Each time the A's seem to hit rock bottom, they find ways to sink further
When Oakland dropped its fourth straight game to the Angels on August 31 to cede control of the American League West race to its biggest rival, the A's surely believed their once-promising season had reached rock bottom.
Little did they know at the time how much worse things could get.
Oakland has lost 11 of its first 16 games in September, a miserable stretch that continued Thursday when the A's were swept at home by the last-place Texas Rangers. Two errors and two wild pitches cost Oakland in game one, a ninth-inning bullpen collapse spoiled game two and the A's hardly seemed to have any fight left by game three.
Whereas Oakland boasted baseball's best record and a four-game lead over the Angels as recently as August 10, the A's have since lost an astonishing 16 games in the standings to their rivals to the south. Now there's no guarantee Oakland will even make the playoffs, let alone win the division, as the A's currently hold just a 1.5-game lead on Seattle for the final Wild Card spot
That the A's could miss the playoffs is staggering considering the heights this team achieved during the first two-thirds of the season.
They won a franchise-record 59 games before the all-star break. They were averaging a league-high five runs per game at the trade deadline. And though they sacrificed some offense in dealing Yoenis Cespedes to the Red Sox, acquiring Jon Lester to pair with Sonny Gray, Scott Kazmir and Jeff Samardzija gave the A's an otherworldly rotation with four starters boasting a sub-3.00 ERA.
It's easy to blame the Cespedes-Lester trade for the subsequent Oakland collapse, but the truth is Lester doesn't deserve the blame. He has actually lowered his ERA from 2.52 to 2.45 since joining the A's, but Gray, Kazmir and the rest of the rotation have hit the skids at the worst possible time.
Given the unexpected struggles of the starting pitching staff, the A's desperately needed their offense to maintain its pre-trade deadline level despite the loss of Cespedes. Alas, that hasn't happened as Oakland has averaged a meager 3.31 runs per game since its high-water mark on August 10.
Also problematic for the A's has been their maddening inability to come through late in close games. They're 6-12 in one-run games in August and September, a stat made worse by the heartbreaking nature of a few of those narrow setbacks.
Perhaps none was more agonizing than Wednesday's loss to Texas that enabled the Angels to spray champagne in their clubhouse a mere five weeks after they trailed Oakland by four games.
First the A's failed to score in the bottom of the eighth inning despite loading the bases with nobody out. Then closer Sean Doolittle imploded, turning a 1-0 ninth-inning lead into a 6-1 defeat.
Moments after that nightmarish ninth inning, Doolittle told reporters he believed the setback would serve as a turning point for the A's one way or the other.
"Are we going to look back and point at tonight and be like, 'This is the game where the wheels came off for good,’" Doolittle said. "Or are we going to be able to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and talk about how resilient we are as a team and how we were able to overcome a game like this and still get it done?
The early returns weren't promising Thursday. Oakland fans booed the home team as Gray surrendered four first-inning runs, the A's never mounted much of a comeback and a season that had so much promise a mere five weeks ago continued to sink to new depths.
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
