San Francisco Giants at Oakland Athletics: Final Score & Recap

The San Francisco Giants defeated the Oakland Athletics 4-2 in ten innings at Oakland Coliseum on August 18, 2024, with the decisive blow coming in the top of the tenth when Jerar Encarnacion launched a home run off Dany Jiménez that swung win probability by 51.7 percentage points according to the DiamondIQ model's estimate. That single swing effectively ended Oakland's hopes, as the Athletics had entered the game with a 47% pre-game win probability before watching it fall to zero by the final out. The Giants finished with nine hits and one error while Oakland managed eight hits but could not convert them into enough runs, committing no errors of their own until the contest was already in hand.

The scoring had been sparse through regulation, with Oakland drawing first blood with a run in the bottom of the sixth and San Francisco answering with Heliot Ramos connecting on a home run off JP Sears in the top of the seventh, a swing worth 15.6 percentage points of win probability that knotted the game at one and sent it to extras. In the tenth, Encarnacion's three-run blast proved insurmountable, and Ryan Walker shut the door in the bottom half by striking out Miguel Andujar and JJ Bleday, reducing Oakland's chances by 14.7 and 12.2 percentage points respectively on those two outs, though Max Schuemann reached via a fielding error in between that briefly restored 12.5 percentage points of hope for the home side.

Among position players, Encarnacion led all batters with a WPA of plus 44.1 and an RE24 of plus 1.4, while Abraham Toro contributed plus 11.4 WPA and Lawrence Butler added plus 11.0 WPA for San Francisco. On the mound, JP Sears paced all pitchers at plus 27.1 WPA, followed by Blake Snell at plus 20.1 and Mason Miller at plus 13.5, a distribution that reflects how tightly the game was contested before Encarnacion's tenth-inning home run rendered the DiamondIQ model's estimate of Oakland's victory chances a flat zero.