Entering the Bubble Won't Make for Many Changes as Athletics Prep for Postseason

The Oakland Athletics are heading into the postseason next week; they've already moved into the Major League Baseball postseason bubble, and they say things won't change that much for them, because they've been mostly in a bubble for much of the 2020 season.

The schedule says the Oakland A’s are in Los Angeles, and the schedule is correct, as far as it goes

What the schedule doesn’t say is that the A’s are in the playoff bubble. From now through however long they are in the playoffs, the A’s will go from hotel to ballpark to hotel to ballpark to airport to hotel to ballpark.

In a season played under a canopy of pandemic, the A’s are in Major League Baseball’s version of a bubble. They’ll come back from Los Angeles to Oakland for a four-game series against the Seattle Mariners, but they won’t be going home.

They’ll instead be ensconced in a Bay Area hotel for the duration of the Seattle series and for the Wild Card round of the playoff, assuming they emerge as the American League West champions; the Oakland magic number to get that crown is at one, meaning one Houston loss or one Oakland win gives the A’s the Division title. The Astros play tonight in Seattle while the A’s don’t play against until visiting Dodger Stadium Tuesday.

So, when they packed for this road trip, the A’s didn’t pack for three days in L.A. Instead, they packed for a month, knowing there’s no way to guess how long it will be before they head home.

How will entering the bubble impact the A’s?

Not much, if you as A’s reliever Jake Diekman, outfielder Mark Canha, starter Jesús Luzardo or manager Bob Melvin.

“I feel like we’ve been in a bubble all year,” Diekman said. “You can get groceries delivered. You can get anything like that you want delivered. I don’t think, honestly, it will be that much different.

“It’ll be pretty nice to say here or wherever. For the most part, I think in the hotels it will only be baseball families.”

The A’s plans call for trying to find hotels in which they can get entire wings of the property to themselves. And once the players and their families are there, they won’t go anywhere else – no shopping, no dining out, to walking through the city – until it’s time to move on.

“We’ve basically been doing it on the road anyway,” Melvin said of the bubble. ”It’s just going to be like doing the road at home. There are only certain times you can be at the ballpark. You go from the hotel to the ballpark to the hotel.

“Everybody is aware of that now. The experience you have on the road should make it a little easier at home., even though you’re not used to do it that way at home. It’s just going to be like we’re on a constant road trip now.”

Melvin, the staff and players had a meeting addressing the issue before Sunday’s loss to the Giants at the Coliseum.

Canha said he believed his teammates were completely on board with the rules and regulations around being in a bubble.

“It’s going to be kind of what we’ve been doing, but just a little more,” Canha said Sunday. “They explained it to us today. It just going to be a little more tightly controlled. And we’re not going to be allowed to go outside the hotel for any reason. It’s a little less free.”

For Luzardo, he’s gotten used to it. He said he spends most of his free time “in my apartment, playing video games,” and he doesn’t seem to think changing locales to a hotel will be all that much different.

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

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