1

Chris Capuano seems like a nice guy, valedictorian of his high school, economics graduate of Duke (Phi Beta Kappa, even), married to a college girlfriend, but he's also the definition of a lefty soft-tosser who combines a surprisingly solid strikeout rate with a good walk rate, giving up a rather high number of home runs, and if you had to pick a merely solid pitcher who could shut down the A's, that'd be the profile, right, because Oakland, especially with Josh Willingham out, is singularly unequiped to take advantage of a pitcher whose major fault is hanging some hittable stuff that can be taken yard.

2

The Twitter debate earlier today centered on whether Graham Godfrey would pitch well, and he came out fine, not giving a performance to either write home about or be ashamed of, just kind of putting in a solid day's work on the mound, but further not inspiring me to trust him going forward, because Jesus does he pitch awfully far up in the zone, and he's not exactly bringing filthy 96 mph fastballs at the belt, so it sure feels like somebody's going to hammer him, and it can't be too far in the future.

3

Tonight was the kind of game that tends to get fans up in arms about the team having no fire and no passion, because somehow our own apathy as we watch a guy like Capuano set hitters down on weak grounder after weak popup is supposed to mean that the team just needs to yell and jump around a lot and suddenly they'll be good, and their failure to energize us reflects on the manager and his inability to inspire the troops to do miraculous things, like hit even though nobody on the team actually has the skill to do so.

4

These recaps are getting a little punchy, I realize, but I've got to do something to keep myself and you guys interested in a team that's clearly gunning for third place at best, so I figure if Grantland can go to town with their filthy "we're writers goddammit" nonsense, favoring the supposed craft of writing over all else (like having a new idea once or twice, let's say, or hell, forget novelty or insight, having a goddamn thesis would even be a step up), and using footnotes in a way that would surely make the guy they think they're emulating spin in his grave were he actually able to muster up any amount of emotion about such a tawdry display of generally pointless ripoffery in the name of homage, then dammit, I can do silly things, too, like writing hundred-word sentences that maybe hang together grammatically just enough to not make every fourth-grade teacher from here to Topeka groan in frustration while simultaneously masking the fact that, shit, the A's just lost another 4-1 game and I've got even less to say about it than usual.

5

The real recap tomorrow will include analysis of the Graham Godfrey HBP on Justin Turner that got everyone on Twitter all worked up, a preview of which is this: he didn't do it on purpose, calm down.