A's win 7th straight in feat unseen since 1895

OAKLAND -- When a team is going through a stretch as hot as the A’s currently find themselves in, things always just seem to fall your way in the critical moments. Case in point: Tuesday night against the Rays.

With the game tied entering the bottom of the eighth inning, Carlos Pérez chopped a 100.2 mph grounder that bounced off the glove of a diving Isaac Paredes at third base. The ricocheted ball allowed Ramón Laureano, who led off the eighth with a single and had just stolen third base earlier in Pérez’s at-bat, to score the go-ahead run.

Carrying a one-run lead into the ninth, Trevor May shut the door for his third save with a scoreless inning to secure a 2-1 victory over the Rays, owners of the best record in MLB. The win was Oakland’s seventh straight, continuing the longest active winning streak in the Majors.

“These guys are really coming together,” A’s manager Mark Kotsay said of his club. “The momentum in that clubhouse and feeling of confidence that they can win a baseball game showed. Any time you’re down to a team with the best record in baseball, it’s easy to shut it down. These guys showed their resiliency and continued to fight tonight.”

Entering the streak, the A's had a .194 winning percentage. Now, their seven-game winning streak is tied for the longest by a team to enter with a sub-.200 win percentage (minimum 25 games into a season), according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

The other two teams? The 1895 Louisville Colonels (.192 winning percentage) and the 1885 Detroit Wolverines (.190).

Making that streak all the more impressive is the fact that all seven victories have come against teams currently above .500, as the A’s entered this series with five straight wins against the Pirates and Brewers. They’ve managed to slow a juggernaut Rays club, which has now dropped back-to-back games for just the seventh time in 2023. Tampa Bay has yet to lose three in a row at any point this season.

“Early on, it truly was a lot of situations where breaks were not going our way,” said A’s designated hitter Brent Rooker, who tied the game in the seventh with an RBI double.

“If something could go wrong, it did," Rooker added. "Some of those bounces and breaks have started to go our way the last week. It shows that when you go out and play hard for each other, results will eventually come.”

In a win that featured several key contributors, Hogan Harris stood out with arguably the best performance of his young career. Making his fifth Major League appearance in the second inning out of the bullpen as he followed opener Shintaro Fujinami, who pitched a scoreless first, the rookie left-hander tossed a career-high seven innings of one-run ball, allowing just four hits and no walks with two strikeouts.

Following one of the worst Major League debuts imaginable on May 14 as he was charged with six runs in just one-third of an inning, Harris has been on an upward trend since.

Over his last four outings, Harris has allowed just six runs in 22 innings. On Tuesday, he kept hitters off balance by distributing all four of his pitches about as evenly as possible, throwing 34 fastballs, 19 changeups, 16 cutters and 15 curveballs.

“He just attacked these guys and mixed pitches,” Kotsay said of Harris. “The maturation for a young pitcher whose debut did not go well, to regroup and come back to pitch the way he’s pitched, tonight was the growth we want to see. It was ‘Hogan Harris Night’, really.”

The announced attendance was 27,759 fans, the largest home crowd of the year. A local group rallied fans to attend as a way of trying to convince ownership to rethink the plan to move the A’s to Las Vegas and keep them in Oakland.

The lively audience was so loud that at one point Harris couldn’t hear the pitch selections coming in from catcher Shea Langeliers through his PitchCom device despite its volume being set to the highest level possible. Harris said he was fueled by the “absolutely wild” energy from the Oakland fans, a sentiment which was shared by several of his A’s teammates.

“It was cool. It was really fun,” Rooker said of the Coliseum atmosphere. “The fans came out and made it very clear how passionate they are about the city and this team, which was cool to see. We fed off that energy all night.”