I resolved to watch this game live so that I could put up a quick recap after, doing something I rarely do on this blog because 7pm on a weekday just isn't a convenient time for me to be watching baseball. There's dinner to eat, dishes to wash, and TV to watch with my lovely wife. There are cats to pay attention to. Baseball is for the wee hours.

Here, though, from my hotel in an undisclosed location, there are no dishes. So baseball it was!

If that game is what the A's think baseball is. I don't, not particularly.

There was essentially one highlight: Jonny Gomes took a slider in the middle of the plate out to left field on a line for his fourth homer of the year. That's it. That's the highlight. I giggled madly at Yoenis Cespedes's throw from deep left field to third base to get Wilson Betemit trying to turn a double into a triple, but notice something: the throw came from left field. Why? Because the whole reason the play happened was Coco Crisp making a futile dive for a ball going to his left and missing it, leaving the cleanup for Cespedes. And then Cespedes bobbled the ball on the ground anyway. So, sure, highlight, but highlight created in part by two lowlights.

Wei-Yin Chen, the Oriole left-hander, was atrocious in the first inning, throwing ball after ball, resulting in second-and-third with one out and bases loaded with two out, but when the A's couldn't put a run across, you could feel A Very A's Day beginning.

How did the Orioles score ten runs? Mainly by Tyson Ross being terrible and not having luck jump up to rescue him from his terrible pitches. He was still getting downward movement on a lot of his pitches, resulting in balls on the ground; the problem was that the vertical location of the pitches was entirely too high, so the velocity with which the balls in play came off of the Oriole bats was such that unless they were hit right at somebody, they were going to make their way into the outfield for hits.

The teams will do it one more time tomorrow. The rubber match. This one's for all the crab cakes. And with Tommy Hunter pitching against Bartolo Colon? Yeah, there's going to be some motivation.