The Athletics arrived at the Cubs on Friday night carrying their worst stretch of the season, a skid that has left them with seven losses in their past nine games and forced another round of pitching shuffles. Gage Jump was set to make his second career start in the opener, with Thursday’s starter still unannounced and Kade Morris in position for a possible big league debut.
That is the state of the club in early June: three games below.500, already searching for answers after a week that began with a home sweep by the Mariners and continued with two losses in three games to the Yankees. The slide has pushed the Athletics into second place in the AL West and made this trip to Chicago feel less like a routine series and more like a test of whether the roster can steady itself before the month gets away from it.
Pitching has taken the hardest hit. Luis Severino went on the injured list over the weekend, Jacob Lopez was crushed by the Yankees on Sunday and then sent to Triple-A, and the club has had to lean on J.T. Ginn, who has a 2.87 ERA on the year and a 2.56 mark over 10 starts since moving into the rotation. Even the bullpen has been stretched thin enough that four different relievers — Hogan Harris, Mark Leiter Jr., Joel Kuhnel and Jack Perkins — already have at least three saves each.
The bigger problem is that the lineup has not covered for any of it. The Athletics spent heavily on bats such as Brent Rooker, Tyler Soderstrom and Lawrence Butler, but all three have been stuck in season-long slumps, and even Nick Kurtz, last year's AL Rookie of the Year, has not changed the shape of the offense enough to stop the slide. Jacob Wilson is out with a shoulder injury, and Shea Langeliers is hitting.
That leaves Jump’s start to open the series carrying more weight than a typical callup outing, because the Athletics do not yet know who will take the mound Thursday. If Morris gets the ball, it would be another sign that the club is reaching deeper into its pitching depth just as the losses begin to pile up again in June.
