A's focus on what's in front of them in shellacking of Rangers

OAKLAND -- Playoff fever raged through the A's clubhouse Monday night. You could tell by the fact that two of the three televisions after Oakland’s no-degree-of-difficulty 9-0 win over the Texas Rangers were tuned into...
 
Cardinals-Dodgers.
 
Of course Cardinals-Dodgers. Why wouldn't it be Cardinals-Dodgers? After all, showing Astros-Mariners would show to the prying eyes of the outside world that the time has come for them to start paying attention to that sort of thing, and since it’s still August, obsessing about the standings is still someone else’s job.
 
Like general manager David Forst, who was in managerBob Melvin’s office watching Seattle beat Houston, 7-4, on Robinson Cano’s eighth-inning three-run homer. It mattered to him that the A’s had pulled back into a tie with Houston for the AL West lead, at least enough to watch Edwin Diaz crush the Astros in the ninth, as is his wont.
 
But the rest of the boys handled it as just another night on the line. They bombarded the antediluvian Bartolo Colon and two Texas relievers for four homers and four doubles. Mike Fiers stole the notes from Trevor Cahill’s brilliant start Saturday and almost exactly matched it (Fiers had one more strikeout and threw five more strikes overall, but otherwise his pitching line was exactly Cahill’s).
 
Why, it’s as if Sunday’s 9-4 loss to Houston never happened at all.
 
Indeed, the only real angst of the evening occurred in the second, when Fiers gave up a leadoff double to Nomar Mazara and then hit Jurickson Profar five pitches later. Melvin winced; he needed Fiers to give his weary bullpen a night, and his plan looked to be in shards.
 
“I didn’t want to take him out,” the manager said. “I needed some innings tonight, and he looked like he didn’t have command of anything. But he and Luke (catcher Jonathan Lucroy) talked, and Luke told him that he was a little off line and not coming straight through, and all of a sudden he was like a new guy.”
 
Indeed. Profar was the last batter Fiers allowed to reach base; he retired batters six through 23 without incident, and by then the A’s had rained down Ramon Laureano and Khris Davis and Stephen Piscotty, and the game went from a potentially grisly one to a boat race.
 
The kind, truth be told, the A’s have come to master against the American League’s legion of bad teams.
 
Against the AL’s eight teams with losing records (they haven’t yet played Minnesota) and the two National League teams (San Francisco and San Diego), the A’s are 50-20. Of course, October doesn’t allow teams with losing records to participate, but as the clubhouse televisions tell us, it isn’t October yet. It isn’t even September yet. You can only win the games put in front of you, and the A’s have won 60 percent of all their games. That’ll play anywhere.
 
It will even play in Oakland, where the crowd of 9,341 embodied their first four-digit attendance since before the good times started to roll in mid-June. The task of turning word-of-mouth into walk-up crowds remains a daunting one for the organization’s designated tub-thumpers, but they’re the ones who kept saying how bad the ballpark and the city were, and they are still paying for those years of hubris-driven sins.
 
But on the field, where the real bills get paid, the A’s relocated the hammer they’ve been putting down on whatever team comes into town, and the ancillary perks will come when they come.
 
Probably about the time the uniformed gents start asking for the Astros to be put on the television.