The Oakland Athletics have fought tooth and nail into the top American League wild-card spot with a month remaining in regular season play, sitting 14 games above .500 for the first time since 2006.
Bob Melvin and the A’s got back on track from an early season derailment after a nine-game losing skid that left the Athletics clubhouse in post-game silence all too often.
The Cinderella story that is the 2012 Athletics’ season has left its mark in the storybooks. The A’s lead the league with 13 walk-off victories, are amongst the MLB’s lowest team ERA’s, and are doing so at a fraction ...
For a team that had little to no expectations, the Oakland Athletics have provided many shocking moments and feats in 2012. At the halfway point, the surprises continued to throw many into disbelief. Now as the season comes to a close, the perplexity of how this team continues to keep themselves in the headlines has switched from confusing to astounding. Here are the 10 biggest surprises of the Oakland A's 2012 season.Begin Slideshow
The Oakland Athletics had "serious interest" in Randy Wolf before he agreed to sign with the Baltimore Orioles, according to Roch Kubatko of MASN Sports. Even though they missed out on Wolf, another veteran pitcher just entered the market and could be an interesting option. According to Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, the Milwaukee Brewers have placed Shaun Marcum on waivers. Throughout his entire career, Marcum has put up solid numbers. He is not what I would call overwhelming, but with a career 55-37 record and 3.71 career ERA, you know that he must be doing something right. The problem ...
I do not want to write this without omitting the contribution Bartolo Colon made to the 2012 Oakland A's. Whether he was clean or dirty throughout the year, no one knows, and frankly, I do not care.His 10 wins were tops on the team before Major League Baseball suspended him for the remainder of the 2012 regular season (50 games total). But that said, Colon was the most consistent pitcher on the A's staff until last Wednesday.Sadly, we can only speculate as to how much of that was due to performance enhancing drugs. There is no doubt, however, that his ...
When Bartolo Colon tested positive for using (according to the Associated Press) testosterone, he was suspended for 50 games. Seeing that the suspension began on August 22, it effectively ended his season, if not his career.Colon was having his most effective season since winning the 2005 Cy Young Award and was a huge boost for the Athletics' rotation. Losing him may have been a fatal blow for the young, overachieving Oakland squad.Instead, they have won four of the first five games since the suspension and remain in place for one of the two Wild Card spots. Two of the wins ...
The Oakland Athletics have been among American League postseason conversations since their breakout 19-5 July that caught the attention of baseball critics everywhere—not to mention stimulating the whipped cream industry in the East Bay Area by coining the temporary slogan, "Come for the game, stay for the pie."A's fever started to spread following the four-game sweep of the highly-favored New York Yankees in mid-July, putting an exclamation point on their surprising midsummer upheaval that catapulted them into American League wild-card contention.Some called it a fluke. Others called it luck.The A's called it "The Bernie."Originating from the film Weekend At Bernie's, the unorthodox celebration came in the form ...
Oakland's Tyson Ross took a trip to St. Petersburg to get the unexpected start against Tampa Bay, replacing the suspended Bartolo Colon. His trip to Florida was one to forget, as he surrendered five earned runs in six innings, taking the 5-0 loss. Ross’ career with the A’s has been lackluster to say the least. His 2-9 overall record this season speaks for itself, and his tires can attest to the many miles driven to and from Sacramento throughout his career with Oakland.The A’s sent Ross back down to Triple-A—only this time he will take on the role of relief ...
The Oakland Athletics watched their starting ace prematurely empty his locker at the hands of the joint drug program earlier this week for the illegal use of testosterone just two days shy of his scheduled start against the scolding-hot Tampa Bay Rays. Bartolo Colon’s untimely 50-game suspension for PED use rattled Bob Melvin’s fragile dynamic that has managed to land the Athletics a surprising potential postseason appearance for the first time since 2006. It would be easy to condemn the Athletics’ playoff run amid Colon’s departure—but the resilient 2012 A’s don’t take kindly to being written off. Please refer to ...
For the first time in the history of the sport, the wild-card team in each league will now be decided by a single-game playoff between the two best teams among non-division winners in the standings. That puts a huge amount of importance on pitching, especially the starting pitcher.A team may be lacking offensively, but one great start by an ace and suddenly they're only looking for one or two runs to send them to the postseason. It's an exciting new approach to the wild-card race, but it's one that can be fortuitous or deadly depending on your standing and who ...
As the MLB season gets ready to head into the home stretch, teams look at this point of the year as a chance to see some of the younger players from the minor leagues get some big-league experience. It works well for the team, which does not lose time on a player's arbitration clock, and for the players themselves, who have an opportunity to impress or stick around into the following season.For the A's, the September call-ups may turn out to be largely ceremonial in the midst of a full-fledged playoff chase. This is even more of a possibility after ...