Second sweep in A's 2023? Historically, Oakland has Detroit's number
The Oakland A's, believe it or not, just won their second consecutive game against a fellow MLB franchise on Wednesday.
After kicking off their series against Detroit with a razor-thin, extra-innings 1-0 victory in 10 frames on Monday, July 4th, the A's went on to destroy the Tigers 12-3 on Wednesday to win the second game of this series and enter Thursday looking at a very realistic chance of sweeping their rivals.
This development, which is a true oddity in the middle of a historically bad season put together by Oakland (25-63), is actually far from rare when it comes to A's vs. Tigers affairs in the whole history of the MLB as we know it.
Since the A's relocated to Oakland ahead of the 1968 season, they have faced the Tigers 534 times through Wednesday. The A's are in possession of a positive 283-251 record. They have not lost a season-long matchup against Detroit since they fell 3-4 overall in 2016!
In fact, Oakland is a resounding 31-5 in the past six seasons worth of games versus the Tigers (they didn't face each other in 2020), and they have only lost more than one game to Detroit in a single campaign just once (last year) in that span.
The A's have now defeated the Tigers three times in a row, from the second leg of a double-header held inside the Coliseum on July 21, 2022 through Wednesday's 12-3 trouncing by way of Tuesday's narrow 1-0 win.
That record goes all the way up to a near-perfect one if you look a little further down the road, with the A's going 6-1 in their past seven matchups against Detroit, and 8-2 in their last 10 games against each other.
The recent history between these two franchises has been so unbalanced, in fact, that Detroit never defeated Oakland in 16 meetings between May 6, 2017 and Sep. 6, 2019, and they won just one of 24 games between the former date and Aug. 31, 2021.
Oakland might trail everybody in the MLB these days, and the A's can very well be on their way to earning the worst-ever (modern day) MLB record beating the Mets' 120 losses in 1962, but the Tigers betweet watch out on Thursday if they don't want to get sweep in their own stadium.