Yesterday morning I wrote that the A's can't win at home, so I'd take the Pirates' coin flip for plus money. Last night the A's won 11-2. So let's start where the honesty starts: that pick lost, and it lost ugly.

Not a one-run heartbreaker I can shrug off as variance. An 11-2 detonation of the exact premise I sold you. Nick Kurtz hit two home runs and drove in five. Jeff McNeil — Jeff McNeil, the contact-hitting second baseman you draft for batting average and apologize for in the power column — went deep and knocked in four. Between them, nine of the eleven runs. The "team that can't slug at home" put up a touchdown and a field goal in a building that's supposed to suppress everything.

Here's the thing I have to sit with. The Pirates side wasn't a bad number — Pittsburgh at plus money against a team that genuinely had been losing at Sutter Health Park is a defensible coin flip, and I'd look at it again tomorrow. But "defensible" and "right" are different words, and last night they lived on opposite sides of the box score. The market priced a coin flip; the coin landed on Kurtz's barrel twice.

What I actually got wrong wasn't the price. It was leaning on a small-sample home-record narrative as if it were a law of physics. The A's have spent this whole displaced season being more dangerous than their address suggests — I've written that too, the comebacks, the won't-die AL West stuff — and then I turned around and bet against the offense on the one night it decided to remind everyone. You can't have it both ways. I did, and the wrong way cashed.

So: tip of the cap to Kurtz, who is quietly making the "is this guy actually a middle-of-the-order bat" question sound stupid, and to McNeil for the most un-McNeil line of the year. No new number from me here — this one's just the receipt. Line not pulled; this is analysis only, and the analysis is that I was on the wrong side of a blowout I helped talk myself into.

Record stays on the board. The losses go up there same as the wins, or none of it means anything.