The A's Got Swept Four Straight in Kansas City, Have Now Lost Seventeen of Twenty One, and Sit at Forty Nine and Seventy Nine

Bobby Witt Jr. homered four hundred and two feet in the first inning and scored three times. Gage Jump gave up five in four. Eleven thousand people watched it. This is what the last six weeks look like.

Four games in Kansas City. Four losses. The first one they gave back in the ninth, the second one they gave back in the eighth, and by Thursday afternoon there was nothing left to give back, so they just lost it in the first inning like a team that has run out of ways to make it interesting. Six to two. Eleven thousand eight hundred and sixty seven people in the building. Seventeen losses in twenty one games.

Bobby Witt Jr. again. Four hundred and two feet to left center in the first inning, and by the end of the afternoon he had scored three of the six. He walked off the A's on Tuesday. He beat them on Thursday. There's a version of this franchise where a player like that comes up through the system and stays, and every person reading this can name the last three times that didn't happen here.

Gage Jump couldn't get out of the fifth. Four innings, eight hits, five runs, three walks, three strikeouts, and the loss that drops him to five and eight. Salvador Perez and Michael Massey had three hits each. Twelve hits for Kansas City and exactly one of them left the yard, which is the tell: this wasn't a team getting beaten up, it was a team getting picked apart single by single.

Here's the genuinely infuriating part. They had Dobnak on the ropes for four innings and couldn't touch him. Six hits and four walks off a starter who gave up zero runs. Ten men left on base. When Kansas City finally went to the bullpen and Duran walked three men in a third of an inning, the A's got two, and then Thomas came in and put out the fire for his first big league win. Ten stranded isn't bad luck twice. It's a lineup that can't land a punch.

Who actually hit. Lawrence Butler was two for three and looked like the hitter he was in the first half. Carlos Cortes had two. Serven and Walton drove in the two runs. Zack Gelof went hitless in four, Jeff McNeil hitless in five, and if you want the shape of this stretch in one line, it's two men in the middle of the order walking back to the dugout nine times between them.

The sweep in context. Kansas City hadn't swept a four game series all season. They've now won five straight. This is a fifty five and seventy four team, and they treated the A's the way good teams treat a club that has quit, which is worth saying plainly because that's what the last three weeks look like from outside: the ninth inning on Tuesday on Tuesday, the seven run eighth on Wednesday on Wednesday, this on Thursday.

Forty nine and seventy nine. Seventeen losses in twenty one games. Thirty four to play. There's no mathematical anything left to discuss and there hasn't been since roughly the fourth of July. What there is, still, is a major league team playing home games in a fourteen thousand seat minor league park in West Sacramento, which we laid out in full at Sutter Health Park, while a dome goes up on the Las Vegas Strip on the schedule set out in the Las Vegas timeline.

And no, this doesn't get easier to watch. The players didn't do this. Butler didn't do this, Gelof didn't do this, and the young lefty who gave up five in four innings on Thursday certainly didn't. But the thing that happens to a roster with no reason to be anywhere in particular is exactly what has happened here since the middle of July, and if you want the full argument on whose fault that is, Bay Area Villains hasn't aged a day.

For what it's worth, the Giants lost as well, five to two in Cleveland, though they at least took the series. the Giants has that one. It was another bad Thursday for baseball around here, or wherever it's this team is supposed to belong now. The rest is on the A's hub.

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