigh couldn’t catch the relay. A clean catch and tag would have had Wilson out by a few feet.
The A’s could have taken the lead in the sixth inning when they loaded the bases with a little help from a nine-pitch walk from Canha and pinch-hitter Tony Kemp’s single with Chapman on base. But Elvis Andrus struck out swinging, dropping the A’s average with the bases loaded to .220 (13-for-59) and adding to a climbing strikeout count for Oakland. Because it’s often a symptom of an approach that favors power, the A’s have never been overly concerned with high strikeout counts. Especially when the opposing pitcher is offering a new out pitch more frequently.
“It happens. That guy has explosive stuff. When you have a 97mph fastball and a cutter and slider you can execute and throw for strikes and out pitches, he mixes the changeup in there he has four pitches he can strike you out on,” Canha said. “It makes it tough and he had a good night, honestly. When a guy like that is in his zone, he’s tough to get.”
Thirty-three splitters
Montas left his sinker middle-middle in the zone twice too many times. After walking the leadoff hitter in the second inning, he lobbed one over the heart of the plate for Cal Raleigh, who hit his first career home run 444 feet into right field to give the Mariners a 2-0 lead. Luis Torrens followed with a solo home run off a sinker to make it 3-0.
Montas answered by striking out five of the next six batters he faced and threw his splitter more aggressively throughout his six-inning appearance — and his splitter was nasty.
“His split’s become his second-best pitch,” Melvin said. “He leaned on his slider a little more, but he’s found a comfortable grip for it and throwing it like a sinker and it bottoms out. It’s a great pitch for him.”
He threw his splitter 33 times out of his 102 pitches and of the 19 swings it got, 13 were swings and misses. Three of his 10 strikeouts came on his splitter and six came on his slider, which he said he is throwing similar to a slider with a more comfortable grip.
