OAKLAND – After the Oakland A’s finished their brutal road trip through Seattle, Houston, and Kansas City over the weekend with eight straight losses, Brent Rooker felt it time to call a team meeting.
“The message that I wanted to kind of deliver was that we were going through a rough patch, obviously,” Rooker said of Sunday’s postgame get-together at Kauffman Stadium, “but that we had the guys in this room that are equipped to get through that.”
The A’s showed signs of life Tuesday, as J.D. Davis, Seth Brown, and Abraham Toro all homered in a 5-4 win over the Colorado Rockies before an announced crowd of 4,005 at the Coliseum.
Toro’s solo shot over the right field wall in the bottom of the eighth inning proved to be the difference, as the A’s (20-30) earned their first win since they beat Seattle 8-1 on May 11.
Oakland closer Mason Miller was electric as he touched 102.8 mph in the ninth inning with his fastball, striking out all three batters he faced to earn his ninth save of the season.
Toro’s solo home run was his fifth of the year, as he turned on an 89-mph slider from Rockies reliever Tyler Kinley.
“(Rooker’s) a big leader here,” Toro said of the meeting. “He’s one of the guys that everybody listens to. He just talked and it was a pretty good speech, basically saying, ‘Hey, guys, just keep your head up and just play some good baseball, and we were able to come here today and win a game.”
“We have a really, really good dynamic and a good group of guys in here who really care about each other and who want to see each other succeed, and that’s what it takes to get through times when you’re not playing as well,” Rooker said. “If the results on the field start to creep into the locker room and the dynamic is affected, it becomes really hard to get out of those skids.
“So the message would just keep the dynamic that we have in our locker room the same, and that was going to allow us to get out of that little losing streak. Just because we do care about each other so much, and we want each other to succeed, that eventually was going to feed onto the field and we’re going to build off that.”
For six innings, the A’s were mostly stymied by Rockies starter and former Stanford standout Cal Quantrill.
The A’s got a badly needed homer from Davis in the third inning but managed just two other hits against Quantrill, who allowed three hits and two earned runs – and eight strikeouts — in six innings.
Against Quantrill, the A’s could only manage a Rooker double in the fourth inning and a JJ Bleday triple in the sixth. Bleday then scored on a wild pitch from Quantrill.
That’s why the A’s, down 4-2, had to like seeing Justin Lawrence enter the game in the seventh inning. And after Zack Gelof walked, Brown smoked a 95-mph sinker from Lawrence 414 feet over the center field wall to tie the game 4-4.
The homer was Brown’s fifth of the season and his second in the last three games.
Davis hit his third home run of the season, and his first in 26 games since he hit two on March 29 against Cleveland.
The A’s would love to see him and Davis, two players who combined for 32 home runs last season, get hot as they try to pull out of an offensive malaise that has lasted most of May.
During this stretch before Tuesday, which saw them lose 13 of 15 games, the A’s scored three runs or fewer 10 times. Before Tuesday, Oakland, in the majors, had the third-lowest batting average (.220), were tied for third in fewest runs (180), had the fourth-lowest on-base percentage (.295), and were tied for fourth in fewest stolen bases (21).
A’s starting pitcher Aaron Brooks allowed three earned runs over six innings, and veteran Scott Alexander allowed a solo home run in his two-thirds of an inning in relief.
Colorado’s Ezequiel Tovar hit a pair of solo home runs for his first career multi-homer game.
“It’s momentum,” A’s manager Mark Kotsay said. “Saturday and Sunday in K.C., we had 11 hits each day, and we didn’t come up on the winning side. Tonight, even though we were down you felt the energy still in the dugout that we still had some outs left, we still had some at-bats, and that was a good sign.”
