Arrieta goes 8 innings, Cubs beat A’s 4-0; Gray injured

And he might be headed back to the disabled list to boot. After going winless in the month of July, Arrieta tossed eight innings of shutout baseball as the Cubs topped the A’s, 4-0.

“Emphasis (is) on sinking the ball down, middle down in the strike zone and forcing action early on”, Arrieta said. “I was just going out and throwing them without really locating them”. He’s got a curveball he buries in the dirt to keep people off his sinker.

“The numbers he’s put up the past couple of years show just how good he is”.

Overton has struggled with giving up home runs in his five major league starts, having allowed 11 in 21 1/3 innings on his way to a 10.97 ERA. With one out, Jason Heyward had an RBI single and Javier Baez followed with a two-run double.NOTES: Cubs OF Jorge Soler (left hamstring strain) was activated from the disabled list after missing 51 games and started at designated hitter against Oakland. “(Melvin) made a decision to shut it down instead of risking me hurting anything else”.

Sunday was Hendricks’ best start on the road this season. “Hopefully, it’s a minor thing”.

Top Play (WPA): The top two moments came on solo home runs in the sixth and seventh innings, so this is really a matter of which one came first, which means it was Kris Bryant’s 6th inning lead off home run to break the scoreless tie (+.174).

“We were swinging the bats well coming into the series”, Melvin said.

The game was also the second straight in which former members of the A’s organization came back to haunt the team.

Amusing thing, after the Cubs spent several weeks and two trades of top prospects trying to upgrade an admittedly-weak bullpen: it took until the eighth inning of the third game of the series against the Oakland Athletics before they used any of their key late-inning relief pitchers. Zobrist and Addison Russell had two hits each for the Cubs.

Sonny Gray’s disappointing season got even worse Saturday.

Elsewhere, there were runs galore as the Atlanta Braves put in one of their best performances of the season in their 13-5 rout of the St Louis Cardinals, while the Colorado Rockies doubled the Miami Marlins’ score in their 12-6 win and the Milwaukee Brewers went even better than that as they drubbed the Arizona Diamondbacks 15-6.

Alex Colome got the final two outs for his 27th save after the Twins rallied for two runs in the ninth. Still, that didn’t bother Gray as much as being taken out while he was pitching well. I enjoyed pitching here. “To have it cut short like this is very tough”.

“Not quite yet”, Cubs manager Joe Maddon said after his ace beat the Oakland Athletics 4-0 for the Cubs first win in an Arrieta start since June.

On Saturday, however, Arrieta seemed to be in his early-season form.

Arrieta gave up a two-out double to Yonder Alonso in the second inning, a single to Marcus Semien in fifth and a single to Ryon Healy in the eighth.

The Cubs successfully challenged an infield hit by A’s right fielder Danny Valencia in the seventh inning.

Orioles 10, White Sox 2: Manny Machado became the second player in major league history to homer in the first, second and third innings, driving in a career-high seven runs as Baltimore lit up James Shields in Chicago.

“Believe it or not, I was hitting my spots better tonight”, Overton said after Friday’s loss. Kluber (11-8) struck out eight in eight innings of five-hit ball, beating CC Sabathia (6-9) in a matchup of pitchers who won the AL Cy Young Award with Cleveland. “I told them after the fourth I had a little bit of an issue come up and when I went back out for the fifth it kind of felt the same”.