OAKLAND -- In the midst of an offensive funk, the A’s were hopeful an expected big crowd on hand for Fireworks Night at the Coliseum could help provide the extra energy boost they so desperately needed.

The vibe certainly felt like the first big home game in quite some time, with an announced crowd of 32,304 marking the largest attendance in Oakland since the 2019 Wild Card Game. The raucous A's fans in the stands Friday were sent into a frenzy when Elvis Andrus hit his first home run of the season to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth, but the good times were short-lived as Oakland ultimately fell to the Red Sox, 3-2, in 10 innings.

“Everybody was talking about [the crowd],” A’s manager Bob Melvin said. “This is what you love. Wish we could have won the game, but we came back and tied the game with a chance to win.”

Fresh off the announcement of his winning of the AL Reliever of the Month Award for his stellar work in June, Lou Trivino’s first pitch of the game was a leadoff broken-bat single in the 10th by Enrique Hernández that scored Michael Chavis, who was the automatic runner on second base.

The bottom half of the 10th began promisingly. Trailing by one run, Jed Lowrie’s leadoff single gave the A’s runners at the corners with no outs before a strong throw to the plate from Hernández on Sean Murphy’s flyout nabbed Seth Brown to mitigate the threat.

One batter later, Frank Schwindel flied out and the A’s hopes of a comeback were thwarted for good.

“Their guy made a great throw,” Melvin said. “It was an evenly matched game. A well-played game. Fans enjoyed it. But certainly we would’ve liked to win it.”

Although the late heroics by Andrus went for naught, his solo blast in the ninth, which was crushed 107.3 mph off the bat and traveled a projected 422 feet to straightaway center, per Statcast, could end up paying big dividends for the A’s in the long run.

Andrus had already been showing vast improvements from a rough early-season slump as he entered Friday’s game batting .280 (46-for-164) over his last 49 games after hitting just .143 through his first 31 contests. Now that Elvis has left the building for the first time in 2021, he just might be regaining the solid power stroke he displayed over the last 11 seasons he played with Rangers.

It had been a long time since the veteran shortstop experienced the joy of rounding the bases for a big fly -- 269 at-bats to be exact, which stood as the second-longest active stretch of at-bats without a homer in the Majors behind David Fletcher’s stretch of 292 games with the Angels.

"I thought it would be a good time to hit my first one. I was really glad that it happened,” Andrus said. “I feel a lot better now. I’m taking a lot of good swings. I’ve been waiting for that first homer for so long. Now, I can start hitting some more bombs.”

Frankie Montas did his best to navigate through a tough Boston lineup without his best command. Despite walking three batters and hitting another, the right-hander managed to limit the damage to just two runs over 5 2/3 innings against a Red Sox offense that entered the series fresh off scoring 52 runs over its previous seven-game homestand.

"You look at [Boston’s] numbers coming in offensively and they’ve been swinging the bat as well as anybody in baseball for some time now,” Melvin said. “They grinded at-bats and made him work. At the end of the day, he comes out with two runs allowed. Against a team like that, he pitched well.”

The only hit a slumping A’s offense could muster through six innings against left-hander Eduardo Rodriguez was an infield single by Schwindel. Once Rodriguez departed after the sixth, the A’s got to the Boston bullpen, starting with Lowrie’s solo shot off Garrett Whitlock in the seventh.

Even with Friday’s loss marking Oakland’s ninth in the last 13 games, there’s no panic setting in among this group. The offense might be struggling, now hitting .174 (40-for-230) as a team over the last six games. But as they showed a couple of months ago by shaking off a 1-6 record through the first seven games of the season with a 13-game winning streak immediately after, these A’s know how to turn things around in a hurry.

“We haven’t been swinging great,” Melvin said. “Their guys pitched well tonight. We got some big hits when we needed to. I feel like we’re going to break out any day. We just need to sustain a good game and score some runs so it can get contagious.”