Athletics 4, Red Sox 3: Max Muncy Took Aroldis Chapman Off the Monster and the A's Finally Won a Series Again

Down one in the ninth at Fenway, they beat the closer, McNeil got his thousandth hit, and Jacob Wilson set a major league record nobody in the Bay Area will hear about.

The Athletics won a series. An actual series. Two out of three at Fenway Park, finished off on Sunday with a ninth-inning double off the Green Monster against Aroldis Chapman, and it's the first series this franchise has won since the middle of June.

Read that again. Mid-June. And the last one came against Colorado in Las Vegas, at their own Triple-A affiliate's ballpark, which is either a punchline or a business plan depending on how charitable you're feeling about the people who run this team.

Here's how Sunday actually went. They scratched runs in the first and the fourth and had a two-nothing lead in Boston, which for this ballclub is the equivalent of getting up three touchdowns. The Red Sox tied it in the fifth and then went ahead, and every single person who has watched an inning of this season knew exactly how the rest of it was going to go, because that's what the last two months have been. They lost thirteen-one to this same Boston team on Friday. Nine in a row before that. A tailspin that stopped being funny around the middle of July.

And then they didn't fold. Jonah Heim doubles home the tying run with two out in the eighth. Elvis Alvarado gets three outs. And in the ninth, with Chapman on the mound, Chapman, who's still throwing gas at thirty-eight and still terrifying, Max Muncy lines one off the Monster and Oakland, Sacramento, whatever we're calling them, has the lead. Hogan Harris pitches the ninth for his eleventh save. Four to three. Series won.

Two other things happened in that game that deserve better than they're going to get. Jeff McNeil singled in the eighth for the thousandth hit of his career, which is a genuine milestone for a genuinely good hitter who's finishing his career in the strangest circumstance in the sport. And Jacob Wilson played his hundred and eleventh consecutive game at shortstop without an error, which is a major league record for the position, he passed Mike Bordick's hundred and ten from 2002.

A major league record. Set by a young shortstop who plays his home games in a fourteen-thousand-seat minor league yard in West Sacramento in front of nine thousand people, for a franchise that ran away from the seventh-largest market in America. That's what this move actually costs, and it doesn't show up in a relocation press release. Wilson does something no shortstop in the history of baseball has done and there's no home crowd to stand up for it, no radio call anybody around here heard, no bar in Oakland going nuts. He did it in Boston, on a Sunday, in front of thirty-six thousand people who don't care about him.

Forty-seven and seventy-one. That's the record after the win, and it isn't going anywhere good. But this is the part I'm not going to be cynical about, because I grew up in this region and I'm not capable of being fully cynical about green and gold: there are real major league players in that clubhouse. Wilson is a real shortstop. Muncy took a good closer deep into the ninth and beat him. McNeil has a thousand hits. Heim came through with two out. That roster isn't the problem and has never been the problem, and what the Bay Area lost is the whole argument.

The problem is that they're two summers away from a dome on the Las Vegas Strip and every one of these afternoons is happening in a holding pattern. A series win in August in a lost season is supposed to mean something small and warm, your team took two of three in a hard place to play. Instead it's a thing that happened in a city they left, on the way to a city they were never from, in a season being played in a third city entirely.

Take the win anyway. They beat Chapman at Fenway. The dates on the move are in the relocation timeline, the ballpark they're stuck in until 2028 is in Sutter Health Park, who's actually playing is on the depth chart, and the anger lives in Bay Area Villains. The rest is on the A's hub.

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