MVN - Most Valuable Network

A’s Finally Get to King Felix; Hot Bat

OAK 4, SEA 2: In what appeared to be another game in which Felix Hernandez owned the Oakland lineup, Emil Brown’s broken-bat, two-run single sparked a four-run Oakland eighth inning to propel the A’s to their first win over King Felix in a long, long time. Not only that, the A’s finally gave Joe Blanton the much needed run support he was missing all season. Red hot Santiago Casilla pitched another scoreless inning (thats 12.1 perfect innings so far) to hand it off to Huston Street who picked up his eighth save in a row since starting the season with that blown-save in Tokyo.

Oakland picked up another series-win and is really starting to exceed expectations set on them by most analysts, as well as fans. I don’t think anyone in the baseball world thought Oakland would be atop the AL West with an American League best 16-10 record. The pitching staff continues to perform at a high-level and the while the offensive statistics are mediocre, the A’s are getting the timely hits to win ballgames.

Hot Bat:  Yes, it’s that time again. The Hot Bat from last week goes to the veteran Mike Sweeney. If I recall, this is the second time I have given him the award, and well-deserved. In 13 at-bats, Sweeney hit a sultry .462 with 2 homers and 0 K’s. Not only that, he has 13 total bases in those 13 AB’s giving him a .500 OBP for the week. With the addition of Big Hurt, Sweeney may see less less time at DH. But as long as he can produce like last week in his few chances, the A’s should win a lot of games. Play the hot bat, right?

Oakland will look to hold on to their AL West lead this week when they travel to the Anaheim/Los Angeles area to take on the Angels in the first match up of 2008 for the California rivals. Pay starts tomorrow at 7:05 pm as Chad Gaudin takes the mound against Jon Garland.

LET’S GO OAKLAND!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.