The second game of this three-game set with Oakland was one of the back-and-forth variety; the best way to break this one down is to chop it up into its different parts, if you will …

Liriano Loses Control

Francisco Liriano seemed to really “have it” tonight, as the first five outs he recorded were via the strikeout. But once the 3rd inning came along, it quickly became a different story, as he went on to allow 6 earned runs through just 3.1 IP. He lost control, walking two in the 3rd inning and also hitting a batter and left the inning with his team trailing 5-2, after they had just jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the 2nd. After letting up another quick run in the 4th inning, Manager Robin Ventura took him out in favor of the team’s new long reliever, Phil Humber.
It’s fine to be upset after a bad pitching performance, but Sox fans should not be nearly as mad as I assume a good portion of them are (based on Twitter). Liriano is a very Gavin Floyd-like pitcher in the sense that he just ain’t all that consistent. When he’s going good, he can help carry a ball club. When he’s scuffling, he sometimes opens the slugfest flood gates, if you will. It’s usually one or the other; he’s an awfully polarizing pitcher.
In his first 2 starts he was pretty good for the Sox, letting up 2 runs in 6 innings in Minnesota last week and 1 run in 5 innings this past Sunday. If he’s good 2 out of every 3 times, though, the trade will have been a good one. I fully trust Don Cooper to nip any mechanical woe in the bud that he saw Liriano doing out there Saturday night.
So while it is frustrating, I still fully expect him to be good more times than not throughout the next month and a half, at least. Regardless of the future, this rough outing did leave the Sox in a substantial hole that they’d need to inch their way out of.

Sox Offense against Blackley

The south siders hit Travis Blackley, an Australian-born south paw that they’d never seen before, pretty well. As previously mentioned, they jumped out to a quick 2-0 lead in the 2nd inning behind Dayan Viciedo’s groundout RBI and Tyler Flowers’ RBI double down the right field line. It was a good start against Blackley, who came in with a 3.30 ERA since joining the A’s in ’12.

Scoring then resumed for the Sox in the 4th, when Flowers drove in his 2nd run of the game on another opposite-field hit. It appeared that Blackley would likely not be able to escape unscathed, but the Sox were still down 3 runs and had to strike sooner rather than later. After Alejandro De Aza led off the bottom of the 5th by being HBP, Kevin Youkilis followed with his 14th long ball of the season, bringing the score to 6-5, still in favor of Oakland.

To the Bullpens We Go

Humber, who replaced Liriano in the 4th inning, got off to a solid start out of the bullpen as he came in and pitched 3 scoreless innings, which is everything you ask from you long man.
Jordan Norberto replaced Blackley in the bottom of the 6th, as the game was now fully in the hands of the ‘pens. Norberto retired the first two he saw in that inning before Tyler Flowers launched a home run to left center field, driving in his 3rd run of the evening, which doubled his total entering Thursday night! At that point, Steve Stone labeled it “The Tyler Flowers Show,” which is something I didn’t think I’d be hearing at any point in 2012.
Jesse Crain came on to close out the top of the 7th inning for Humber with a man on 1st base and one out. Despite letting up a 2-out pinch hit ground rule double to Cliff Pennington, he escaped the inning safely, and the Sox and A’s remained knotted up for at least a little while longer.
The bottom half of that frame continued to give momentum to the Sox, as hits from Youkilis, Alex Rios, and finally A.J. Pierzynski brought in the go-ahead run, as the game headed to the 8th inning with the score 7-6 Chicago. It didn’t stand for long though, as Matt Thornton surrendered a game-tying bomb to Johnny Gomes in the top of the 8th. After a broken bat infield single and a pop up that landed in no-mans land, Thornton was pulled in favor of set-up man Brett Myers, who let up the go-ahead run on a Brandon Inge opposite-field single. Say what you want, but it was pure bad luck. Nothing was hit hard after the Gomes home run, but the Sox trailed. It was a strange series of events, as the Sox seemed stripped of their momentum after fighting back to take the lead.

Sometimes a team gets lucky, and other times that team gets extremely lucky. Extreme luck was indeed the case throughout this one for the A’s. In the top of the 9th, two more bloopers led to another run, as the A’s tacked on some insurance.
The lead would hold in the bottom of the 9th, as the A’s won it by the score 9-7. It was a very, very hard fought game for the Sox, but in the end, the A’s just had a little too much luck in their pockets. And for the record, I’m not ripping Oakland because of this … but you can’t deny their luck, which we saw time & time again in the late innings.
Tomorrow it’s Chris Sale on the bump for the rubber match against veteran right-hander Bartolo Colon in what is definitely a big game for our ball club. Just a few days ago we lost a rubber match to Kansas City at home, so we need to get this one to salvage a solid home stand. So simply put, Sale needs to be Sale. And hopefully, some luck will fall our way after this head-scratcher on Saturday evening.