THIS WASN’T PRETTY — IT WAS BETTER: A GRITTY A’S WIN IN BALTIMORE

The A’s didn’t stroll into Baltimore tonight wearing tuxedos and playing smooth jazz. They walked in with steel-toed boots and survived a nine-inning alley fight. After getting bottled up early by Kyle Bradish, the offense finally cracked the game open in the fifth inning behind clutch at-bats from Max Schuemann, Lawrence Butler, Zack Gelof, and the massive swing from Nick Kurtz, whose two-run triple flipped the entire night on its head. That was the moment the game changed. The A’s stopped playing reactive baseball and started dictating the tempo against one of the toughest lineups in the American League. And then came the stress. Of course it came with stress. Because nothing involving the A’s bullpen is allowed to feel normal. Jeffrey Springs and the relief corps spent the late innings trying to navigate around Adley Rutschman, Pete Alonso, and a Baltimore lineup that kept threatening to rip the game away. Mason Miller wasn’t there riding in on a white horse tonight, so the A’s had to win the hard way — with strikeouts, ugly outs, and enough nerve to survive a ninth inning that felt like somebody trying to parallel park a shopping cart downhill. Last Call goes LIVE at 10:45 on YouTube to break down one of the grittiest wins of the season