Houston at Oakland

[Uli2001]

It's the first inning and the Houston starter Bud Norris has thrown so far 45 pitches recording a grand total of 1 out.

Oak has scored five runs and has the bases loaded.

I get that Houston is historically bad but why does a manager hang his pitcher to dry like that? From a sports perspective, this is brutal.

[howboutthoseos]

The unbalanced schedule is totally unfair when combined with the wild card. Oakland gets to play these guys 18 times. 6-0 already.

[SteveA]

It's the first inning and the Houston starter Bud Norris has thrown so far 45 pitches recording a grand total of 1 out.

Oak has scored five runs and has the bases loaded.

I get that Houston is historically bad but why does a manager hang his pitcher to dry like that? From a sports perspective, this is brutal.

It probably takes a long reliever, who was not expecting to pitch in the first, at least 3 or 4 batters to get up, stretch, and warm up. At the time of your post, the A's were 9 batters into the game. So they would have had to get him up around the 5th or 6th batter to have him ready by the time you posted. At that point (just speculating, haven't actually pulled up the game log) maybe it was 1 out, 2 or 3 runs in, and a couple men on. A bad situation, but not a situation where you are thinking you are going to have to yank the starter. Norris had been having a pretty good year up to now, you have to have at least some measure of confidence that maybe he can get out of a jam like that without too much more damage. Unfortunately, he couldn't. I would imagine by the 7th or 8th batter, Porter probably got somebody up.

[O-Arm36]

Also, our old buddy Erik Bedard didn't get out of the first on Monday, and Brad Peacock didn't make it 5 innings on Tuesday, so the bullpen is a bit taxed.