Oakland's lineup is banged up everywhere you look, and that's before you get to the guys already lost for the year. Cincinnati has its own list of absences, but nothing that's gutted the middle of the order the way Oakland's has. That gap in available talent is doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the board tonight.
The Reds aren't exactly rolling — their division hopes are toast — but they're still hanging around the wild-card picture, and a 6-4 stretch over their last 10 games has kept that door cracked open. That's a real incentive to take care of business against a team playing out the string. The Athletics, meanwhile, are stuck in one of the worst slides in the sport, getting outscored by football scores in back-to-back losses to Detroit before this series even started.
None of this screams marquee matchup, but there's a real storyline here: does Ginn's return give Oakland's rotation any life, or is this just one more name to shuffle in and out while the losses pile up? Either way, Cincinnati is the far more complete team standing in the batter's box and on the mound tonight, and their recent form backs that up.