Athletics 7, Twins 3 -- and a game of Mound Ball to boot

I know, I know.  It's another baseball post.  I was hoping to sneak something else between game summaries, but it hasn't happened.  I promise to work on it.

I even thought about skipping this summary completely, but since Duckie and I attended the A's/Twins game last Sunday, the A's have been swept in Seattle by one of the worst offenses in baseball and they've also dropped the first of the weekend series in Tampa.  It would be a shame if Duckie and I attended the last win of the season for the A's, and I completely failed to blog about it.

Going into the game, the A's were actually playing pretty well.   They were scoring more runs per game than anyone else in baseball after the All-Star break.  At least I think I read that somewhere.  In any case, that wasn't what brought us to the game.   We bought the tickets months ago with the hope of getting a hold of the promotional giveaway item for the game: gold Kurt Suzuki jerseys.  We knew the Coliseum would be handing out the jerseys to the first 15,000 fans, and we made sure to get there an hour early to get ours (though, honestly, based on fan attendance at A's games, I wasn't worried about missing out).  The jerseys are pretty sweet.  Take a look:

The Food:

With our jerseys in hand and an hour to kill before game time, we took the opportunity to have a nice ballpark lunch.  Duc has been craving spicy and tangy foods these days, so she wanted nachos with extra jalapenos, and I decided to go the hot dog route.  I bought the dog first from a special sausage-centered concession stand.  For some reason my focus was on total quantity of food, so I picked the Super Atomic Dog with peppers and onions for $7.50 over a bratwurst for $5.95.  It was the wrong choice. (I'll 'splain shortly).  I don't remember what I paid for the nachos, but I do remember that the woman serving me took my request for extra jalapenos very seriously.  I almost told her to stop as she added tongful after tongful to the top off the tortilla chips.  It looked like a lot of freaking jalapenos, but the amount worked out fine in the end.

Why was the Super Atomic Dog a mistake?  First of all, somehow my puny malfunctioning brain didn't catch on to the fact that "Atomic" meant the dog would be spicy.  I like spicy food, but not so much in hot dog form.  Second, the juice from grilled peppers and onions dissolved the crease of the bun which disintegrated when I picked it up.  The whole thing was a messy pain in the ass to eat, and much of the peppers and onions ended up in a pile in the tray. That's what you get for bringing your malfunctioning idiot brain to the ballpark. Duc's nachos were more successful.  Not all the jalapenos were eaten, but we put a good dent in them.

Off the field:

The off-the-field entertainment was typical stuff.  There was a weird competition in which two ten year-olds put on visors with tea bags dangling off them and they had 1 minute to flip both tea bags onto the brim of their visor without using their hands to win a prize.  I prefer the frozen t-shirt competition in Cleveland.  There's something unsavory about tea bags.

The best off-field entertainment, though, was provided by our neighbor to my right and a game called 'Mound Ball'.  I talked to this guy a bit and learned that he came up from Sonora with his friend and his friend's girlfriend.  Apparently, they were originally going to bring the friend's 30 year-old son so he could see Twin's catcher Joe Mauer play ball.  This was something of a bucket-list wish for the son who had some form of terminal cancer.  Unfortunately, the son passed away a month before the game.  A sad story to be sure, but it didn't keep the group from having a good time at the game.  The game of 'Mound Ball' certainly contributed to the fun.

Mound Ball works like this: every inning the three participants put a dollar in a cup (in this case the money apparently ended up in the girlfriend's bra -- a different sort of cup, but still a cup I guess).  Each inning is assigned to a different player in rotation.  After the third out of every half inning, the umpire throws a baseball toward the mound for the next pitcher to use for his warm up.  Sometimes the ball rolls up the mound and stays on the dirt, but most of the time it rolls all the way back down to the grass.  If the ball the umpire throws to the mound at the end of the inning (the balls used in the middle of the inning don't count) stays completely on the dirt -- it can't be touching the grass at all -- the player assigned that inning gets to take all the cash in the cup at that time.  If the ball touches the grass, the players just add another dollar apiece and move on to the next inning.  The point is that the money builds up until somebody wins, kind of like a skins game.

Okay, so it's not the most exciting game in the world, but it kept our neighbors occupied.  It also provided the single most enjoyable off-field moment of the game.  When the 6th inning rolled around, the Mound Ball moolah had gone uncollected by any of the players.  Our nearest neighbor owned the rights to the inning.  When the A's surrendered their third out, the ump chucked a ball at the mound, and sure enough it rolled up onto the dirt and sat there.  Our neighbor stood and cheered it all the way: "Go! Go! Go! YEEESSSSSSSS!"  Of course no one in our vicinity was standing or cheering for any reason (Why would they? The A's just got out), so our friend stuck out like a loud middle-aged nut job screaming for no reason.  He made $18.  That's enough to buy a ticket to another A's game.

The Game:
I'll keep this brief.  The A's won, so it was a great game.  Brandon McCarthy pitched very well for the green and gold, striking out 9 Twinkies.  The bullpen struck out five more to bring the total to 14 Ks.  In fact, the only Twin not to strike out was the aforementioned Joe Mauer.  Even pinch-hitter Trevor Plouffe struck out.  I only mention him because his name is on the list of "Worst Names in Baseball," along with Taylor Teagarden and Madison Bumgarner.  Plouffe (rhymes with poof) sounds like something used to apply make-up, or maybe a brand of toilet paper.  The boy needs a name change.

So we saw the A's last game of its best month this season.  Since then, they've sucked.  I don't really think the A's will go winless for the remainder of the season, but it'll be a shame if they just suck through August and September.  More July would be nice.