Weird baseball season’s sad end
The strangest baseball season in history ended in depressingly familiar fashion for the Oakland A’s.
Even a pandemic couldn’t derail the A’s customary result: postseason heartbreak.
“Our goals were lofty,” said manager Bob Melvin, “and we fell short.”
In an empty Dodger Stadium, the A’s were eliminated Thursday afternoon by the despised Houston Astros, 116. The A’s couldn’t do what baseball fans across America yearned for: send the cheating Astros packing. Instead Houston, benefiting from Commissioner Rob Manfred’s expanded playoff structure, advances to the American League Championship Series — one
“Our goals were lofty, and we fell short.” Bob Melvin, A’s manager, after his team was eliminated in the playoffs
step short of the World Series.
The lone positive note in that development: old friend Dusty Baker, the Astros’ manager, is one step closer to his elusive title.
The A’s had been eager to face the Astros, a team they played well against during the season and one they felt had robbed them of division titles and a chance at a World Series in past seasons by using a signstealing system that Major League Baseball deemed illegal. What they learned was that, even without trash can lids — which the Astros banged to signal pitches to their hitters — Houston is a talented and frightening postseason opponent.
“They wanted us, they got us,” tweeted Astros catcher Martin Maldanado after the game.
While Houston moves on to play in San Diego, the A’s go home after a strange and disjointed year.
In a regular season reduced from 162 to 60 games, the A’s campaign stopped and started and stopped, because of social justice demonstrations and a positive coronavirus test. They lost their best player to injury when third baseman Matt Chapman went down in early September. The odds, stacked against everyone in 2020, swayed even further against Oakland.
The A’s have not made an ALCS since 2006 and have not appeared in the World Series in 30 seasons. Though they got further this year — winning a postseason series for the first time in 14 seasons — their season fell short of their own expectations.
“Our goal was to win the World Series,” said A’s shortstop Marcus Semien, a potential free agent who acknowledged that he wondered toward the end of the game if those were his final moments in a greenandgold uniform. “So, you lose in the ALDS, it’s not exactly where you want to be.”
In their fourth doordie game of this postseason, the A’s capitulated. They let a 30 lead vanish during a rough fourth inning when 10 Astros came to bat, chasing starter Frankie Montas but not before they had scored five runs off him. The A’s could never regain the lead.
Whatever magic the A’s had summoned on Wednesday afternoon couldn’t be sustained. In that elimination game, center fielder Ramón Laureano delivered a Hunter Pencelike exhortation in the dugout. Laureano, as Pence did in 2012 when the Giants were in a 20 hole against a Bakermanaged Cincinnati Reds team, told his team he wasn’t ready to go home. And the A’s responded.
Laureano did his part Thursday, hitting a threerun home run in the second and a solo shot in the fifth, but the rest of his team couldn’t keep the momentum going. There would be no “Reverend” Laureano legend in the making.
Though the A’s showed more life in their bats in the postseason than they had during most of the regular season, their pitching let them down. Chris Bassitt, against the White Sox in Oakland’s bestofthree firstround series, was the only starter who got past the fifth inning: he pitched seven innings. The A’s vaunted bullpen let them down.
Now, we wait to see what happens. After past postseason heartbreaks the A’s under executive Billy Beane have done some drastic things: getting rid of manager Art Howe in 2002, firing manager Ken Macha after an ALCS appearance in 2006, blowing up much of the roster after the 2014 wildcard loss.
The A’s are at a crossroads economically, a “small market” team that has been hit hard. Their proposed ballpark at Howard Terminal remains a hypothetical mystery. Their owner, cheap during the best of times, will likely be even more frugal. Will they be in a position to resign Semien? Will the remarkably stable front office show cracks?
Melvin recently called the ( ir) regular season “hard, really hard.” The year has been hard and it never got any easier.
“It hurts,” said A’s outfielder Mark Canha. “It hurts a lot.”