How the Oakland A’s became the hottest team in baseball
OAKLAND — There’s something about the timing of all of this that doesn’t seem accidental, not to those on the inside of the A’s clubhouse, where a team that was on pace to be the worst of all time has suddenly become the hottest team in baseball.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Tony Kemp said smiling at his locker on Tuesday afternoon, just before the A’s stormed back to beat the Tampa Bay Rays, 2-1, extend their winning streak to seven games and do it all in front of a roaring crowd of 27,759 at the Coliseum.
“Tonight was as close to a playoff crowd as I’ve experienced managing a game,” said A’s manager Mark Kotsay. “The energy, the atmosphere, was everything that this stadium can be.”
The electric crowd on hand for the reverse boycott of the team’s expected move to Las Vegas came at the perfect time: The A’s are finally winning.
How did this happen?
For the first two months of the season, the A’s rarely looked competitive. They rotated players from Triple-A to the big leagues on what seemed like a non-stop shuttle. The roster was hardly recognizable, but the results were familiar.
The A’s couldn’t hit. Their 3.4 runs per game ranked last in MLB.
They couldn’t pitch. Their 6.69 ERA also ranked last, and it would’ve been the second-worst in baseball history next to the 1930 Phillies (6.71 ERA).
And they couldn’t play defense, with their .984 fielding percentage worse than all but six teams.
Their 12-50 record after 62 games put them on pace to be the worst team since the 1800s.
All the while, A’s owner John Fisher was inching closer to a deal that would net the A’s up to $380 million from the Nevada taxpayers to build a stadium on the Las Vegas strip and move the A’s to the desert as soon as 2025.
A laughingstock to the rest of the baseball world, the A’s knew it couldn’t stay this bad.
“The sun comes out and pierces through the clouds eventually,” said veteran reliever Trevor May. “It took 50-plus games. A really, really long time. Which is way longer than I’ve ever experienced. I’ve been in 15-game stretches where you go 3-12 and it’s like, ‘We’re so bad.’ And then you get going a little bit, throw a couple .500 weeks in and you’re, ‘OK, back on track.’
“We were just 1-6 every single week for the whole season, losing tough game after tough game.”
As bad as they were — as bad as they were supposed to be with an Opening Day payroll of $56 million, the lowest in a sport where 22 of the 30 teams spent at least $100 million — the A’s didn’t think they deserved their 12-50 record.
They were certain of three things: They were getting unlucky, they didn’t have much chemistry and they were lacking confidence.
“That chemistry takes a minute,” said Kemp. “There are a lot of guys from different organizations and different teams that are molding from this team. Sometimes it just takes a road trip for everyone to get together in a room, talk and have a good time.”
Of the 26 players on the roster to open the season, 10 were playing in their first Opening Day game. The collective inexperience on the roster made losing even more difficult to recover from. And the oldest guys on the team — May, Kemp, Seth Brown, Aledmys Diaz and Jace Peterson — were either on the injured list or not performing.
“I’ve been playing for 10 years now and (the losing streak) is usually not that long,” May said. “But we had veterans saying it over and over again: ‘We have guys that are starting to get going as they usually do, and some young guys that are starting to come into their own.’”
It was at the end of May when the National League East-leading Atlanta Braves were in town that the A’s finally saw the sun come out from behind the clouds.
They took two of three from the Braves, and Kotsay saw a spark.
“The Atlanta series was a wake-up call for this club that we played a first-place team, one of the better teams in baseball, and were able to go out and win a series against them,” he said.
Then they got swept by the Marlins in Miami, but there was a sense that things were changing inside the clubhouse. Kotsay addressed the team during their next series in Pittsburgh.
“We really felt like we were going to build some momentum and gain from those experiences,” he said. “And they did. We turned a corner in Pittsburgh. Winning games brings confidence. That’s what this group needed. They’ve been working all year to get to this point where they could just build on the processes.”
Kotsay’s ability to stay calm during the first two months was appreciated throughout the clubhouse. The entire time, the veterans in the room were preaching patience.
“We do have a lot of new guys who are learning on the field and off the field of how to be a professional,” said Brown. “The guys coming in are embracing that. Playing in the big leagues is a thing you earn but you have to understand where we’re at, how lucky we really are.
“The guys in here, it’s fun to be around them because they’re embracing the mindset of learning and trying to be as good as they possibly can. That’s what you’re seeing with this team, guys are coming together. Kotsay has done a phenomenal job of keeping it light.”
It's 2-1 y'all pic.twitter.com/kfiAdqSNbL
— Oakland A's (@Athletics) June 14, 2023
It all led to Tuesday, when the A’s got seven magical innings from Hogan Harris, who said he hadn’t thrown that many innings in five years. They scratched two runs together in the seventh and eighth innings. And they turned a 2-1 lead over to May, who just last month was on the injured list while battling anxiety.
When he recorded the final out, he pumped his fist and let out a scream met by 27,759 others at the Coliseum.
“It felt like a playoff game,” May said. “When I signed here, I saw a group of young guys, some guys who could bud into stars like the A’s always do. I said, ‘I want to be in the clubhouse when that happens.’ And we’re starting to see it.”
With the win, the A’s were no longer the worst team in baseball. At 19-50, they surpassed the 18-49 Kansas City Royals for 29th.