Athletics Thinking Playoffs at a Minimum as a Short, Strange Baseball Season Begins

The Oakland Athletics take what they believe is their best team in years into the 2020 season starting with the opener tonight in the Coliseum against the Angels. A fast start hasn't been an A's specialty; that needs to change for Oakland to get to the World Series, which is, after all, the point.

There will be a time that baseball fans and historians alike look back on the first seven months of 2020 and just shake their heads.

It began with Major League Baseball trying to dump some 40 minor league teams. It moved on to a battle with the COVID-19 coronavirus that cause the last two weeks of spring training and the first four months of the regular season. A national Black Lives Matter movement impacted players all over the map. Just last night in Washington, all the Yankees and all the Nationals took a knee.

A 162-game schedule was whittled to 60 games. About a dozen players and about a dozen umpires have opted out of playing over health concerns in the middle of a pandemic. The entire minor league season was scrapped. As a July 24 kindling of a mini-season, teams were allowed to start the season with 30 players after a Spring Training 2.0 lasted about half as long as the regular one.

Fans won’t be allowed to watch in person, players will be wearing masks, and seats in many stadiums will be filled by cardboard cutouts. Television and radio announcers will be calling road games from home. Teams are trying to figure out how to pipe in crowd noise without weirding players and staff out. Tom Hanks is giving the A's a hand. The Toronto Blue Jays won’t see Canada all season. Buffalo anyone?

And just as a series of ceremonial first pitches in empty stadiums from coast to coast is going to ignite the season, players and owners did an abrupt about-face, turning a 10-team playoff system into one of 16 teams. More than half the teams will make the postseason.

There’s probably more, but for the moment what matters is that the Oakland A’s are starting their season with the idea that they have a good-and-now-suddenly-better chance to make the playoffs for a third consecutive year.

The A’s host the Angels at 7:10 p.m. in the Coliseum. Frankie Montas pitches for the A’s against the Angels Andrew Heaney. The game will be broadcast both by the A’s regular home, NBCSCA as well as by ESPN. And don’t get used to the 7:10 start. Night games will go at either 6:10 p.m. or 6:40 p.m. the bulk of the season.

This is the season in which the A’s may have their best team in almost two decades. A healthy offense is homer happy. An almost healthy starting rotation gives hope that the A’s won’t have a patchwork quilt of starters as was the case last year. Oakland many have the best infield defense in the American League. The bullpen is rated the best in the division and one of the top half dozen in all of MLB.

Now it’s just a matter of going out and playing games. After everything that’s gone down already, playing actual baseball will be a shock to the system.

“This is the best team we’ve been able to put together the last couple of years. With expanded playoffs, it only expands our cause,” third baseman Matt Chapman said. “But we feel like we can win the division.

“The team’s goals are still the same, you know – win, win as much as we can. Getting off to a good start, you know that’s extremely important now. You can lose a season in two weeks, it seems like, in this short schedule. You know you can’t fall too far behind, but you can also jump out to a good lead. I think it’s exciting, because every game seems like it’s going to be a playoff game.”

Even while going 97-65 both of the last two years, the A’s have been a .500 team in the first 60 games. They can’t afford that kind of middling effort in the first 60 this time around. Oakland was the best team in baseball the second half of both 2018 and 2019, and they need to play at that level to get where they want to go.

They have a chance to lose shortstop Marcus Semien, the No. 3 vote getter in the MVP race last year, 15-game winner Mike Fiers and closer Liam Hendriks to free agency after this season is done. This is the year the A’s have been pointing toward.

Now or never? Maybe.

“We’ve been waiting for this group to come together,” manager Bob Melvin said. “What our front office has been good at is making the adjustments along the way and making us better along the way, and this is where we are.

“We have our best guys here now. Our best young pitching prospects are here, and our best young position players have had a couple of really good years under their belts now.”

He said that before starter A.J. Puk went on the disabled list, but his point is valid.

Those wearing green and gold can’t just think about what happens on the field. In this age of COVID-19, following health rules is more important than following baseball runs. Hendriks, for example, said if he finds teammates aren’t taking the proper health precautions, those players will hear from him.

“It might take some getting used to,” Hendriks said. “But I feel like you put the fear of God into them that this is something that could make some guys on this team unhealthy but could theoretically kill some guys on this year, hopefully they’ll take it seriously.”

Play (a different sort of) ball.

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

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