'JP was athletic today': Sears adds defensive highlight to 9-K day

OAKLAND -- The sun at the Coliseum can be one of the toughest opponents to battle for players trying to field their positions, but A's starter JP Sears beat the odds to turn two with a heads-up play.

In the fourth inning of Sunday's Bay Bridge Series finale -- an eventual 4-2 A's loss in extras -- Sears got Mark Canha to pop up to the left side of the infield with Tyler Fitzgerald on first and nobody out. Third baseman Darell Hernaiz lost the ball in the sun and shortstop Max Schuemann didn't seem to have a read on it either -- but Sears swooped in to make the snag.

Then, noticing that Fitzgerald had drifted off the bag, Sears fired to first base to complete one of the more electric double plays started by a pitcher in recent memory.

"Pitchers are always told to go after it until you're called off, and he went after it," said manager Mark Kotsay, who was ejected in the eighth after expressing displeasure with a call on a 3-0 pitch to Daz Cameron with two outs and the bases loaded in the seventh. "We always talk about pitchers not being athletic. JP was athletic today, and that was some type of play."

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The play from Sears was about as eye-popping as his final line, a career-high 7 2/3 innings with the lone run coming on a screamer of a game-tying solo shot from Heliot Ramos in the seventh inning. The projected 448-foot blast was the second-longest hit by a Giants player at the Coliseum on record, trailing only Jarrett Parker's 454-foot blast in 2015, the year Statcast began tracking.

But it was ultimately the Giants who seized Bay Area bragging rights for the final time after Dany Jiménez allowed back-to-back home runs to Jerar Encarnacion and Michael Conforto to open the 10th inning.

With the A's slated to play in Sacramento from 2025-27 before their planned relocation to Las Vegas, the longtime geographic rivals will have more than the San Francisco Bay separating them for the first time since the A's moved to Oakland in 1968.

"It was definitely something, you know, not too emotional for me, but something that I know is really big for the area. And I feel honored to be the starter for the game," said Sears, who completed at least seven innings for the fourth straight outing.

The final Coliseum edition of the Bay Bridge Series brought in two of the three largest A's home crowds this season, with the announced attendance on Saturday (37,551) and Sunday (32,727) bookending the Aug. 3 game against the Dodgers (35,207).

"It was a great two days," Kotsay said. "I thought both of these games, obviously, were exciting. They went back and forth. … You never want to drop a game, but I thought we did everything we could to win a game today, and … the Giants did everything yesterday.”

Seth Brown, the only current A's player who was on the roster during their last winning season in 2021, got to reunite with some former Oakland players and personnel who are now with San Francisco over the weekend, including Canha, Matt Chapman and manager Bob Melvin.

"Those guys were here when I first came up, so it's definitely special to kind of share the field with them again, especially in a series like this," Brown said. "It's one of those things where it kind of brings it all into perspective for you a little bit."

After both teams moved to the Bay Area -- the Giants arrived 10 years before the A's, in 1958 -- they did not face each other in game action until the 1989 World Series, which was famously disrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake before Game 3. The local rivals have played each other every year since Interleague Play began in '97.

Since then, the A's have gone 76-72 against the Giants. The two teams will continue to play each other moving forward, of course, but Sunday marked the end of a chapter in the rich history between the franchises.

"It's nothing better than playing for a crowd here in Oakland, having such a big stadium," Sears said. "It just brings a lot of buzz to the stadium, and it's a lot easier to show up for those games and be ready to go. It's been a lot of fun, the past several days, to have [those fans]."