The carry to right field at Coors Field might as well have been a jet stream, and the Oakland A’s rode it to a win in their first game of a rare trip to the live National League ballpark.
The A’s collected 12 hits in a 9-5 win over the Colorado Rockies on Friday night. That included multi-hit games from Sean Murphy, who had three, Mark Canha, Jed Lowrie and Matt Olson.
Murphy and Canha hit opposite-field solo home runs over the right-field fence. Canha’s home run led a three-run third inning that started with Olson’s single tapped the other way and Seth Brown’s walk. That forced Rockies starter Jon Gray out of the game with trainers. But the A’s kept the rally going against reliever Chi Chi Gonzalez, Lowrie and Murphy singled and Matt Chapman’s sacrifice fly made it 6-0.
The Rockies, fourth in the National League West, know no lead is safe at Coors Field. Against A’s starter Frankie Montas, Yonathan Daza’s RBI triple and Charlie Blackmon’s RBI double chipped the deficit to four runs. They added another in the fourth.
Montas got the boot for Mitch Moreland the pinch hitter with a scoring threat afoot in the sixth inning. Moreland hit into a double play, but Canha knocked Chapman home for a much-needed seventh run. He finished with three runs allowed over five innings with just one strikeout — his sinker and splitter not quite dropping as dramatically as it usually does, perhaps due to the mile-high air.
A’s reliever Burch Smith gave up two runs in his 1 1/3 innings of work, including Alan Trejo’s first career home run, to make it 8-5 in the seventh. Tony Kemp created some cushion with an RBI double in the eighth, the A’s ninth run.
Yusmeiro Petit quieted any Rockies comeback with 1 2/3 innings of scoreless ball, allowing one hit.
