Worst and worster.
Tonight the Rangers kick off their third and final series in Oakland for the season. In the last one, Texas took the June 16 opener, 14-8 — putting up its biggest run total of the season — before embarking on an eight-game losing streak (which would extend to 22 losses in 25 brutal games) by dropping the final two against the A’s.
In the clubs’ first series in O.co this year, Texas won the first two games by a run each, and took the finale, 3-0, behind a Martin Perez complete-game shutout on April 23, which for obvious reasons feels like about two years ago.
That early-season series happened to have been the only Rangers sweep of 2015 until they took care of the Braves in Arlington over the weekend.
There’s late night baseball the next two nights, followed by a getaway afternoon tilt on Thursday, and while Texas will go to battle with a turbo-decimated roster marked by an absurd number of rookies, it’s the other team that’s in a really bad way.
Just five weeks ago, on August 9, the A’s owned baseball’s best record (72-44) by a full four games, leading the West by the same margin because it was the Angels who boasted MLB’s second-best mark. Since then, Oakland has the worst record in the game at 11-22 (Texas is 12-21 over the same stretch), while Los Angeles’s 26-8 tear has it on the brink of clinching the division title.
Oakland is now a game ahead of Kansas City for home field in the Wild Card Game — but only three games ahead of Seattle (imagine if the Mariners hadn’t just lost three straight) in its effort to avoid missing the playoffs altogether.
The Rangers have a chance to make things meaningfully worse for the A’s this week, just as they did for Atlanta over the weekend.
The silver lining, of course, is that any loss to Oakland takes Texas closer to securing the 1.1 pick in June and all those other goodies, though this three-game win streak in combination with the Rockies’ current seven-game skid has Colorado just 1.5 games back in that backpedal chase. Arizona had briefly caught the Rockies before going on its own win streak these last three days, but there’s now 4.5 games of distance between the Rangers and Diamondbacks.
Speaking of Colorado and Arizona, Jon Heyman (CBS Sports) was the first to report that Rangers Assistant GM Thad Levine is on the Diamondbacks’ list of 10 candidates for their vacant GM position, while Ken Rosenthal (Fox Sports) speculates that if the Rockies dismiss GM Dan O’Dowd, Levine could be a candidate there as well, as he worked in Colorado’s front office for six seasons before Jon Daniels brought him to Texas.
But that’s not what brought me to my keyboard this morning. Buster Olney (ESPN) published a story on Saturday titled “Oakland’s collapse could be worst ever,” and I enjoyed that a lot before even reading the article, especially because I’d just read a chat that Olney’s ESPN colleague Keith Law conducted that included this exchange:
Q: How many hitters in minors have a future 70 hit tool, [and] is J.P. Crawford one?
A: I wouldn’t put that on many prospects. Addison Russell would be one. Crawford . . . I’d feel more comfortable at 60 or even 65. 70 is pretty rare.
Yes it is.
And Russell, like Yoenis Cespedes and Billy McKinney, belongs to someone other than Oakland going forward. Which is awesome.
Maybe you think the schadenfreude is a little unbecoming and a lot pot/kettlesque given where the Rangers’ season has gone, but 2014 is what it is for Texas, and you can recover from injuries.
Recovering from Cespedes (and a premium draft pick) for impending free agent Jon Lester, and Russell/McKinney/Dan Straily for Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel? The A’s have a chance over the next two weeks to make sure their season doesn’t have a devastating “worst collapse ever” result, before salvaging things when they trade Samardzija this winter (or I guess possibly next summer) to start to restock a turbo-decimated farm system.
And Texas has a chance, late tonight and late tomorrow night and Thursday afternoon, to make things even more difficult on the A’s, a position that I hate the Rangers find themselves in, but we are where we are, at least for 2014, and I’m not a bit above looking forward to this opportunity to keep knocking the Oakland kettle off the stove . . . not that I won’t be keeping an eye on Colorado and hoping for a little Rockies pride at home against the Dodgers and Diamondbacks these next six days.