Sloppiness snowballs in ugly A's loss

A's make 6 fielding errors, many more mental mistakes in 14-1 loss to Angels

It's hard to imagine an entire team waking up on the wrong side of the bed, but somehow nearly every A got an F in the team's worst game in almost 2 years.

The bad play started early and the mistakes grew worse as the innings wore on for the A's who took out their frustration on each other to make matters worse in an embarrassing 14-1 loss to the Angels.

"Tommy Lasorda once said: 'In a given season you will win 1/3 of your game, you will loss 1/3 of your games and it is what you do in the other 1/3 that counts,'" A's manager Ryan Manager said. "I can't stand the fat bastard, but the glory hound had at least on thing right. The ratios might be a little different in this league, but we've played three good teams and battled hard to win 2 and today I don't think we had a chance to win. Not because the Angels played so good, but today was our day to play bad. We need to avoid more games like this and we need to avoid all the bickering that went on when things didn't go right. I'm one of the culprits there and I made some mistakes that cost us run too, but no one guy is to blame in a game like this. I think every guy can think of one bad decision he made or one bad error on a play he normally makes."

The A's fell behind 3-0 in the second when Jason Schnaible went with an outside pitch and lofted a ball just over the 315 foot sign on the right field wall at Napa High. A ball the A's felt would have been a routine fly out with their standard wood bats, but this game was played with metal due to REBL interleague rules when AL teams play the 35-and-over Continental League teams.

The bats didn't matter much  for the 3 runs the A's gave away in the third with a pair of throwing errors compounded by the A's failure to back each other up. Shawn Purcell came in relief with two scoreless innings, but the A's could only manage 1 run in the fourth when Ryan Haven was hit by a pitch, hustled into third on a single by Dodson and scored on the Angel's lone error of the game.

The A's had chanced to cut into the lead further with two runners reaching first in the second and fifth, but poor base running decisions and poor batting choices were costly for the A's. The Angel's extended the lead to 9-1 on RBI hits by Todd Priddy and  Robert Sordi, who also had a two-run single in the third. The first three A's reached in the sixth, but a potential sac fly by Dodson was wasted and another runner was tagged out at the plate. The Angels then blew the A's away for god with 5 more unearned runs in the seventh behind 3 more errors.

The Angels outhit the A's by a slim margin of 9 to 8, but did the little things to bring those runners home and keep the A's from having big innings. The A's will try to cool them tempers and warm their bats and brains in time for a game against the Brewers at their home field in Point Reyes on May 20 at 2 p.m.

Steve Nojima pitched 3 decent innings, but 1 aluminum bat homer and 2 errors accounted for 6 runs.

Matt Wolfe hit what should have been an RBI single up the middle but a pickoff spoiled it.

Mike Mastro' isn't swift, but he had the A's lone stolen base, running 1-for-3 as a team.

Nojima- MVP