Sears and the A’s bullpen look great; Woo and the M’s bullpen do one better
The 2024 MLB season is in its winding days, and the A’s offense took an early vacation tonight.
To preface, they faced Seattle Mariners young arm and Oakland-native Bryan Woo who’s dominated the A’s all season as well as the rest of baseball. JP Sears toed the rubber against him and had strong final outing himself but he made just a couple more mistakes and it costed him and the A’s.
Overall, the M’s took the 2-0 win as pitching reigned the day. It’s the A’s 14th time getting shutout this season and hopefully their last with just two games to go.
Seattle drew first blood in the second when Mitch Garver took a 92 MPH middle-middle fastball over the center-field fence for a solo bomb. In the third, Cal Raleigh made it 2-0 smoking a solo-shot to left center. The M’s pitcher tonight, Woo, would do all in his power early to ensure that the A’s offense never caught their stride on the flip side.
Woo recorded six of his first nine outs via strikeout, and he punched out eight overall across five shutout innings — a new career high. The A’s had just three singles against Woo who now finishes 2024 with 21.2 innings thrown against the green and gold allowing just two runs and striking out 23.
Sears would last longer than Woo throwing six innings surrendering four hits, two runs and four strikeouts. He left two pitches right down the heart of the plate and both were deposited over the fence for the difference of tonight’s affair.
Sears final line on the season: 11-13 W-L, 180.2 IP, 32 GS, 1.22 WHIP, and 4.38 ERA. It’s too bad the offense couldn’t help Sears end his solid 2024 campaign on a higher note tonight despite definitely deserving it.
And that’s pretty much it as far as positive takeaways from tonight. After Sears’ quality start, fellow southpaws Hogan Harris and Scott Alexander both worked impressive innings in relief. Not to be outdone was the Mariners pen which combined to give up two hits and six strikeouts in four scoreless innings.
The A’s struck out 14 times and recorded just five hits — four of them singles — as their offense has still yet to hit a home run since September 18th at Wrigley Field. They’re averaging 2.5 runs/game since then.
In the ninth, Tyler Soderstrom led off the inning with a double and he immediately moved to third on a wild-pitch but strikeouts for Daz Cameron and Zack Gelof and a groundout ended the rally empty-handed. An A’s offense that impressed many the second half of this 2024 season has fizzled out and underwhelmed lately.
160 down and two more to go. Joey Estes takes the rock tomorrow for his final start at 6:40 PM PDT and as it stands this second, the Mariners still have yet to announce their counterpart.
