Oakland Athletics: Another Wild Card loss reveals the cruelty of baseball

The Oakland Athletics fell to the Tampa Bay Rays 5-1 and have been officially eliminated from the 2019 Postseason. But the disappointment isn’t anything new for longtime A’s fans.

Baseball is cruel. It’s easy for fans of the Oakland Athletics to feel that way after a muted 5-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays — the second consecutive year where the postseason quest was ended early in a do-or-die, single-elimination game.

The A’s were able to scatter seven hits across nine innings but were never able to do much more than that. They didn’t have a single extra-base hit for the game and only scored on a three-bag error and a sacrifice fly.

This was a hollow loss for the team, who played in front of a record-setting crowd of 54,005. The fans did their best to stay engaged in a game where the A’s weren’t even able to muster hard contact against Charlie Morton.

It isn’t hard to see the ugliness of baseball in losses like these, with everything on the line.

The cruelty can be seen in putting together a second consecutive 97-win season only to be handed a second consecutive exit in the Wild Card Round.

The Oakland Athletics haven’t won a winner-take-all game in the playoffs since 1972. They’ve lost eight consecutive games of that kind, the longest streak in MLB history. It’s exhausting for fans — understandably so.

Every year, as the season comes into its final stretch of games, a sense of magic seems to mount for each team. It begins to feel like this year is different, that there’s something different about this chance compared to every other.

It’s been half a decade now since the Oakland Athletics headed into Kansas City to face the Royals at Kaufman Stadium.

It was Oakland’s first taste of a revamped Wild Card system that allowed two teams to meet in a winner-take-all, single-elimination game.

The A’s, at that time, felt the kind of magic that every playoff-caliber season inspires. They put together an incredible first half. They acquired three all-star level pitchers to bolster their rotation.

The adversity that we saw the A’s go through at the tail-end of this season with runners in scoring position couldn’t hold a candle to the drought felt in 2014.

The Oakland Athletics were scuffling, allowing the Los Angeles Angels to overtake them for the AL West lead. Yoenis Cespedes was playing with the Boston Red Sox as a result of a huge gamble to land postseason specialist Jon Lester. The middle of the lineup couldn’t seem to get anything going.

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The A’s limped their way to the postseason — largely due to the unsuspecting contributions of Adam Dunn in a final hurrah for his career. They narrowly got past the Seattle Mariners to make the playoffs by a one-game margin.

These are the beautiful moments of baseball.

Despite the season falling apart in the latter half, despite watching the A’s plummet from one of the best teams in baseball this century to a team that leaned on the contributions of a slugger that could round the bases at the approximate speed of a new stadium being constructed in Oakland, the A’s were in the dance.

There’s been much ado about whether or not the one-game playoff in the Wild Card Round has been a resounding success or a colossal failure for baseball.

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On one hand, it makes sense from the perspective of an industry that is about manufacturing as much tension and drama as possible. Nothing feels more dire than putting everything on the line for a single game.

On the other, every single one of those 162 games played beforehand is pushed to the wayside; fans are left to evaluate teams based on nine innings and nothing else.

Managers can be lauded as geniuses or crucified as pariahs for their decision-making. Players can become eternal legends or be pinned with irreversible hatred because of their shortcomings.

It doesn’t matter what happens in all those games before. What matters is that single game.

Take Bill Buckner for example. The name, to most modern baseball fans, calls to mind a single play at Buckner’s lowest point — a ground ball slowly hit down the first-base line, slipping between his legs and into right field, costing the Boston Red Sox Game 6 of the World Series.

The New York Mets would go on to win Game 7. The supposed ‘Curse of the Bambino’ would live on.

Buckner was an All-Star in his career. He was a batting champion. But because of this single moment in the postseason, he received death threats.

Baseball is cruel.

No amount of analytics will be able to properly predict exactly who will thrive in these situations. No one would have guessed that Robbie Grossman or Jurickson Profar would lead the Oakland A’s in hits last night.

The coaching staff can attempt to plan all they want, layout a pristine lineup, and pair it with six innings of Sean Manaea shutout baseball, two innings of relief for star prospect Jesus Luzardo, and a save opportunity for all-star Liam Hendriks.

But baseball will never be that simple.

Things go perfectly well until they stop going perfectly well. The plan to lean on an opener last season as opposed to a traditional starter led to a quick offensive outburst in the Bronx. The only stable plan for a manager in baseball is to always be prepared for Plan B.

For the Oakland Athletics last night, Plan B was to pull the plug on Manaea early. Despite five strikeouts and some filthiness with his breaking ball, his ability to command his low-90’s fastball was a serious issue.

Yandy Diaz transformed himself into playoff hero last night, launching two home runs into the right field deck on almost identical swings. Both came on fastballs left up and away.

You can sense poetry within baseball in these moments where something has to give. You could feel it when Manaea stood on the mound to face Diaz as the first batter of the game.

Analytics will never be able to quantify just how much pressure goes into these moments — how these athletes can respond to pressure situations. Sean Manaea had the expectations of nearly 55,000 fans placed squarely on his shoulders as he slung his pitches into the zone.

Perhaps the poetry comes with this pressure.

Or perhaps the beauty comes in whoever can face up to that pressure and deliver. Before the game, when asked how he felt about the prospect of playing in front of 50,000 raucous A’s fans, Yandy Diaz playfully quipped, “There was people with guns when I played in Cuba.”

The leadoff home run by Diaz was a similar gut-punch to the two-run jack by Aaron Judge the year before.

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Liam Hendriks, who just a year ago was on the brink of not even being included on the 40-man roster, got the nod to start the game and employ a strategy that had baseball forefathers rolling in their graves.

Judge, meanwhile, was topping off a breakout rookie season where he hit a record-setting 52 home runs. Lost in all of the Yankees hype was the fact that Judge is from Linden, California and was actually drafted by the A’s years before he made it into the Yankees minor league system.

There’s poetry somewhere in this, too, but it’s draped by irrefutable disappointment.

A’s fans have had to read between the lines of a box score to find some kind of this beauty and poetry.

In 2014, despite backing into a single-game playoff with the expectation that the only path to victory was to be held up on the back of a former playoff giant in Jon Lester, the offense suddenly broke out.

A switch was flipped. Brandon Moss, who was hitting just over .100 in the final months of the season, hit two home runs, the second of which prompted a five-run sixth inning for the A’s where they took a 7-3 lead.

If it had stopped there, the Oakland faithful would have bathed in the beauty of the game. But it didn’t. The Royals fought back to creep within a run heading into the ninth, then tying it up to push the game into extras.

The beauty didn’t cease. The A’s made it to the 12th inning and sent Alberto Callaspo to the plate — surely not who you would have penciled in as a playoff hero. He was able to drive Josh Reddick home to take the lead again.

But 2014 taught us an important — and painful — lesson about the game of baseball. Every team in the dance is working with some amount of that magic. The magic that pushed Moss out of a slump. The poetry that led Diaz to rise in the face of relative pressure.

Oakland Athletics fans have been forced to watch the same movie each year with the hope that the ending would change. But it hasn’t. It’s crescendoed our hopes. It’s made us believe. But it hasn’t panned out yet.

With each year of shortcomings in the playoffs, it’s subdued any celebration of the fact that the A’s have accomplished what they’ve accomplished in spite of everything else.

In spite of a tug of war with the City of Oakland to construct a new stadium. In spite of an ownership group that has continued tabling “going for it” in the hopes of timing it with a new venue.

Somehow, someway, the A’s have refused to roll over on their backs and submit to multiple seasons of 100+ losses. They’ve refused to be awful like so many other franchises have.

The beauty has been hidden in games like the one last night, where the Oakland Athletics went quietly in a season where they did anything but that.

But there’s hope that comes from such a loss.

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Baseball is only so cruel because of these moments in time where things get away. I think back to the baseball that just snuck by the outstretched glove of Josh Donaldson in the bottom of the 12th.

I think about the ball that just missed nicking Jurickson Profar’s uniform with the bases loaded in the first inning.

A’s fans have been forced to accept resiliency in these moments.

The beauty can only be seen from the other side of the field — in the celebrations of the Tampa Bay Rays, in the storybook run by the Kansas City Royals in 2014, and so on.

But the heartbreak felt by so many Oakland A’s fans — the suffering that seems to mount each and every year — isn’t for nothing at all. Baseball is cruel. Its legends are based in playoff droughts. There are curses. There is endless, unfair, unrelenting heartbreak.

But it always sets up for an eventual payoff that makes it all seem worth it.

We must remember that baseball is a game that demands patience in every aspect — we watch intently for three hours on 162 different nights in the hope that everything culminates in victory.

Playoff glory works the same way.

Hendriks’ abysmal showing in the Wild Card Game of 2018 motivated him to become the lights out, record-setting closer that served as a blessing for this season’s bullpen. We can only hope the same comes for Manaea, who surely is taking the loss hard.

These losses have merit. They shape young rosters who are looking for reasons to take their game to the next level.

The team may have come up short this season, but it can only empower them going into next season. It will inspire them to avoid the cruelty of the all-or-nothing, one-game playoff. It will make them refuse to be remembered for falling just short of their ultimate goal.

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Baseball can be beautiful. But until it is, it’s cruel. It’s cold. It’s heartbreaking.

And it leaves us with no choice but to feign faint optimism in saying, “next season.”

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