Laureano Continues to Fuel Athletics Offense with Three-Run Game-Winner
The Oakland A’s aren’t finding their offensive grind to be over.
The hitters are still for the most part in a funk. What the A’s have discovered, however, is that they can plow their way through with a little luck and a whole lot of Ramon Laureano.
The center fielder crushed a three-run homer in the fifth inning. It was the only time all day Sunday in seven attempts the A’s would get a hit with runners in scoring position. It would prove to be enough, however, with Chris Bassitt allowing one run in 5.2 innings and the bullpen keeping the Mariners at bay for a 3-2 Oakland win.
Laureano is hitting .290 through Oakland’s first nine game. That’s not going to remind anybody of Shoeless Joe Jackson, but along with Mark Canha and Robbie Grossman, Laureano is helping to carry an anemic offense that has yet to get more than eight hits in a game and on Sunday emerged with their fifth win in nine tries despite getting just five hits.
The center fielder leads the club in hits with nine, in runs scored with seven and in runs batted in with seven. He has two homers on a team that has hit just seven; no one else has more than one.
On opening night a week ago Friday, it was Laureano who produced the season’s first run, a homer m in the fourth inning. Later, he’d add a game-tying double and was on base for Matt Olson’s walkoff grand slam. Last Monday he drove in the game’s first run in a 3-0 win over the Angels. And then Sunday. He’s had major roles in three of the A’s five wins so far.
For all of that, Laureano rests in perfect confidence that his teammates someday will come around, and that someday will be soon.
“Everybody, every individual has just got to focus on their job,” Laureano said. “(Focus on) the process of hitting and not force anything. Just let the game come to you and everything else will happen. All of us together, we’re going to be hitting, we’re going to be in a hot streak.”
That can’t come soon enough for Marcus Semien (.205), Olson (.133), Matt Chapman .194 and Khris Davis (.048). For the moment, the A’s are riding Laureano’s coattails and they have a two-game hitting streak heading into Monday’s series finale in Seattle.
The fifth inning was already two outs old and the A’s had put just three men on base before Tony Kemp worked a one-out walk against former A’s starter Kendall Graveman. Semien beat out a grounder for a hit, bringing up the right-handed Laureano against Mariners reliever Anthony Misiewicz, a lefty.
“I knew pretty much that was the spot for Ramon,” Bassitt said. The starter had allowed just two base runners and one hit in the first four innings, but that was enough to put him in a 1-0 hole. “And Ramon, he didn’t miss it. Arguably, he’s our best hitter right now. He did what he’s supposed to do. If it’s a hit, great, but a home run is a whole different ballgame.
“It changed the complexity of the game. That was a big sigh of relief for everybody.”
It changed the job for manager Bob Melvin, who was able to turn loose his bullpen on the Mariners. T.J. McFarland needed one pitch to get out of the sixth. Jake Diekman walked the first two men of the seventh but pitched out of it. Yusmeiro Petit was dinged by a Kyle Lewis homer in the eighth, but that only made the game close. And Liam Hendricks struck out the side while allowing one hit, a single, in the ninth in closing it out.
“It will get going,” Melvin said of the offense. “It’s frustrating for everybody right now. We’re a team that feels like we can score in any inning and anywhere, up and down the lineup. It’s going to come at some point. My guess is that we’ll probably have one game where we’ll break out and scored 10 runs, and then everybody can relax a bit.”
Until then, the pitching is going to have to carry the ball when Laureano isn’t.
He singled out Bassitt, saying he was “overall really good today, and he needed to be because we didn’t have much room for error.”
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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