This postseason nightmare will feel worse than other playoff disappointments of past
Think the Oakland A’s feel a crushing sense of disappointment after bowing out of the postseason on Thursday?
Wait until Opening Day 2021, and potentially much longer than that, when A’s players, coaches and executives are still experiencing the sting from being upset by the rival Houston Astros.
The pain of exiting the playoffs earlier than expected always lingers for teams, but it’s how the A’s lost and who they lost to that will stick with the franchise in a way previous postseason pain almost certainly hasn’t.
After Houston was exposed in a cheating scandal brought to light by veteran Oakland right-hander Mike Fiers over the offseason, the A’s had the rest of the league cheering them on in their quest to unseat the Astros in the American League West. Manager Bob Melvin’s squad
left no doubt in the regular season, running away with the division crown to secure the second seed in the AL playoff bracket, but the A’s appeared overmatched throughout an ALDS in which the team’s biggest strength became an obvious liability.
The A’s finished the regular season with the best bullpen ERA in the major leagues, but the Astros exposed Oakland’s relief corps and proved they didn’t need illegal advantages to muscle their way to victories.
“You look at the numbers over the course of the regular season with our bullpen, we had a lead after the sixth, we usually won,” Melvin said. “It didn’t happen this series and we struggled to hold them down really the entire game at times.”
Oakland had no answer for George Springer, couldn’t contain Carlos Correa and never solved Michael Brantley. The Astros pitching staff wasn’t exactly spectacular this week, but Houston’s lineup did so much damage that mediocre performances on the mound didn’t make any kind of a difference.
Never mind that Houston lost 2019 ace Gerrit Cole to free agency and a future Hall of Famer, Justin Verlander, to seasonending elbow surgery. The Astros proved they had the superior roster and a deeper pool of talent throughout an ALDS that didn’t appear all that competitive.
“They said they wanted us anyway,” Dusty Baker said before the series. “So you just have to be careful what you ask for.”
After losing in the AL wild-card game in 2018 and 2019 and having 90plus win seasons go to waste, the A’s arrived at spring training this season expecting to get revenge against the Astros. Houston was defensive and hardly apologetic about a cheating scandal that altered the AL West race over the past few years and A’s players believed good karma was on their side.
The regular-season standings suggested as much as the Astros finished with a sub-.500 record, dealt with a slew of injuries and had several core players including Alex Bregman and José Altuve underperform. When the Astros upset the Twins to advance to the division series against the A’s, Oakland should have viewed the series as a golden opportunity to reset the hierarchy of power in the AL West and atop the American League.
The chance to end the Astros’ season and finally end their run as a perennial powerhouse was within reach, which is precisely why the A’s will relive this week’s nightmare long beyond the winter months.
At the beginning of each spring, players talk in clichés about “unfinished business,” and deep postseason runs, but that chatter didn’t really fade for an A’s team that spent 2020 convinced they would usurp control of their division and contend for a World Series title. That Oakland couldn’t even advance to the ALCS and lost to an Astros team that finished seven games behind them in the regular-season standings only makes the pain more acute and the failure more frustrating.
“It’s a failure, we wanted to win the World Series,” outfielder Mark Canha said. “Anything short of that is falling short of our goal. But every failure as a competitor is an opportunity and those opportunities are valuable to learn.”
The A’s have enough talented young players to return to the postseason in the near future, but do executives Billy Beane and David Forst have a formula to do anything meaningful in October? It’s a question Beane has long grappled with, yet as the postseason appearances pile up and the playoff exits continue to pass, the A’s never seem to get any closer to hoisting a trophy.
The 2020 A’s were built on their bullpen, their star-studded infield and the supreme motivation to dethrone the Astros. Next year, a bullpen loaded with free agents will have a new look, half of the starting infield will likely be gone and the players who remain will once again arrive in Mesa, Arizona in February to discuss the motivation they find in coming up short.
“It’s a bad feeling, but hopefully it doesn’t happen next year,” center fielder Ramón Laureano said postgame. “We’ve just got to keep our head up, keep working, keep dreaming about moving forward and winning a World Series and that’s it.”
Over the last two decades, the A’s have made 11 postseason appearances and advanced to the ALCS just once, when they were swept off the field in 2006 by the Detroit Tigers. All of those losses hurt the A’s for different reasons, but the heartbreak from their 2020 run should feel unique.
Presented with a chance to exact revenge against the Astros, the A’s came up short. By a lot.