This would have been a 3-2 game, tops, if not for the fielding. The ballpark was completely empty. If any team with a history is in town, it's going to be 70% visiting team fans.
As a basic strategy I would take the A's at home in day games but fade them at night.
Mazzaro looked good out there. Those early runs were mostly because of bad fielding, although he himself committed one of those errors on a bad pickoff attempt. (Why are pickoff attempts always "errant" when they go wrong? I won't call them that out of principle.) The team settled down after the first and eventually figured out Hellickson, who entered the game with a 0.60 WHIP and 1.35 ERA.
Toward the end of the game, the A's defense was quite good, although this, like the first inning, could very easily be random distribution. All in all, there wasn't a lot to learn from this game. The A's have a reliever Rodriguez who was clocked at 101 in the park. I've never seen that radar gun in triple digits before, even when Dotel was here.
