OAKLAND, Calif. _ The Oakland A's game plan for the 2017 season kicked right in Monday in a 4-2 win over the Los Angeles Angels.
And it worked.
The plan is simple. Get decent starting pitching, score enough to own a lead after six innings, then turn the game over to the bullpen, the deepest and most veteran part of a relatively young club.
Kendall Graveman did his part, touched for a two-run Mike Trout but nothing else while the A's got solo homers from Stephen Vogt and Khris Davis to go with a an RBI single from Yonder Alonso. Davis' homer broke a 2-2 tie in the newly inaugurated Rickey Henderson Field, and then it was up to the bullpen.
The relievers did their job, and just to make sure he was carrying his weight, Davis hit a second homer, this one in the bottom of the eighth, to produce some breathing room. He became just the second player in a half century of Oakland baseball to homer twice on opening day, the other being Jason Giambi in 2000.
The result was just the second opening-day win in the last dozen years for the A's.
While he finished with big numbers, including 42 homers and 102 RBI last year, April of 2016 was a wasteland for Khris Davis.
He said all spring that he didn't want to start slow again, and in the opener he took the first step toward erasing his April showers with a single and a solo homer, the bomb coming to break the 2-2 in the sixth inning. The second homer came off J.C. Ramirez and carried out to left-center.
Asked to hold the lead in the seventh, Ryan Dull struck out the side. Sean Doolittle got two out in the eighth before Ryan Madson took over to try to put away Trout away, but he ended the inning with a soft end-of-the-bat double to right. Then Coliseum fans got their first look at the new no-pitch intentional walk before Madson faced C.J. Cron with two out and two on. Cron grounded out softly.
That left it for Santiago Casilla to pitch the ninth. The 2016 season saw Casilla save 31 games for San Francisco, but the Giants lost faith in him over the final six weeks of the season and he was barely a factor in the post-season, after which he signed with the A's. The question this spring was whether Madson or Casilla would close.
The answer for now is Casilla.
The A's first base runner of the 2017 season turned out to be Vogt, although the catcher wasn't on base long. He picked on a 3-2 pitch from Ricky Nolasco and lined it over the out-of-town scoreboard in right field for a homer that put the A's up 1-0.
Graveman couldn't make the lead hold up for long. He got the first two outs of the fourth on strikeouts and thought he was out of the inning, but a 3-2 pitch to Kole Calhoun was called ball four by home plate umpire Ted Barrett.
Five pitches later Trout got the Angels on the board. The defending American League Most Valuable Player lined a blast just over the 367-foot sign in left field for a 2-1 Angels' lead.
Graveman kept the A's in the game from there while waiting for his offense to get him some help. That came in the fifth inning when Jed Lowrie's second hit of the day was followed by a grounder that moved him to second. Yonder Alonso then looped a single in front of Trout in center to bring Lowrie home with the game-tying run.
