Gray can play with the best of them!
He lifts teammates after jarring week.
By Greitzer –
LOS ANGELES — With a wrenching punch to the gut of the Oakland Athletics’ team due to recent trades, Sonny Gray comes to the rescue, and plays with the best of them.
Oakland’s ace made a three-hit, 2-0 shutout win over the National League West-leading Dodgers look easy, assuring the A’s clubhouse that the loss of Ben Zobrist in a trade with Kansas City earlier in the day, Tyler Clippard to the Mets on Monday, and Scott Kazmir to Houston on Thursday was business as usual.
“It can be a cloudy day,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said. “You could see that when the Kazmir day transpired, and we’ve had two more since then, so to be able to go out there and give the team a good feeling after what was a rough day for everybody, you can’t say you expect it out of him, but you get used to games like he pitched today.”
“No matter who is out there, who is in the clubhouse, who’s not, when the game starts, you have your 25 guys out there and you’re just trying to win a baseball game,” Gray said. “I don’t think that’s going to change for us. We’re going to go out there and we’re going to compete and battle and win as many games as we can.”
“That was the game plan going in, just to execute fastballs to both slides, and my slider was better than it has been,” he said. “Just getting ahead was huge.”
It was Gray’s fourth career shutout and second of the month. The right-hander struck out nine and walked only one.
Gray’s 11-4 shutting down the Dodgers in the first of a two-game road series made a gem of a game. He lowered his ERA and reclaimed from Kazmir the American League-lead with 2.16, also setting the pace and bringing a four-game A’s losing streak to an end.
He also picked up his first career hit, a chopper down the first-base line for a single in the eighth with a bat owned by Billy Butler, who said, “He told me to pick him out a winner.”
“With Sonny out there it’s a completely different ballgame,’’ the A’s Billy Butler said. The first baseman drove in the game’s first run with a grounder in the first inning. “We’re expecting to win every time Sonny takes the hill. We expect to win every day, but it’s a different level with Sonny out there.
Josh Reddick, who had three hits including a solo homer, was in the video room when Gray got the hit. He called Gray’s knock “amazing.”
“I was down in the video room, and I came sprinting out trying to get to the top step to get him to do something, but he didn’t do anything,” Reddick said. “He acted like he got 100 career hits in the show or something.”
Once on the bases, “he said he was looking for the green light,” Melvin said, smiling.
Howie Kendrick with the Dodgers, singled with two outs in the ninth before Adrian Gonzalez flied out to end the A’s 13th shutout of the season, the most in the American League.
Gray finished his latest game at 110 pitches, throwing 81 of them for strikes. He threw first-pitch strikes to 24 of his 29 batters.
Dgreitzer@EMIsportsCentral.com
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