by Charlie O Mallonee

The Oakland A’s are 7-3 in their last ten games and they have won four games in a row, the A’s in last place are 32-41 in the A.L.West. The A’s are 9.5 games behind the Houston Astros. That’s not a real surmountable amount of games for the A’s to play catch up on. More importantly at this point in time the A’s are a 1.5 behind Seattle with the M’s being in fourth place.

That is what the major goal has to be right now for the A’s is to make up that ground and get out of the cellar and get into fourth place. If the A’s can get into fourth place. Then they can go after let’s go after .500. Currently their nine games under .500 they have improved that number, they were further down than that.

The A’s can get into fourth and they have some work to do and things are going to look different and we know that this team could look different. Take the game against Texas it was a game two weeks ago that they lost, the A’s got down 5-2 and they came back to win 8-6. The offense came out big, they had a 11 hits and they had two key home runs.

One of those key homers came from the A’s catcher Josh Phegley and then they had a two run blast from Ben Zobrist whose been off the charts. So last night they had doubles help from Ike Davis, Marcus Semien, Phegley, and Zobrist the A’s had extra base hits all the way around. Phegley is doing a great job taking over for Stephen Vogt who had to take a cortisone shot so he couldn’t play Tuesday night.

Phegley did a great job, they got RBIs from Eric Sogard, one from Billy Butler, two from Zobrist, two from Phegley and with runners in scoring position this is one thing we were talking about when they were not converting with runners in scoring position. They were 4-8 with runners in scoring position.

You’ll take a 500 percentage with runners in scoring position anytime, they just left five men on base. So the A’s did a great job on offense but the other team we talked about the M’s are underperforming so far. The A’s bullpen had really performed well on Tuesday in Detroit. A’s reliever Evan Scribner pitched two innings shutting out the Tigers and getting two strikeouts.

Charlie O does the Oakland A’s commentary each week for http://www.sportsradioservice.com listen to the podcast below