The Curious Curse of the Oakland A’s - NY Times
Oct 10, 2013 7:10:15 GMT -5
Oldtimer and themonk like this
Post by prisonerno6 on Oct 10, 2013 7:10:15 GMT -5
The Curious Curse of the Oakland A’s
By JOHN BRANCH
Published: October 9, 2013
OAKLAND, Calif. — The line was buried deep in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” but it still taunts the Oakland Athletics, 10 years after Michael Lewis’s best seller was published.
General Manager Billy Beane, the architect of a string of surprisingly successful A’s teams both then and now, said that his deeply statistical, low-cost system “doesn’t work in the playoffs,” adding, “My job is to get us to the playoffs.”
What happens in the postseason, he said, is “luck,” prefacing the word with an R-rated adjective.
If playoff success truly is a matter of luck, the A’s of the “Moneyball” era are jinxed with the worst kind of it. Long gone is the novelty of Oakland being the regular-season surprise contender, replaced by it being the most predictable of October flameouts. The only thing more likely than sewage overflowing at O.co Coliseum before Thursday’s Game 5 against the Detroit Tigers will be anxiety surrounding the home team.
For the sixth time since 2000, the A’s find themselves in the fifth and deciding game of an American League division series. They are 0-5 in those all-or-nothing contests, including 0-4 at home.
There have been plenty of Game 3s and Game 4s in that span, too, where victory would have sent the A’s to the next round. But the A’s are 1-11 in potential series-clinching games, including a Game 4 loss at Detroit on Tuesday. The lone victory came in 2006, when they swept the Minnesota Twins — only to be swept by the Tigers for the pennant in the A.L. Championship Series.
This year’s setup is a familiar one. As in 2012’s Game 5, 364 days earlier, the A’s will face the right-hander Justin Verlander. Last year, Verlander pitched a complete-game four-hitter, striking out 11, and the Tigers beat the A’s, 6-0. This year, Verlander held Oakland without a run in seven innings of Game 2, extending his postseason scoreless streak against the A’s to 22 innings.
Oakland will start Sonny Gray, the 23-year-old rookie who threw eight shutout innings in a duel with Verlander last Saturday night. The A’s won, 1-0, on Stephen Vogt’s ninth-inning single.
Manager Bob Melvin chose Gray over the 40-year-old Bartolo Colon, who was 18-6 during the regular season. Colon allowed three runs in the first inning of Game 1 before shutting down the Tigers for the rest of six innings. The A’s could not overcome the deficit, and Max Scherzer’s pitching performance, and lost, 3-2.
“Obviously we had two great options there, with Bartolo,” Melvin said Wednesday during a conference call with reporters. “We looked at it from a bunch of different angles. We have a lot of smart people in our front office and our baseball operations. And, really, the short of it is, it came down to Sonny’s last game that he pitched.”
If form — or luck — holds, it will not end well for the A’s, who will find a new and agonizing way to end a season in a deciding game.
In 2000, at home against the Yankees, Gil Heredia — who had outpitched Roger Clemens to win Game 1 — surrendered six runs in one-third of the first inning. The Yankees won, 7-5.
In a rematch in 2001, the A’s won the first two games of the series in New York and lost two games in Oakland. In Game 5 at Yankee Stadium, the A’s held an early 2-0 lead that Mark Mulder, the Game 1 winner, could not hold, no thanks to three Oakland errors and two unearned runs. The A’s lost, 5-3.
That series may be best remembered for one of Derek Jeter’s career highlights, when he snared an errant throw from right field in the seventh inning of Game 3 and flipped the ball to home, backhanded. Jorge Posada tagged out Jeremy Giambi, who did not slide, and the Yankees won, 1-0.
In 2002, the A’s won 103 regular-season games but could not capture Game 4 on the road or Game 5 at home against the Minnesota Twins. In the fifth game, A. J. Pierzynski’s two-run homer and David Ortiz’s run-scoring double in the ninth inning gave the Twins a 5-1 pad — which they needed when Oakland’s Mark Ellis hit an all-for-naught three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth.
In 2003, the A’s had a two-games-to-none lead on the Boston Red Sox, only to lose three straight — an abbreviated precursor of the comeback the Red Sox would perform on the Yankees in the league championship series a season later. Oakland’s three losses came by a combined four runs.
Game 3 was lost when Trot Nixon hit a two-run homer in the 11th inning. It was one of the stranger Oakland meltdowns. Eric Byrnes collided with catcher Jason Varitek when trying to score in the sixth. Unaware that he did not touch the plate and had not been called out, Byrnes stood and shoved Varitek, who tagged him out. Moments later, Oakland’s Miguel Tejada ran into third baseman Bill Mueller, who was called for obstructing the runner. But as Tejada pointed and argued, off the base, Varitek tagged him out.
In Game 5 in Oakland, the A’s trailed, 5-4, but had runners on second and third with one out in the bottom of the ninth. Derek Lowe struck out Adam Melhuse and Terrence Long, both looking.
Last year’s series with Detroit extended the sorry streak. The Tigers’ two runs in the third inning of Game 5 were all Verlander needed. Four more runs in the top of the seventh just added to the sting.
For this Game 5, Melvin might have considered testing the arm of Dave Stewart, the former A’s ace scheduled to toss Thursday’s ceremonial first pitch. Stewart won twice during an earthquake-interrupted sweep of the San Francisco Giants in 1989, the last time the A’s won the championship. And he remains the last Oakland pitcher to win a Game 5 in the playoffs, throwing a complete game against Toronto in the 1992 A.L.C.S.
A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2013, on page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: The Curious Curse Of the Oakland A’s.
By JOHN BRANCH
Published: October 9, 2013
OAKLAND, Calif. — The line was buried deep in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” but it still taunts the Oakland Athletics, 10 years after Michael Lewis’s best seller was published.
General Manager Billy Beane, the architect of a string of surprisingly successful A’s teams both then and now, said that his deeply statistical, low-cost system “doesn’t work in the playoffs,” adding, “My job is to get us to the playoffs.”
What happens in the postseason, he said, is “luck,” prefacing the word with an R-rated adjective.
If playoff success truly is a matter of luck, the A’s of the “Moneyball” era are jinxed with the worst kind of it. Long gone is the novelty of Oakland being the regular-season surprise contender, replaced by it being the most predictable of October flameouts. The only thing more likely than sewage overflowing at O.co Coliseum before Thursday’s Game 5 against the Detroit Tigers will be anxiety surrounding the home team.
For the sixth time since 2000, the A’s find themselves in the fifth and deciding game of an American League division series. They are 0-5 in those all-or-nothing contests, including 0-4 at home.
There have been plenty of Game 3s and Game 4s in that span, too, where victory would have sent the A’s to the next round. But the A’s are 1-11 in potential series-clinching games, including a Game 4 loss at Detroit on Tuesday. The lone victory came in 2006, when they swept the Minnesota Twins — only to be swept by the Tigers for the pennant in the A.L. Championship Series.
This year’s setup is a familiar one. As in 2012’s Game 5, 364 days earlier, the A’s will face the right-hander Justin Verlander. Last year, Verlander pitched a complete-game four-hitter, striking out 11, and the Tigers beat the A’s, 6-0. This year, Verlander held Oakland without a run in seven innings of Game 2, extending his postseason scoreless streak against the A’s to 22 innings.
Oakland will start Sonny Gray, the 23-year-old rookie who threw eight shutout innings in a duel with Verlander last Saturday night. The A’s won, 1-0, on Stephen Vogt’s ninth-inning single.
Manager Bob Melvin chose Gray over the 40-year-old Bartolo Colon, who was 18-6 during the regular season. Colon allowed three runs in the first inning of Game 1 before shutting down the Tigers for the rest of six innings. The A’s could not overcome the deficit, and Max Scherzer’s pitching performance, and lost, 3-2.
“Obviously we had two great options there, with Bartolo,” Melvin said Wednesday during a conference call with reporters. “We looked at it from a bunch of different angles. We have a lot of smart people in our front office and our baseball operations. And, really, the short of it is, it came down to Sonny’s last game that he pitched.”
If form — or luck — holds, it will not end well for the A’s, who will find a new and agonizing way to end a season in a deciding game.
In 2000, at home against the Yankees, Gil Heredia — who had outpitched Roger Clemens to win Game 1 — surrendered six runs in one-third of the first inning. The Yankees won, 7-5.
In a rematch in 2001, the A’s won the first two games of the series in New York and lost two games in Oakland. In Game 5 at Yankee Stadium, the A’s held an early 2-0 lead that Mark Mulder, the Game 1 winner, could not hold, no thanks to three Oakland errors and two unearned runs. The A’s lost, 5-3.
That series may be best remembered for one of Derek Jeter’s career highlights, when he snared an errant throw from right field in the seventh inning of Game 3 and flipped the ball to home, backhanded. Jorge Posada tagged out Jeremy Giambi, who did not slide, and the Yankees won, 1-0.
In 2002, the A’s won 103 regular-season games but could not capture Game 4 on the road or Game 5 at home against the Minnesota Twins. In the fifth game, A. J. Pierzynski’s two-run homer and David Ortiz’s run-scoring double in the ninth inning gave the Twins a 5-1 pad — which they needed when Oakland’s Mark Ellis hit an all-for-naught three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth.
In 2003, the A’s had a two-games-to-none lead on the Boston Red Sox, only to lose three straight — an abbreviated precursor of the comeback the Red Sox would perform on the Yankees in the league championship series a season later. Oakland’s three losses came by a combined four runs.
Game 3 was lost when Trot Nixon hit a two-run homer in the 11th inning. It was one of the stranger Oakland meltdowns. Eric Byrnes collided with catcher Jason Varitek when trying to score in the sixth. Unaware that he did not touch the plate and had not been called out, Byrnes stood and shoved Varitek, who tagged him out. Moments later, Oakland’s Miguel Tejada ran into third baseman Bill Mueller, who was called for obstructing the runner. But as Tejada pointed and argued, off the base, Varitek tagged him out.
In Game 5 in Oakland, the A’s trailed, 5-4, but had runners on second and third with one out in the bottom of the ninth. Derek Lowe struck out Adam Melhuse and Terrence Long, both looking.
Last year’s series with Detroit extended the sorry streak. The Tigers’ two runs in the third inning of Game 5 were all Verlander needed. Four more runs in the top of the seventh just added to the sting.
For this Game 5, Melvin might have considered testing the arm of Dave Stewart, the former A’s ace scheduled to toss Thursday’s ceremonial first pitch. Stewart won twice during an earthquake-interrupted sweep of the San Francisco Giants in 1989, the last time the A’s won the championship. And he remains the last Oakland pitcher to win a Game 5 in the playoffs, throwing a complete game against Toronto in the 1992 A.L.C.S.
A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2013, on page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: The Curious Curse Of the Oakland A’s.
