Dog Day Afternoons for Athletics' Hendriks, Laureano
For Liam Hendriks, these are the dog days of August.
More specifically, that applies to his wife, Kristi, who is at home with the couple’s two dogs. And the two cats. And, as it happens, she’s dog-sitting for Macy, Ramón Laureano’s dog, too.
It’s a measure of Laureano’s devote to Macy that when the A’s fly back from Seattle Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, he will head to Hendriks’ East Bay abode to pick up Macy, a female black lab.
Hendriks was describing his pandemic-induced Sunday evening in Seattle when the subject arose.
“I’ll be FaceTiming with my wife because she’s dog sitting Ramón Laureano’s dog right now,” said Hendriks, who jokingly said staying quarantined wasn’t that difficult for him because he doesn’t like people that much. He is a huge fan of cats and dogs.
“She’s been sending me videos of Maci mixing with the two dogs we have, a foster dog, plus the two cats that we have,” he said. “That doesn’t even include the squirrels that we feed in the back yard that come up to the door, knocking on the door saying, `Hey, where’s our food?’ So, we’ve got a full house and she’s been keeping me in the loop.”
Asked to compare Maci with Laureano, Hendriks laughed.
“She’s not quite as hyper as Ramón, but she has her moments” Hendriks said. “She forced Kristi to sleep on my side of the bed last night because Macy decided to take over her side. She’s a really good dog, easy to deal with. As soon as we land, he’s coming over to pick her up, and he’ll be going home with her.
“It’s always good to see a dog parent that is invested in the fact that it could be two or three o’clock in the morning, but I’m picking up my dog.”
For the moment, it seems that the A’s first road trip of the year has passed without major pandemic-induced incidents.
That's a particularly important issue for Hendriks, who is in the high-risk category where COVID-19 is concerned. He said Monday he's had auto-immune liver disease for about a decade. Kristi is a germaphobe, even more than Hendriks is, and he said that's been good in making sure he is aware of every health protocol that applies.
"I'm at high risk just due to that, but it's not anything that is like a huge thing," he said. "I'm managing myself, but it definitely gives me a little bit of pause when you see some things going on around the league."
Having won the second and third games of the four-game series has Hendriks feeling as if things are beginning to get back on track for Oakland, which entered Monday’ series finale tied with Houston for the AL West lead at 5-4.
He pointed to the 10th-inning win Saturday as the most pivotal game the A’s have played yet. Down 2-0 early, the A’s pulled into a tie on Chad Pinder’s two-run homer in the seventh, got four innings of shutout relief, winning the game in the 10th on Robbie Grossman’s pinch-hit double.
“I think that two nights ago was a big turning point,” Hendriks said. “All of a sudden we came back from behind, and then we moved on from there (winning 3-2 again on Sunday, Hendriks getting the save in both games). So hopefully we can kind of use that as a stepping stone and start this train going and we can rattle off 10 slash 37 wins in a row.”
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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