‘Was hard on everybody’: In oddest year, A’s hope journey is just starting
If smoke from the latest North Bay fires smothers the Oakland Coliseum on Tuesday at noon, as the Athletics open postseason play, it will be sadly fitting.
Because why should the opening game of a best twoofthree series against the Chicago White Sox feel normal when nothing else in 2020 does?
Global pandemic, choking air quality, racial justice protests, stops, starts, swabs, masks, doubleheaders, quarantines and 60 quick games have brought the A’s into the playoffs, in perhaps the strangest season ever recorded.
“Hard” is how A’s manager Bob Melvin described it Monday. “Really hard.
“You hear guys talking about that more now. Early on, they knew what they signed up for and that there would be obstacles along the way. But now you are starting to hear what it took to finish, and it was really hard. Whether it was the travel, the protocol, the game times, the air quality, the doubleheaders. It was hard on everybody.”
And it’s still hard. It wouldn’t be A’s baseball without some disrespect, which is what Major League Baseball showed Oakland with its scheduling.
Despite being the No. 2 seed in the American League and the only AL playoff team on the West Coast, the A’s got zero primetime love. Instead of getting an afternoon or evening slot (like the one the Dodgers will occupy Wednesday), the A’s have backtoback noon games.
That means they have to get to the ballpark by 6:30 a.m. to take coronavirus tests. They have to take batting practice at 9 a.m., something they wouldn’t even do during spring training. The visiting White Sox will hit later than the A’s.
The wildcard round, a configuration that feels a bit like a trap, offers little advantage to higher seeds save for the comfort of being in their (empty) home ballparks. The schedule MLB constructed ensures the A’s received no extra reward for winning the West.
“We continue to get hurdles,” Melvin said. “Guys are good about understanding and never expecting things to come easy. … But there are a lot of obstacles.”
The A’s are accustomed to being overlooked and slighted. Shortstop Marcus Semien is making the best of the scheduling, saying he’d rather play at noon than at 5 p.m., when there are difficult shadows.
But the whole exercise feels strange. After weeks of acrimonious negotiations in the spring, Commissioner Rob Manfred imposed a 60game season, a bastardized vehicle to transport his sport to this point. To the playoffs and the television revenue the postseason brings.
Baseball is a game of rhythm, but there was very little cadence to this choppy, twisted season.
“You’re like, ‘Wow, they made the playoffs?’ ” Semien said of some of the 16 teams that made the postseason.
He noted that the talented White Sox finished only a game behind the A’s, yet fell to the seventh seed.
“It’s a weird setup,” Semien said. “A lot of teams feel like they’re just getting going. Sixty games is not even half the season.”
There’s some relief that baseball made it this far, into the playoffs, despite all the obstacles. But there’s no surprise that the A’s are among the teams still playing.
“I don’t think there was any doubt that this team would make the playoffs,” said catcher Sean Murphy. “This is expected. This is where we want to start, not end.”
The A’s would like to end in Arlington, Texas, in the World Series bubble. They hope to be traveling next weekend to Los Angeles, where they would relocate their current bubble (they’ve been living in a hotel for a week) to Dodger Stadium for the ALDS.
But first the A’s have to get through the series against the White Sox. This is the A’s third straight trip to the playoffs, though in each of the previous two years their stay was short, abruptly losing the onegame wild card both times. In 2018, it was in front of a crowd of almost 50,000 at Yankee Stadium. Last year, it was in front of 54,000 rabid fans at the Coliseum.
Tuesday, their playoffs will open in front of empty stands and some cardboard cutouts against a team they haven’t faced since August 2019.
“Even though there’s no crowd, I feel this is a tough place for an opponent to come into,” Semien said. “We’ll try to use that to our advantage.”
The pressure to be perfect that the A’s faced in those oneanddone outings won’t be there. But neither will the intensity that comes from having a packed house.
“It’s going to be so different without fans,” Semien said. “The playoffs are sold out and there’s that added pressure. It’s going to be different . ... We’ll need to wake up with some energy.”
The A’s will have to be up early. Get swabbed. Take BP when they would normally be drinking coffee. Manufacture their own energy in an empty stadium. Get through more obstacles. Perhaps battle with burning eyes and lungs.
Because it’s the 2020 postseason. Of course it was never going to be easy.