Celebrate A's fans: Oakland is in the playoffs for the third consecutive year.
But wait.
First, there's that pesky one-game, win-and-your-in AL Wild Card Game to get through. Because of such dire circumstances, the A's will go with their main man Jon Lester. But after that? What will the rotation look like, or what could it look like, rather, with the postseason schedule?
Assuming the A's make it past the wild-card game, they're set up with a powerful rotation.
Check out the ideal rotation and whether or not bullpen roles will change.Begin Slideshow
The Oakland A's are limping into the playoffs, which makes Josh Donaldson the perfect man to carry them.
After tearing through the first half like world-beaters and stockpiling at the trade deadline, Oakland pulled up lame after the All-Star break. The formerly potent offense sputtered. The losses piled up.
As Carl Steward of the San Jose Mercury News put it in a scathing (and perhaps premature) postmortem Sept. 20, "The puzzle pieces that made the A's the best team in baseball the first four months of the season just don't seem to fit very well anymore."
And so Oakland found itself, on the ...
It took every bit of 162 games, but the Oakland Athletics are headed to the MLB playoffs for the third consecutive season.
The former owners of the best record in baseball just a couple of months ago blew their first shot at securing the AL wild-card slot Saturday. Oakland regrouped and took down the Texas Rangers 4-0 Sunday afternoon behind a complete-game shutout from ace Sonny Gray on the mound.
The team celebrated the feat on Twitter:
MLB.com provides the final out of game No. 162:
MLB noted the lengthy journey for Gray and the rest of the roster:
The Athletics entered Sunday losers in ...
My mama always told me, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Well, if you go by that philosophy, there hasn't been much to say about the Oakland A's over the past two months.
But with the A's looking likely to fall backwards into the postseason, fans are looking for something, anything, good to say about this team. "All you need to do is get in, then anything can happen," they say, halfheartedly. Because, while that's ostensibly true, there's not a whole lot of evidence in front of us for anyone to truly believe that.
Nonetheless, I'm nothing ...
The Oakland A's could look a bit different in 2015, dependent on how the postseason plays out.
If the team doesn't make the playoffs at all, general manager Billy Beane could put everyone in cleats on the trade block. If they win the World Series, Beane may feel that after capturing that elusive ring, one in Oakland is good enough and recommit to the farm system.
If, however, the team barely falls short of a World Series win, management could keep the roster intact. With Beane at the helm, you just never know.
Let's be realistic and go somewhere in the middle.
The A's ...
It's been a while since anyone was afraid of the Oakland A's.
After boasting baseball's highest-scoring offense and the game's best record for much of the first half, the A's have plunged into a vertigo-inducing free fall. They're 26-34 since the All-Star break and 19-29 since they traded slugger Yoenis Cespedes to the Boston Red Sox for ace Jon Lester.
The point of the Lester deal was to bolster the rotation for a deep playoff run. Now, Oakland is scrambling desperately just to get to October.
"The production across the board from everybody was much better in the first four months or so ...
Every team, at some point, imagines its ultimate nightmare scenario. The very worst of worst-case contingencies.
The Oakland Athletics are way beyond that.
Oakland spent much of the season as the prohibitive front-runners in the American League and went nuts at the trade deadline, dealing for top-line starters Jeff Samardzija and Jon Lester.
The small-market club that made its reputation from doing less with more was finally going all in.
Then, it all fell apart.
A gut-punching 7-2 loss to the woeful Texas Rangers on Thursday (capping a shocking sweep at home) bumped the A's to 83-69, half a game behind the Kansas City Royals for the first ...
As the Oakland A's big league team fights for its postseason life, the organization's minor league squads did well this year.
The Sacramento River Cats (Triple-A) came within one win of returning to playoffs. The Stockton Ports (Single-A) were swept in the first round of their postseason but finished 85-55, the best record in the league. The Midland RockHounds earned the ultimate bragging rights when they became 2014 Texas League champions.
No team could have done it with only a superstar or two.
Though Addison Russell and Billy McKinney—formerly the organization's top two prospects—are no longer here, the A's still certainly have dominant ...
After emerging as the best team in baseball over the first half, the Oakland Athletics have been free-falling throughout August and September. While much of the blame can be attributed to the A's suddenly feeble offense, Oakland's normally reliable bullpen faltered with closer Sean Doolittle on the disabled list, costing the team a few wins in the process.
Doolittle landed on the DL on August 24 with a right intercostal strain and was reinstated on September 12. During that time, the A's went 5-13 and slid out of the American League West race as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim finished ...
Okay, hear me out.
Since the A's signed Yoenis Cespedes in 2012, the team was 228-131 with him in the starting lineup and 43-69 without him in the lineup, including their 15-25 record since the trade.
That's a .635 winning percentage with him vs. .384 without him. Those are, quite simply, staggering numbers. The kind of numbers that suggest that Cespedes had much more of an impact on this team than a player with a career on-base percentage of just .317.
Yes, his arm was a thing of legend. But it's not like he was sterling in the outfield. His fielding percentage and range ...