There’s Always Hope…and Other Bleak Sayings

What’s still alive is that the A’s DO have the ability to still make the post season where it’s a fresh start for everyone. They CAN win the play-in game, even on the road. Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

With just ten games left in the season, the A’s find themselves trailing the Kansas City Royals by a half-game for the A.L.’s top wild card and ahead of the Seattle Mariners by 1 ½ for the second spot.

What’s impossible to recapture here is how it felt daily to watch this steady slide into embarrassment and apparent apathy that the Athletics made so dreadfully. Short of writing a screenplay for a seasonal recap that makes fans cringe in their seats, including special horror movie sound effects for August and September so far, I’m left with this piece.

Since Aug. 10, the A’s are 11-25 and following the now-infamous Cespedes trade, they’re 17-29.

While they’re not the first to blow it, or even the first ones to flop with the biggest lead, the 2014 A’s are one the verge of one of the biggest seasonal collapses joining the 2007 Mets who blew a 7-game September lead, the 2009 Tigers who lost a 3-game lead with only four to play, and the 2011 Red Sox who lost 20 games in September and became the first team in MLB history to miss the playoffs after holding a 9-game lead in the final month of the season.

There’s always hope that they can come back, but “hope “is not a successful plan for winning.

For the remainder of the season, it doesn’t matter who the A’s play now. Two of the three remaining series – Philadelphia and Texas – are cellar dwellers and the third, the (enter preferred city here) Angels have already clinched and are coasting.

For the A’s, they are their own competition as they now struggle to score more than three runs a game and get a bullpen in line that can preserve superb outings by its starters when batters don’t produce. In seven of their last eight games they’ve scored three or less and only scored more than four runs twice all of September.

When a team has a .615 winning percentage and the best record in baseball with less than two months to play and falls to .546 with a week left to play, it simply changes everything for everybody for all time.

Forget the last 36 games. You can’t look back and say maybe this, maybe that.

Maybe if Sean Doolittle comes through last Tuesday, or if Ryan Cook and Fernando Abad don’t walk five batters on Sept. 7 vs. the Astros, or maybe Eric O’Flaherty gets Tyler Flowers with two outs in the ninth the following day, or maybe they split the series with the Angels at the end of August, or maybe… As the saying goes, “When maybes come true, everyone has a great Christmas.”

What’s still alive is that the A’s DO have the ability to still make the post season where it’s a fresh start for everyone. They CAN win the play-in game, even on the road.

The Wildcard winner is likely to play the Angels, a divisional opponent they’re familiar with. The A’s have the better pitching staff that was successful against them early on. With that success, it’s on to the ALCS where they were predicted to be at season’s end.

Remember A’s fans, “hope” springs eternal.