And just like that, the Oakland A’s are already back at the .500 mark.
After opening their 2021 season with six straight losses, it didn’t even take another two weeks for the A’s to erase their slow start from the standings. They finished flipping the script Friday night with their sixth straight win, a 3-0 victory over the Detroit Tigers, making them just the third team in MLB history ever to have streaks of six wins
and six losses within their first 14 games of a year.
The story begins and ends with pitching. Even as the team has gotten back in the win column lately, the pitching staff has still endured some shaky outings that were fortunately overshadowed by explosions from the lineup. On this night they tossed their first shutout, only the fourth time they’ve limited the opponent to fewer than four runs.
Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports
The Oakland A’s dropped their Cactus League game 7-3 to the Cleveland Indians on Monday. Let’s run through some positives and negatives, without putting too much stock in spring training results in either direction.
The good news begins with starting pitcher
Chris Bassitt, who made his second appearance of the spring. For the second time he was wonderful, working into the 4th inning and striking out one-third of the batters he faced. He reached his pitch count before finishing the 4th, but only allowed one run along the way, on back-to-back extra-base hits in the 2nd.
SU offensive line coach Mike Cavanaugh reportedly leaving for Arizona State
/ The Daily Orange
Syracuse ranked 116th of 126 teams last season in run blocking, according to PFF s positional grades.
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Syracuse offensive line coach Mike Cavanaugh is joining Arizona State as its run game coordinator and offensive line coach, Jacob Rudner of 247 Sports reported. Cavanaugh became a member of head coach Dino Babers’ staff for the 2018 season after spending three seasons at Nebraska.
The offensive line group improved tremendously in Cavanaugh’s first season with the Orange, recording a school record of 38 rushing touchdowns and increasing its rushing average by 37.7 yards from before his hire. SU went 10-3 that year, finished with over 6,000 yards of total offense and ranked 11th nationally in scoring, with 40.2 points per ga