It stayed a game for five innings. Then it didn't. A 2-run fourth got the Athletics on the board, but the finisher was a 4-run sixth that blew the doors off and turned a manageable deficit into a laugher, with a 1-run seventh piled on for good measure.
Minnesota had actually taken the opener of this set, 9-6, so this wasn't a club getting run out of town all week — it split the first two meetings before dropping the finale. But the pattern of one big inning erasing whatever the Twins had built was the through-line of the whole series.
Oakland's lineup card is missing a lot of name recognition — Jacob Wilson, Shea Langeliers, Nick Kurtz, Tyler Soderstrom and Brent Rooker all unavailable — which makes whoever filled those at-bats in the sixth inning explosion the actual story of the night, more than any name on the scoreboard.
Prielipp's final line and Ginn's final line will both look better than their outings deserved once the box score settles, because a 4-run inning skews the story more than it should. For a team fighting to stay above .500-adjacent relevance in the Central race, this was the kind of loss that doesn't show up on a highlight reel but stings on the flight home.