Sears 'ready to face that challenge' of late-season grind

OAKLAND -- JP Sears prides himself on being a workhorse pitcher. Upon learning he made the A’s starting rotation out of Spring Training, the left-hander aimed to show that trait by setting a goal of making 30 starts in what would be his first full season in the big leagues.

Taking the mound for his team-leading 23rd start on Tuesday, Sears is well on his way to reaching his objective. But with such a heavy workload comes the realization for Sears that not every outing will see his stuff be as crisp as he would like it to be, as was the case in Oakland’s 6-1 loss to the Rangers.

Facing a potent Texas offense that entered the day leading the Majors in hits and runs scored, Sears left far too many mistakes over the middle of the plate. The result was four runs allowed on a career-high nine hits and one walk across four high-stress innings, which led to his departure after 86 pitches.

“He was frustrated in his performance,” A’s manager Mark Kotsay said of Sears. “The message from me in the dugout was, 'Keep your head up. Keep battling. Keep fighting.' You’re going to have starts like this throughout the course of a season. He’s on pace to make the most starts he’s ever made in a year. He battled. … We still were in the game when he walked off the mound, but not a performance we’ve seen out of him lately.”

Without a great feel for his slider, a pitch that helped him find success in five innings of two-run ball against the Dodgers in his previous outing, Sears leaned heavily on a four-seam fastball that lacked its usual sharpness. That, along with an inability to get ahead of hitters early in the count, led to Sears failing to pitch into the fifth inning for the first time this season.

“I left some good pitches over the plate and put myself in a hole early,” Sears said. “I just didn’t execute to keep those guys off base. Fourth inning, I got off to a rough start just making a couple of bad pitches and balls found gaps. … Just a pretty frustrating night in general.”

Sears has already eclipsed his previous career-high innings total of 104 in 2021 while pitching in the Yankees’ organization, reaching 125 2/3 on Tuesday.

Navigating the late-summer grind of a season really for the first time as a professional, Sears referred back to the words he once heard from a pitching coach in high school named Joe Norris, who imparted some wisdom about the rigors he would one day have to encounter in situations like this.

“He told me that out of five starts, you’re going to have one where you just can’t find the zone at all and you have to fight, one that you can’t miss and everything is perfect, and three that are kind of in the middle,” Sears said. “It’s part of the game. The one tonight was like one of those three where I felt all right about it, but just didn’t finish the fourth inning very strong. Going through the rest of this year, it will definitely be a battle.

“I’m ready to face that challenge. It’s part of it. I’ll learn from tonight and change how three of those five starts can go and try to do a better job with guys on base.”

Here are a couple additional takeaways from Tuesday’s defeat:

Martínez saves the bullpen
Coming up from Triple-A Las Vegas earlier in the day, Adrián Martínez provided a major assist to a taxed bullpen in need of some rest. Taking over in relief of Sears in the fifth, the right-hander struck out five across 4 2/3 innings of two-run ball on four hits and three walks.

“Overall, his fastball had some life on it tonight and his changeup looked better,” Kotsay said of Martínez. “He got some swing-and-miss with it. He threw it to the righties as well, which is a good pitch. He gave us the length we needed to reset the bullpen and did a good job.”

Bleday’s blast off Max
Though most of the A’s offense was stifled by Max Scherzer over seven dominant innings, JJ Bleday managed to break through.

The 25-year-old outfielder produced Oakland’s first hit against Scherzer in the form of his ninth homer of the season – a solo shot to lead off the fourth – and later drew a walk against him in the sixth.