The idea that the Oakland Athletics would bullpen Wednesday’s American League Wild Card game amuses oldtimers and purists alike because it adds to the already prevalent narrative that the A’s are baseball’s version of Which Of These Things Doesn’t Belong?
Never mind that Oakland was by any meaningful measure the fourth best team in Major League Baseball in 2018, and never mind that they have more than earned their place among the game’s best teams. They are the A’s, and the A’s always seem like the farm family dropped in the middle of Times Square, all big-eyed and stage-struck.
So if they’re going to play to type, why not start Liam Hendriks and then bullpen the hell out of the Yankees to define the postseason? No other team embraces middle-school science fair solutions to obvious problems so much as Oakland has in this century, and this is merely the latest example.
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The other nine teams all have set and established starters ready to in their various Game Ones, from Cy Young candidates like Chris Sale and Corey Kluber and Justin Verlander through Craig Kimbrel. They all have varying levels of strength relative to each other, but they are all expecting their starting pitcher to reach the second inning.
The A’s? Just the opposite, it seems. Having reached October with a scorched-earth starting rotation, a ton of homers and defensive supercompetence, they are going to play this out to its logical end. So Hendriks it is, or is likely to be.
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For the undertrained eye (and when it comes to the A’s national profile, most eyes are undertrained because the curvature of the earth is just too dofficuklt a hurdle for most national analysts), the idea of bullpenning a winner-take-all game would seem at least moderately daft. Other teams have bullpenned this year, following the lead of the Tampa Bay Rays, but none but the A’s have reached the second level of the season.
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And in truth, the A’s bullpenning isn’t so much a strategy as an admission of weakness due to injury. The Elephants have had their starting rotation savaged with surgeries, and the rotation as it presently exists is Mike Fiers (traded at midseason), Edwin Jackson (seemingly traded every season), Trevor Cahill (alum) and either Brett Anderson (another alum) or Aaron Brooks (2 2/3 innings since 2015).
So yeah, bullpenning it’s probably going to be, and if the A’s survive Wednesday, they’ll be back at it in the Boston series, probably in either Game 3 or 4. Plus, everyone bullpens in a win-or-go-home situation, so maybe it isn’t that odd.
No, we’re wrong. It IS that odd, and there’s no point trying to wrap this around cutting-edge thinking or reinventing-the-game nonsense. The A’s wouldn’t do this if they didn’t have to, and given their current need to carve out a more relevant space for themselves in their own market, they could very much use another round or two of overachievement against type. Given that, they would be conventional in October if they could.
Yet if any team would violate orthodoxy without abashment, it would be the A’s. Because they are the odd team in American League team photo based on preseason expectations, 21st century postseason playoff pedigree, the what-the-hell-let’s-try-it-and-see M.O. of the current baseball operations department, and the fact that their mascot is an elephant trying to balance on a baseball, it seems perfectly apt. Of course the A’s should be the first team to use bullpenning by design in the postseason, and of course it should be because they don’t have a better alternative. The A’s are branded for good or ill as a 96-win team going by the seat of its collective pants.
So Wednesday has that Liam Hendriks feels to it. His eight starts have produced one impressive line – 8 2/3 innings, six hits, two runs, two earned, three walks, seven strikeouts, a 2.08 ERA – so you could make the argument that he is Oakland’s best starter without actually being a starter in the current nomenclature.
In short, the wild card game should be a Liam Hendriks game even if it isn’t being done based on desperation. I mean, if the A’s are going to be the weird cousin who shows up unannounced for the holidays, they might as well play it to the nines.
Or in this case, through the first.