The A's Free Fall Never Actually Stopped: 45-63, Fourth Place, and a Trade Deadline That Can't Come Soon Enough
Nine straight losses into the All-Star break was supposed to be the bottom. I said it might get worse before it got better. It got worse. Eighteen games under .500, fourth place, and a trade deadline landing Monday for a team that has nothing left to sell but time.
The bottom that was not the bottom
Back at the All-Star break I wrote that the Athletics staggered into the intermission at 41-55, fourth place, nine games lost in a row, having gone from leading the AL West earlier this year to a team nobody wanted to watch. I said the hot start was a mirage, that the pitching was never as good as the standings pretended, and that I would not bet a nickel on the second half being any kinder than the first. I did not enjoy being right. I have not stopped being right.
Since that nine-game skid ended, the Athletics have gone 4-8. Not a new collapse, not a fresh crisis — just the same one, continuing at a slightly slower pace. They dropped the Diamondbacks series in embarrassing fashion, a 15-run beating on July 22 that left them at 43-59. They beat the Twins 2-0 on the strength of Jacob Lopez and four scoreless relievers to reach 44-59, then blew a chance to build on it the very next day, falling behind 7-0 before Jeffrey Springs left with an apparent injury and a furious Nick Kurtz-led comeback still came up short, 44-60. Ceddanne Rafaela's first career grand slam turned a Jack Perkins near-no-hit bid into a 44-61 loss. Brian Serven's homer held up in a 45-62 win. Andruw Monasterio's tenth-inning shot off Jose Suarez made it 45-63 on Wednesday. Read that sequence again. That is not a team finding itself. That is a team losing in a slightly different order.
The pattern that will not go away
What strikes me most about the last two weeks is how familiar the losses feel. This roster keeps handing away close, winnable baseball games in extra innings — Wednesday's loss to Boston was the second time in nine days this team lost an extra-inning game on one bad swing allowed. When a team keeps calling that coin flip wrong over and over, it stops being bad luck and starts being a description of who they are. I said that after the Twins series. It was just as true after the Red Sox series.
It is not for lack of individual moments worth watching. Nick Kurtz has 21 home runs. Tyler Soderstrom has 17 homers and 22 doubles and can beat you from either side of the plate. Jacob Lopez keeps pitching well enough to win and keeps getting nothing for it — a shutout-caliber start against the Twins was one of the few times all month the run support actually showed up. Jack Perkins carried a one-hit bid into the sixth inning against Boston before it fell apart in a single sequence. None of it has mattered to the record, because none of it has happened often enough, in the same game, at the same time, to add up to anything but 45-63.
Still playing out the string in a borrowed ballpark
And let's not forget the backdrop, because it makes all of this land harder. This is still a franchise playing its home games in a minor-league park in Sacramento, displaced from Oakland, marketed as a plucky story while it searches for a permanent home somewhere else entirely. A hot start in April gave people a reason to look past that for a while. Eighteen games under .500 in late July does not give anybody a reason to look past anything. Bay Area villains, still finding new ways to lose, now doing it in fourth place instead of first.
Monday is coming
The trade deadline arrives Monday, and for a 45-63 team with pending free agents, the honest move has not changed since I wrote it at the break: move whatever has value to a contender and stop pretending this roster is building toward anything in the next three months. Whether this front office, on a franchise that has never exactly opened the checkbook, actually does that is its own question. But there is no version of the schedule left where this team competes for anything, and there has not been one since the nine-game skid that should have been the wake-up call. Instead it was just the first draft of the free fall. We are still reading the same chapter. I would not bet a nickel on that changing before the deadline does its work.
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