I Told You the A's Were a Mirage: Nine Straight Losses, 9-1 to the White Sox, and No Bottom in Sight

Nine in a row now. Nine. A 9-1 beating in Chicago on Sunday, one win in their last ten, a free fall from first place in the West to a team nobody wants to watch. And I'm going to say the thing I've been saying for weeks, because I earned it: this was always coming. Every bit of it.

Let me set the scene, because it deserves to be described in full. The Athletics walked into Chicago and got run out of the building 9-1 on Sunday. That drops them to nine losses in a row. Not five, not six, nine. They're 1-9 over their last ten games, they've tumbled to 41-53, and they've gone from leading the AL West earlier this year to fourth place and falling. Over this ten-game stretch they're hitting .213 as a team with a 7.09 ERA and have been outscored by nearly 40 runs. That isn't a slump. That's a team coming apart at the seams in real time.

And here's the part I'm allowed to enjoy, because I called it. When this team was riding high, when everyone wanted to write the feel-good story about the little franchise that could, I said out loud that it was a mirage. I said the pitching wasn't real, that the record was running ahead of the run differential, and that when the regression came it wouldn't be gentle. People didn't want to hear it. They wanted the fairy tale. Well, the regression is here, it isn't gentle, and it isn't close to finished.

Look at how it's happening. The most damning thing about this stretch is the pitching, exactly where I said it would break. A 7.09 ERA over ten games isn't bad luck. That's a rotation and a bullpen getting hit, hard, night after night, giving up crooked numbers before the offense ever has a chance to breathe. When your staff is putting up touchdown numbers on the scoreboard every night, you aren't losing close games you should have won. You're getting beaten, and you're getting beaten because the talent isn't there to hold it together. I said that in May. I'm saying it again in July, except now the record agrees with me.

The offense isn't bailing anyone out either. A .213 team average during the skid tells you everything. When a lineup goes that cold for that long, it isn't one guy in a funk, it's the whole order going quiet at the same time, and there's no lightning-in-a-bottle bat coming to save a night when the pitching has already dug a five-run hole in the third. The A's have spent this stretch playing from behind, pressing, chasing, and it snowballs. Losing teams lose in exactly this pattern, and I've watched enough baseball to know it when I see it.

They haven't even had the roster to steady the ship, with illness running through the clubhouse and bodies missing on top of everything else. But I'm not going to hand out too many excuses, because the excuses are how a franchise convinces itself this is temporary. It isn't temporary. This is the level. The hot start was the aberration and this is the correction, and when you strip out the early-season luck, this is roughly who the Athletics were always going to be.

So let me be blunt about where I think this goes, because you didn't come here for a hedge. I think they keep losing. I think the schedule doesn't care that they're hurting, I think the pitching doesn't magically fix itself, and I think a team that's 1-9 and playing this badly doesn't flip a switch just because the calendar wants it to. The habits of a losing team are set in now. The body language is set in. When it gets like this, it tends to get worse before it gets better, and I wouldn't bet a nickel on this group snapping out of it any time soon.

I take no joy in the illnesses, and I hope those guys feel better. But the baseball part? The part where I said this was a house of cards and everyone told me to relax? I feel just fine about that. Nine straight, 9-1 in Chicago, 41-53 and sinking. I called it, it's happening, and until something fundamental changes about this roster, the smart money says the losing isn't close to done.

More coverage: A's section · Bay Area MLB · Columns · Bay Area Sports Blog home