The real tragedy of A’s playoff flame-out
What if 2020 is as good as it gets for Oakland?
The A’s season, short and impressive as it was, is now over. The Houston Astros’ relentless hitting finished off Oakland on Thursday in Game 4 best-of-five American League Division Series.
And typically at the end of the season, I’m keen to write a “they’llget-’em-next-year” column — the promise of a brighter future.
But I can’t write something like that for A’s fans because year- over-year continuity is not a thing that Oakland does under team owner John Fisher.
And that’s what makes this playoff loss in 2020 so disappointing, so heartbreaking, so unfair.
This was supposed to be the A’s season. This was the year the team had been building towards for half a decade. The 2020 A’s were supposed to be the exact right blend of young and old, experience and upside. And when they went out and absolutely dominated the American League West this year, they hinted that things were, in fact, different with this team.
For A’s fans, all that hope got them were a few extra playoff games. They didn’t come close to sniffing the World Series. And adding salt to this fresh wound, their loss to the arch-rival Astros — who outscored Oakland by 12 runs over four games — was comprehensive. The A’s weren’t done in by bad luck or a few fleeting missed opportunities. No, they were simply smacked around by a team that consistently contends for championships.
A team, it should be noted, that paid three players — including their Game 4 starter Zack Greinke — roughly the same amount as the A’s paid everyone on their roster.
If these A’s could run this roster back in 2021, they’d again be expected to make the playoffs and perhaps even take a step forward in their quest to win the World Series for the first time since 1989. The talent is there to expect further improvement — maybe even a big jump.