Building a yii query for Connect plugin

Question

I'm using the Connect plugin by Andrew Welch to get some data from an external database. Somewhere in the data, I need data from another related table. The way I'm doing this now is like this:

{% set games = craft.connect.query(db)
    .select(['*'])
    .from('games')
    .where(['and',{'LevelID': '15'},{'SeasonID': '2019'}])
    .limit(99)
    .all()
%}
{% for game in games %}

  {# use lots of data from the games table #}
  {# ... #}

  {% set home = craft.connect.query(db)
    .select(['Name'])
    .from('teams')
    .where({'ID': game.TeamA})
    .one() %}
  {{ home.Name }}

{% endfor %}

but I guess there must be a better way? Where I combine both queries? Or something like that?

Also, I would like to exclude results where the value of the column named "Status" is NOT "a" and NOT "b" (combined with the LevelID and SeasonID clause). How do I do this?