Bob Melvin shook his head and let out a raspy sigh behind the
microphone at his Zoom news conference Wednesday. Through the screen, it seemed
to one reporter that Melvin, manager of the Oakland Athletics, was having an
emotional reaction to his team’s 11th consecutive victory.
اضافة اعلان
“It’s not emotional,” Melvin said, smiling. “I don’t have any
voice left.”
Even by the standards of baseball’s most all-or-nothing
franchise, April has been a month to shout about.
The Oakland Athletics (The A’s) lost their first six
games of the season for the first time in more than a century. They won a game,
lost a game and haven’t lost since.
“We didn’t just lose the first six games; we got boat-raced
pretty much every night,” general manager David Forst said in an interview
Thursday, using baseball slang for blowout defeats. “There’s not a lot of rhyme
or reason to it, but it was potentially demoralizing.”
The A’s lost those first six games by a collective score of
50-13, and the streak roused a musty stench from their ancient burial ground.
The last time the A’s had started 0-6, in 1916, they were based in Philadelphia
and went on to finish 36-117, the worst record in American League history.
It is fitting for the A’s to hold that mark. The shorthand story
of their franchise goes like this: five titles in Philadelphia — still more
championships than the Phillies, Eagles, 76ers or Flyers — but also 18
last-place finishes; a move to Kansas City for 13 losing seasons; then a move
to Oakland, California, where they have reached the World Series six times, both
in three-year bursts.
More recently, the A’s have wrapped six playoff appearances
around three last-place seasons. In 2021, they have bombed and boomed, all in
three weeks.
“Luckily, we have a lot of history of not really coming to any
conclusions in the first couple months of the season, let alone the first
couple of weeks,” Forst said, before referring to Billy Beane, the team’s
executive president of baseball operations.
“Billy’s on record, back to the ‘Moneyball’ days, as saying the
first two months are evaluating what you have, and then you have a couple of
months to make changes before the last two months, when you kind of sit back
and watch. That said, we’ve never had anything quite as extreme as these two
weeks.”
The A’s, who led the AL in homers and steals through Wednesday,
will start a seven-game road trip in Baltimore on Friday. They left Oakland on
a high: After shutting out the Twins in both games of a doubleheader Tuesday,
they survived a 13-12 thriller Wednesday by scoring the tying and go-ahead runs
with two outs in the 10th inning on a throwing error by Minnesota third baseman
Luis Arraez.
It was the first time since 2009 that the A’s had won while
allowing 12 runs in a game. But to hear the players tell it, the outcome was
never in doubt.
“It just smells like you’re going to win,” center fielder Ramon
Laureano said.
Go on.
“A win smells like — just like the Bay Area wind, you know? Like
we’re just going to win,” he said. “You just smell it. We joke around all the
time. After we had an hour half-inning, we joke around, and we’re like, ‘Yeah,
we’re pretty loose still.’”
The A’s had reason to be confident even before their long
winning streak. They cleared a stubborn obstacle last fall, advancing in the
postseason for the first time since 2006 by taking a first-round series from
the Chicago White Sox.
They lost a division series to the Houston Astros, three games
to one, but retained a talented core led by Matt Olson and Matt Chapman, the
Gold Glove sluggers at the corner infield spots, and a solid rotation of Sean
Manaea, Chris Bassitt, Frankie Montas, Jesus Luzardo and Mike Fiers.
A newcomer was especially familiar to the A’s: second baseman
Jed Lowrie, who returned for his third stint in Oakland on a minor league
contract that guaranteed him $1.5 million for making the roster. Lowrie, 37,
was an All-Star for the A’s in 2018, then signed a two-year, $20 million
contract with the New York Mets that quickly became notorious.
Lowrie played only nine games for the Mets, all in 2019, and
otherwise struggled with knee problems. He told The Athletic’s Peter Gammons
this month that he had wanted to have surgery but that the Mets would not let
him. Lowrie finally had the operation last October, after his contract expired,
and he is hitting .323 with a .916 on-base plus slugging percentage.
The A’s lost a more expensive gamble in replacing closer Liam
Hendriks, who — like so many stars before him — priced himself out of Oakland.
After Hendriks signed with the White Sox for three years and $54 million, the A’s
gave a one-year, $11 million deal to Trevor Rosenthal, who needed thoracic
outlet surgery in early April.
Yet Lou Trivino has thrived in the late innings, appearing eight
times in the 11-game winning streak with a 1.38 earned run average for the
season. Trivino, 29, had been inconsistent for much of his career, but veteran
reliever Jake Diekman, his daily catch partner, said Trivino had learned to
conserve his energy and get more from his body.
Trivino faltered against the Twins on Wednesday, but the A’s
rallied to win — without a hit, even — because lately that is all they do.
Their smog-and-sunshine path has led them to a 12-7 overall record and a spot
atop the AL West, exactly where they thought they’d be.
“Absolutely,” Forst said. “I wouldn’t have thought we’d get
there the way we have.”
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