There was a time not that long ago when the West Sacramento Athletics were positioning themselves to replace The Hunny Club as the pride of Yolo County, which would have been a true festival of inner conflict for the region. By "not that long ago," we mean May 5.
Since then, the A’s have clarified their position. And by "clarified their position," we mean "challenged the Colorado Rockies for the title of worst baseball team on earth." The A’s are back in their customary spot as a readily visible example of an organization loathing everything it inadvertently represents, and The Hunny Club has solidified its hold on Yolo’s hearts, if only because of the acronym.
It would make sense if you had forgotten that glorious day four Mondays back. It was notable only because the A’s were 20-16, then, just a game behind the division-leading Seattle Mariners and the first American League wild card team, and with a mere 20 weeks and 126 games left to play. Since then they have not so much experienced a reversal of fortune as simply ceased to be. They have lost 18 of the next 21 games, which is barely a half-game better than the hopelessly beshitted Colorado Rockies over that same stretch. The A’s last attempt at glory came on Thursday night, and was a 12-0 loss at Toronto.
But at least there is no more ambiguity surrounding them, and no more sense that they might have somehow secretly figured things out. The Athletics are, as we suspected and not-so-secretly wished, a bad team playing in a bad park, working for a bad owner who has put them in a situation so bad that not even 110 wins could save it. (We have no problems with the baseball people at all.)
Such is the mudslide of this team that feeling bad about the players' performance these last three-and-a-half weeks is the only way to maintain one's humanity in the face of everything else. At 20-16, one could tackle the complicated math of liking the players while hating the organization; they were sassy down the stretch last season, there are some good young players on the roster, and that mix was augmented by some of the biggest free agent signings the team has ever made, a statement that is both factually true and effectively meaningless. But at 23-34 with a minus-three-digit run differential, all that complication is gone. They’re the A’s again, and John Fisher is once again getting what he deserves.
That is presuming that Fisher cares one way or another about the baseball team, although the evidence clearly suggests otherwise and has for years. His problem now is that he has deliberately denigrated the brand to a point where it cannot be resurrected. He had to sell six percent of his team to the concessions company Aramark in an ongoing attempt to float his share of the money for a Vegas ballpark only a few people believe will happen and fewer still want. Until then, the Athletics are stuck couch-surfing in a janky Triple-A ballpark that the players and coaches seem to hate.
That they are in West Sacramento at all is the result of an ongoing tragicomedy of blundering that separates Fisher from nearly every other owner in North American professional sports. Some of last year’s breakout players have taken big steps back this year, but the ball team still has some intriguing components, including shortstop Jacob Wilson, who owns a .348/.391/.505 slash line, a 150 adjusted OPS, and one of the league’s more bizarre plate approaches. Still, they were never quite as good as their record suggested; even on May 5 their record based on run differential alone would have been 15-19.
Since then, they’ve made it clear what kind of team they are. The A’s have given up more runs than the Rockies in that time, and are allowing nearly seven runs per game; last night, they managed to give up that many to Toronto in just an inning and two thirds. The upside: they were on the road, where they are merely a middling team in a league owned by Detroit and Aaron Judge, not necessarily in that order. At home, without the accoutrements of major league baseball—last week, manager Mark Kotsay had to take a long skulk all the way down the third-base line after being ejected, because the West Sacramento clubhouse is in the outfield and not behind the dugout—the A’s are 9-19. They probably wish they could join that league the Harlem Globetrotters run where the Washington Generals are always the road team.
Becoming the American League comp for the Rockies is galling by any measure, but also out of reach. To truly challenge them by, say, the All-Star Break, the A's would have to lose eight games they have already won, provided the Rockies maintained their current rate of success. If the Rockies finish the season with their current win percentage of .161, the A's would have to go 3-102 to match them. In short, and we're being generous beyond our character here, not even Fisher could do ownership stuff at an .002 rate. I mean, we can’t rule it out—he meant to ruin his baseball team in one town, and is well on his way to ruining it in a second, and those are wins by his personal metrics. But we can probably rule it out.
Still, these past 25 days have helped the rest of us coalesce our feelings about the team and its operator. Their losses hit differently because the players have encouraged none of this mockery; some may eventually turn out to be good enough to eventually escape to the major leagues. But as long as they stay, they seem pretty well doomed. In that way, they have become a mood ring for the man who pays them, which is its own hell, experienced nine innings at a time.
