To be an Oakland Athletics fan these days is to believe, against all evidence, that there is some sort of justice in the universe. Thinking the A's can win it all is believing that the little guy with a good idea can slay the giant of money and power with a carefully placed shot between the eyes. Most of all, being an A's fan means having a fragile faith in the underdog – and having that faith rudely ground into dust every year, usually by the New York Yankees.
This year, of course, the Red Sox – a team whose stadium is populated by the ghosts of playoff failures past, most of whom wear Bill Buckner jerseys – got into the act. And last year it was the Twins who did the honors, running from their own demon of "contraction" all the way to the garbage-bag lined outfield wall of the Metrodome. But each of the last four seasons, the A's have managed to find sour defeat in the division series. And each year they break the hearts of Oakland fans a little bit further.
First, some perspective: The A's rank 26 out of the 30 major league teams with a mid-season payroll of $57 million this year, nearly $12 million of which went to one player, Jermaine Dye, who was injured half the season and batted a wretched .172 when he was healthy. The Yankees shelled out over $180 million, the most in the league, plus $10 million in "luxury tax" for the luxury of their free-spending ways. The Red Sox spent about $105 million, including $15.5 million on ace pitcher Pedro Martinez.
The A's compete for fans with the Giants (2003 payroll: $100 million), a team with a strong yuppie fan base that routinely Pacific Bell Park to watch Barry Bonds ($15.5 million) launch opposing pitching over the left-field wall and into the bay. The Giants play in a beautiful baseball-only stadium which merited its own New Yorker profile and illustration (Roger Angell called it "the best address in baseball"); the A's play in a cavernous Space Age football/baseball arena complete with everything but astroturf. From home plate in San Francisco, you can see the bay and the Berkeley hills; home plate at Oakland faces "Mt. Davis," a concrete wall of football seats that the Raiders conned the city of Oakland into building for them. Upper-deck seats in San Francisco go for $18 and up; the same seats in Oakland are $8 except on Wednesdays, when they're $2 (and you can buy a hot dog for a buck).
And yet, even with the handicaps of a small payroll and a losing battle for fans with the Giants, the A's have been successful, reaching the playoffs each of the last four years. They've been so successful with so little money that Michael Lewis, whose material for books about sexy high-flying tech companies headed south along with the stock market, wrote one about the A's instead, titled Moneyball. The upshot: The A's general manager, Billy Beane, realized that other teams evaluated player talent vs. price in a generally stupid way, made trades for players that robbed other teams blind, had his team play by the numbers instead of by conventional wisdom (examples: no sacrifice bunting and no stealing), and then bragged about it to Michael Lewis.
Meanwhile, before the 2003 season had even begun, A's owner/Scrooge Steve Schott announced that the team wouldn't have the cash to keep shortstop and 2002 MVP Miguel Tejada after this year. This is the great sadness of the A's: they mint MVP's playing out the cheap contracts they signed as minor-leaguers (Tejada, Jason Giambi), then watch them depart Oakland for teams who can afford them. Thankfully, unless the fickle Red Sox dump Nomar Garciaparra, we'll be spared the indignity of yet another former star playing for the team that beat the A's in the playoffs the year before.
The A's season began poorly. Tejada, obviously tired from lying awake at night wondering if Beane would kill him in his sleep rather than allow him to beat the A's next year, played atrociously in the first half of the season. Dye tore his knee up in April, had surgery, came back, then dislocated his shoulder in early July and didn't play regularly until the very end of the year. And rumor had it that several teams wouldn't talk to Beane about mid-season trades thanks to Lewis' book making them all look like fools.
In spite of it all, their pitching kept them in it, and at the all-star break, the A's were four games behind Seattle in the West division, and one game behind Boston for the wild card. Beane even managed to get Jose Guillen (who was batting .327 at the time) from the Cincinnati Reds.
Guillen promptly fell back to earth in Oakland, hitting just .265 with the A's, but the A's surged in the second half, catching and passing Seattle for the AL West championship, but there were storm clouds on the horizon. The freak injuries began: Guillen had to serve a two-game suspension for a brawl during his time with Reds, then fractured a bone in his hand following through on a swing with just two weeks left in the season. Mark Mulder, one the A's three dominant pitchers, discovered a stress fracture in upper right femur that send him to the DL for the rest of the year. And back spasms went around the clubhouse like the flu, sidelining center fielder Chris Singleton, rookie phenom Rich Harden, and closer Keith Foulke.
The first game of the playoffs, though, teased us with the idea that this could be The Year. Up against the Boston Red Sox, a team not only cursed but also with more mullets per capita than any other in the majors, A's fans figured we couldn't lose. Boston quickly confirmed that The Curse was still in good working order. In the ninth inning of game 1, Boston manager Grady Little pulled closer Byung-Hyun Kim with two outs in the ninth, visions of World Series games past dancing in his head. Kim's replacement promptly gave up the tying hit to Erubiel Durazo (Beane's major offseason acquisition) sending the game into extra innings.
In the 12th inning, 20 minutes short of the stroke of midnight in Calfornia, the A's won by channeling "Major League": With the bases loaded, two out, and an 0-1 count, A's catcher Ramon Hernandez, possibly the slowest player on the team, laid a perfect bunt down the third base line to score the winning run. And the A's won the next day behind a masterful performance from 2002 Cy Young winner Barry Zito, shutting down a Red Sox team that looked like it was just going through the motions at the plate.
And then, in what will surely stick in the craw Bay Area sports fans, the A's went into Boston and ended up living a slow-motion replay of the hideous Raiders-Patriots playoff game of January 2002. In that game, played in Boston in the middle of a snowstorm, the Oakland football team lost on a bizarre though technically correct ruling by the referees that resulted in a rule change the next year.
This on was just as strange, and just as painful to watch. The A's pitcher, Ted Lilly, who had been bombed out of Fenway in a start earlier this year, pitched the game of his life, fighting through four A's errors to give up just one Red Sox run. That run scored in the second on an interference call when third baseman Eric Chavez got in the way of a runner trying to get back to third.
In the sixth, things got strange. A's center fielder Eric Byrnes slid into home ahead of the throw and jammed his knee sliding into catcher Jason Veriteck's foot. The ball sailed the backstop, but as Byrnes limped towards the dugout, Veritek retrieved the ball and tagged Byrnes, who was called out for not touching home plateLater in the same inning, Tejada, trying to socre on a single to left, was bumped by Boston third baseman Bill Mueller; Tejada stopped halfway between third and home to argue, was tagged by Boston catcher Jason Veritek, and the umps called him out. Bill Welke, doing his best impression of former White House designated spinner Ari Fleischer, explained after the game that Tejada was "was at his own peril by stopping." The Red Sox finished the job on a walk-off homer in the 11th by Trot Nixon.
And then everything that had worked all season simply stopped working for the A's. Chavez and Tejada, who collectively hit .280 with 56 home runs during the year, never showed up, going a combined 3 for 45 and driving in just 2 runs in the series. And in game 4, the wheels finally came off. Tim Hudson (16 wins, 2.70 ERA in the regular season) pulled a muscle and had to leave after just one inning. Jose Guillen, playing through the pain in his broken hand in an incredible display of either toughness or stupidity, was thrown a third on a perfect throw from Boston center fielder and former Oakland A Johnny Damon. After Dye hit a home run to put the A's ahead, reliever Ricardo Rincon – who had an entire chapter devoted to him in Moneyball – let Boston back into the game by giving up his second home run of the series to Todd Walker, and Oakland all-star closer Keith Foulke promptly blew it in the 8th, giving up David Ortiz's first hit in the series.
Finally, in game 5, Manny Ramirez, who had looked like an overpayed thug the entire series, crushed a Barry Zito pitch into the stands to put Boston ahead 4-1. The A's battled back, pulling within one in the 8th. But it was not to be: In the 9th, Adam Melhuse, sent in by A's manager Ken Macha to hit for Dye for reasons known only to him, struck out looking with men on second and third and one out. After another walk to load the bases, so did Terrence Long. Game over. Series over. Season over. Goliath 1, David 0.
Like every postseason, A's fans now assume the worst, waiting for the pendulum of the opposing team to deliver the death blow or the walls of the team's own breakdowns to dump it into the pit. The A's have now lost 9 consecutive games where they had a chance win a playoff series, losing in ways ranging from the routine (getting beaten in Yankee Stadium in game 5 of the ALDS in 2001) to the improbable (game 3 of this year's series) to the nearly impossible (Derek Jeter's backhanded flip to Jorge Posada to tag out Jeremy Giambi in game 3 of the 2001 ALDS). And now, instead of marching into the ALCS, we wait for the guillotine to fall, for the rest if the league to catch up with Beane - as his disciple Theo Epstein may have already done in Boston – and for the A's outstanding pitching to depart for more lucrative country. And, like Boston fans, every year we have to watch someone else win the World Series.