Pinder Power on display in ALDSPinder Power on display in ALDS
Baseball

Pinder Power on display in ALDS

PINDER POWER!

Those two words accompany many tweets sent out by the Oakland Athletics when former Virginia Tech baseball standout Chad Pinder hits a home run, which he's done 44 times in the regular season and is second only to Franklin Stubbs among Hokies, who hit 104 in his MLB career. The Athletics third baseman helped his team to a series win over the Chicago White Sox in the first round of the MLB playoffs then launched a pair of home runs in the American League Divisional Series against the Houston Astros in an effort to reach the team's first League Championship Series since 2006.

The Athletics came up short, losing to Houston 3-1, but Pinder's presence was certainly noticed during Oakland's 2020 playoff run. See below tweets and links about our only Hokies player to appear in the postseason this year.

Susan Slusser, who works for the San Francisco Chronicle, covering the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball and was also the first woman to serve as president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, certainly noticed his effort in the White Sox series. Quickly, trailing 3-0 in game three of the best-of-three series, Pinder came in as a pinch-hitter in the third and singled. He then hit a two-out, two-RBI single in the fifth, breaking a 4-4 tie (video below).

Pinder, who did not get the start in Game 1 against Houston, started the last three games against the Astros and hit a home run in games 2 and 3. His first home run in Game 2 was said to be the longest blast hit at Dodger Stadium in 2020. His second was a three-run shot in Game 3 that tied the game at 7-7. See videos below.

In the eighth, Pinder knocked in another run with a sacrifice fly and, according to the A's game note highlights for Oct. 8, Pinder had the first four RBI game by an A's third baseman in the postseason and has seven RBI this postseason, which match the most by an Athletic in a postseason over the last 31 years (Sierra, 1992; Bradley, 2006). It was also noted that the last time an Oakland batter hit a game-tying home run in the seventh inning or later was Jose Canseco in the 1988 ALCS Game 2 (7th) and has only been done five times in Athletics history. After the game, he spoke with the MLB Network crew.

The season is now over for Pinder and the Athletics, but the praises of him continued, as NBC Sports California's Brodie Brazil pointed out with a story he did on Pinder during Spring Training.