A’s fans to receive wrong kind of postseason drama

Oh, the Oakland A’s will have a postseason.

Just not the one you hoped for.

Instead of taking place on the baseball field, the A’s postseason dramatics will take place in offices, in city council meetings and at the kitchen tables of ticket holders who will be examining their budgets.

There won’t be baserunners or late-inning heroics. Instead, there will be fingerpointing, recriminations, threats, potential lawsuits and maybe, just maybe, some positive developments.

It was only a year ago this weekend that the A’s were riding high. They had won the AL West in a COVID-shortened season. They had won their first postseason series in 14 years and were preparing for the ALDS against the hated Astros.

Though the A’s would lose that series, there was a good vibe around the team, its prospects for the future and the belief that — after the departures of the Raiders and the Warriors — Oakland’s last remaining major professional sports team was really “Rooted in Oakland.”

One year later? Scratch all that.

Owner John Fisher and his mouthpiece, A’s president Dave Kaval, spent the past year ruining whatever good vibes had been built. Trying to strong-arm Oakland in the middle of a pandemic with a monstrous development plan that, oh, by the way, happens to include a baseball stadium. Running a bare-bones operation that has sacrificed customer service and made the stadium experience even worse than before.

Sucking up all the oxygen surrounding their team and its on-field product with an increasingly hostile tone, threats to move to Las Vegas, trips to visit sites in Southern Nevada and a tone-deaf approach to public relations and wooing over skeptics.

Then late last month, the remaining loyalists received a shock: a sharp rise in seasonticket prices for 2022, in some cases nearly doubled.

Did any of that impact the product on the field? It’s easy to say no, that the players are trying to win games and can ignore all the noise surrounding them. But that also discounts the human element, the reality of the tepid atmosphere at the ballpark, the mood of fans and the looming uncertainty over everything.

Sometimes, in the past, the A’s succeeded despite the chaos. Not this season.

Going into this offseason of questions, there is the customary doubt about the ability to retain star players, like infielders Matt Chapman and Matt Olson. Both could be traded, as their salaries are expected to jump in arbitration. Will the team try to resign outfielder Starling Marte? The faithful fans don’t believe so.

Those fans are still stinging from the A’s treatment of former Oakland shortstop Marcus Semien, a team leader and Bay Area native, who was offered a bizarre deferredcompensation one-year contract last offseason. Instead, he signed a one-year contract with Toronto, where he had a spectacular season, setting a record for home runs by a second baseman.

The futures of team executive Billy Beane and manager Bob Melvin are also swinging in the balance. The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal — a reporter who doesn’t just throw stuff against the wall — recently wrote that Mets owner Steven Cohen should go get both, as a package deal to repair his dysfunctional ballclub.

Beane would be reunited with Sandy Alderson, who is expected to remain as president of the Mets. Melvin would have a chance to manage in New York — he was not allowed to interview for the Yankees’ position a few years back. Both men are 59 — too young to retire but too old to stay on a treadmill to nowhere. Beane would have to divest his share of A’s ownership but the trade-off would be working for an owner with a willingness to spend money.

There is annual speculation about when Beane finally will weary of working for the cheapest owner in baseball. It might be now. There’s an endof-the-rope, last-straw feeling about so much surrounding the A’s.

Meanwhile, plans for a stadium — the one that is supposed to solve all the A’s woes, a very big ask — will continue to play out. The city is waiting on the county. The county is waiting on a plan that doesn’t seem so “speculative.” Everyone is still waiting on a final environmental impact report. And a vague hope that the project will be voted on by the end of the year.

This is a hell of a postseason lineup. It’s not the one you wanted, but it’s the one the A’s have created.