Oakland Athletics @ Chicago White Sox (game 2)

I arrived in plenty of time for this game, with the ticket that I'd bought on StubHub - which complicates refunds in the case of rain-outs, so I was hoping that most of the game would be played.  As it turned out, I'm now back in my hotel, at midnight, and the promised severe storms and rain still haven't arrived in the area, although they are expected to pass through overnight.

This game featured John Danks for the White Sox against Jon Lester, now of the Oakland Athletics, formerly of Boston.  The main feature of this game was errors - the White Sox committed 5 of them, 3 of them by Semien at 3rd base, and the crowd really got on him for it  Although the score finished 11-2, there was quite a lot of adding on in the last few innings, particularly the 5 in the 9th inning.  Of the 11 runs, only 6 were earned due to all those errors.

One error occurred on a play involving a nasty collision between John Danks and Craig Gentry at first, where the latter ended up having to be removed from the game for what looked like a possible head injury as he hit his head on Danks' shoulder as they converged on first base.  Josh Reddick who had the night off came in to pinch-run for Gentry and played the rest of the game.  There was no news on Gentry's condition by the end of the game, although he did stagger off with some assistance from the Oakland coaching team.

There were two challenges in this game, one by each side, and both successful.  Robin Ventura challenged a play where the Oakland runner was called safe at 1st and Bob Melvin challenged a play where his runner was called out at 1st.

With the White Sox so far behind, and getting further behind with every batter it seemed, and the threats from earlier in the day of rain storms in the evening, a lot of the crowd had drifted away early.  However, a couple of sections along from me, a man proposed to his girlfriend and she accepted, so everybody was happy for them and far more interested in clapping that than the game that was about to restart.

By the end of the game, the crowd had thinned out so much that the front carriage of the Red line train back to downtown was almost empty.

I'm not sure whether I've learned anything about these two teams in these two games.  They are error prone, and at times look quite fragile.  Oakland's starting pitching has been good and has given a couple of quality starts with 8 innings performances from Gray and Lester, so I've not seen a lot of the pen, but it is worrying how they can be shut down by somebody like Noesi yesterday.  It's hard to judge today, as they had so many extra outs to work with.

Oakland have the firepower on both sides of the ball to win a wild card game, but at this stage, I wouldn't fancy them in a division series against anybody else in the American League.