The pervasive thought rattling around all of our heads this year, no matter how egregiously terrible or just slightly inconvenienced your life became, was some version of “I can’t wait for this to be over”. Fittingly, that is exactly how the Mariners and A’s played the first part of Friday night’s game. Seattle and Oakland soared through the first seven innings at warp speed as if they were trying to banish them to the repressed memory part of the brain.
This wholly unremarkable game gave us our last chance to watch Yusei Kikuchi this year, a year he’ll finish with the same amount of starts in which he allowed five earned runs as he did two or fewer.