Thanks Heavens for Oakland

It's a rare privilege to get to play the Oakland A's every now and then, especially when they don't have their starting center fielder or catcher in the lineup due to injury.  I feel like Morrow probably wouldn't have fared quite as well against a team with any kind of reasonable offensive skills, because he was definitely a bit wild yesterday.  Probably a blood sugar issue, amirite?

Morrow threw like 112 pitches or something over just 6 innings, a number that was helped severely by a perfect 6th.  To the A's credit, they realized that he was a bit wild and allowed Morrow to inflate his own pitch count by getting deep in to pretty well every count, and 4 walks obviously helped.  Those were Morrow's first walks in 3 starts, and the run he allowed was the first in 23 innings pitched.  Even without his best stuff, he went out there and threw 6 innings of 1-run ball, ultimately striking out 10 batters, which is enough for a Zaunhead.  We owe Kelly Johnson one for Tuesday's game as well.

And wouldn't you know it?  John Farrell really deserves some credit for shuffling the lineup at just the right time to get Adam Lind and Edwin Encarnacion going again!  Most of us would have moved Lind down in the order 8 months ago, put Edwin in the 4-hole immediately to start the season, and taken Coco out of the closer's role before he even got put there, but he had the forethought of realizing that none of that shit would have worked until last night.  That's why being a major league manager is the hardest job in the world.  Now the big question is whether or not Farrell can properly stick Lind back in to the 4-hole without making him bad at hitting again.

The Jays will now head to Minnesota to face the Morneau-less, worst-team-in-baseball Twins for a quick series, before returning home and hitting a tough stretch on the schedule.  More on that later.

*One of the paragraphs in this post is entirely sarcastic.  Make a game out of figuring out which one it is.*