A's 7, Rangers 5
SP: Scott Kazmir (6 IP, 3 R, 8 H+BB+HBP, 6 K)
WP: Dan Otero (1/3 IP)
Homers: Mark Canha (3), an impressive off-field shot
Record: 10-14
Standings: Fourth in the AL West, 6 1/2 behind Houston, 3 1/2 behind Tampa Bay for wild card

• Since when can Josh Reddick not catch a simple fly ball?

• Relatedly, since when does every batter make extremely square contact off of Scott Kazmir? (Comment written after the Kyle Blanks homer.)

• Prince Fielder sure swings hard when he gets a pitch directly into his happy zone. Maybe, Kazmir, don't give him pitches directly in his happy zone?

• It is my opinion that if a pitcher wants to have a good game he should not give up doubles off the wall to the 2015 version of Shin-Soo Choo.

• Colby Lewis isn't actually this good. The A's should stop letting him get to two strikes, IMO.

• I learned so much about gardening.

• Does Brett Lawrie hit more foul balls per swing than anybody in baseball? I could look this up but I'll instead leave it as an exercise for the reader.

• Given Lawrie's swing, I have to imagine the fastball up he got from Neftali Feliz in the eighth inning to hit his go-ahead double was a mistake. This is another issue I haven't investigated, numbers-wise, but give a player with a line-drive off-field swing a fastball up and he's going to hit a line drive to the opposite field. But he kept fouling off slider after slider, and he took a slider way outside and checked his swing on a close on too, so eventually Feliz had to throw one pitch different to see if he could get a different result or set up a different result on a subsequent pitch. Too bad for Feliz that that's where his fastball ended up.

• Mark Canha getting called out on his stolen base in the eighth was absurd. Elvis Andrus plainly lifted his foot off the bag. Like plainly and obviously. Not even close. Nice job by Andrus to do it subtly enough to fool the ump in real time, and ideally Canha would have slid in a way that didn't put him in that position, and on replay, frankly, to be honest, despite my "plainly," it's actually hard to tell whether there is force being exerted on the foot or whether the glove simply follows a lifting foot, but the way Canha's foot plummeted back to earth when Andrus removed his glove makes it pretty clear that the only reason Canha's foot was in the air was because it was resting on Andrus' glove. (I wrote all of this pre-replay. Let's see how it goes!)

  Man, that's bullshit.

  Well, as the telecast later explained, whether a runner is pushed off the bag is nonreviewable. That's probably as it should be for the reason I mentioned above: it's generally not going to be possible to determine the difference between the glove following the body and the glove pushing the body. In this case, it probably was, but this was a weird case, and similar cases probably aren't worth jeopardizing an overall valuable rule -- put the call in the hands of the review staff and they're liable to start looking for things they can't see in order to make a call that seems valid.

• Thank god we got a classic "middle of the infield, Andrus messes with Beltre as he catches a popup" play in the ninth. Bless those two so much. They're simply the best.

• Good job, A's!