On Monday, the Oakland Athletics welcomed the Chicago White Sox to town for the first game of a three-game series. The A's felt pretty good about their chances of starting the series off strong, as they had Bartolo Colon taking the hill for the start. Colon has been the most dominant and consistent starter for Oakland thus far in 2012 and was going for another win. He pitched well once again, but the Oakland offense was shut out by Chicago starter Jake Peavy en route to a 4-0 loss.
The White Sox opened the scoring in the top of the fourth inning, with back-to-back solo home runs by Adam Dunn and Paul Konerko to lead off the innings. Those solo shots were the only times in the game Colon would falter, as he finished with just the two runs allowed on seven hits and three walks over seven innings of work. His ERA is now at 2.62.
Fautino De Los Santos came in to pitch the ninth inning for the A's and immediately gave up a double to Brent Morel, who moved to third on a wild pitch. A single by the next batter, Gordon Beckham, brought Morel home for another Chicago insurance run. Alejandro De Aza singled and Alexei Ramirez reached on an error, loading the bases with no outs. De Los Santos was lifted for Jerry Blevins, who struck out Dunn looking. Rich Thompson came in to pitch and got Konerko to line out, but A.J. Pierzynski got a questionable hit (that probably should have been ruled an error on Jemile Weeks) to keep the bases loaded and make the score 4-0 White Sox. A pop-up finally ended the inning.
White Sox starter Jake Peavy was even better than Colon, allowing just three hits and two walks to Oakland batters in the complete game shutout. Weeks, Coco Crisp and Yoenis Cespedes were the lucky A's batters who picked up hits.
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