OAKLAND -- The Athletics head back to the fun-filled alien world of road baseball, a whirlwind tour of Minneapolis and Houston that allows us to catch our breaths a moment and consider what we have and, if you’re a ticket-buying fan, have not seen.
What you got Wednesday was a pretty routine failure, only this time the A’s did the failing, which you might have expected given the difficulty of sweeping a series. Texas’ 4-2 victory was the result of not just the law of big numbers but Edwin Jackson’s reversion to his historical form, as he spent his four-plus innings making his fielders run long, far and often, and the A’s hitters waited too long to employ the use of baserunners.
But as we said, it only figured to break that way. The A’s win three of every four games they play, and this was that fourth one. Nothing odd in any of that.
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But that’s one of the very few things about this American League playoff race that isn’t at least a bit wack. The only two normal teams are Boston and Cleveland, the ones who don’t have an immediate pursuer. Everyone else has dealt with their seasons from oblique, even bizarre angles, giving us a playoff drive that will resemble nothing quite so much as a rocket-fueled Whack-A-Mole.
And the A’s are very much a player in that.
The A’s remain the weirdest team in the weirdest division in North American sports, and nothing about this 6-3 home stand (2-1 series wins over Seattle, Houston and Texas) has changed that.
They remain wedged nearly between baseball’s most underachieving team by run differential (Houston) and baseball’s most overachieving team by the same metric (Seattle). Indeed, Seattle is a historical overachiever by this measurement (https://bit.ly/2BCcxWr). Taking the baseballreference.com version of the Pythagorean Theorem, Houston is seven games worse than it should be, and Seattle is 12 games better than it should be.
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In other words, the A’s who with all their delightful structural imbalances are still five games better than their own run differential would suggest, would still be the second wild-card team, but their place in the greater universe would be far different as they head off to New Scandinavia.
For one, they wouldn’t be a half game back of the Astros with 35 games left to play but 14, which kinds sucks some of the fun out of scoreboard-watching. For two, they wouldn’t be 3½ games behind the New York Yankees for the first wild card spot but 6½. For three, they would still be 4 ½ games ahead of the playoff cut line, but the team they’d be most concerned with is not Seattle but the Los Angeles Angels, those interest-crushing underachievers whose best player, M.N. Trout, hasn’t played in three weeks (though he is expected back this weekend).
There is something comforting in knowing that the reality is so at variance from the conceptual in this instance. The A’s being 25 games over .500 with a pitching staff rebuilt on the fly is pretty nuts on its face, and the daily struggle to convince the customers that it’s safe to like this team enough to see it in person is a constant source of amusement. Plus the chatter around the team hiring an avant-garde architect for the still-mythical ballpark will divert attention from the actual matters at hand.
But it isn’t like Houston’s got normal figured out; they nearly blew an 8-0 lead Wednesday before barely scraping past Seattle, 10-7, and they were shorting the nation’s expectations well before their injury problems starting blooming. And Seattle – well, lord only knows how they’re doing what they’re doing, except that maybe Edwin Diaz is powered by aliens.
In summary, you would do well not to let this race stray far from your attention. It seems too far gone to ever reach normalcy, and could even get more bizarre by the time the A’s return next weekend.
Besides, we all need all the WTF we can get these days. Normal is squeezing the sap out of our heads, one federal indictment at a time.