The road trip concludes with what will almost certainly be one of the very last visits the Blue Jays ever make to Oakland.
For more than a century, every city that has lost its major league franchise has generally not had to go without for very long. Milwaukee, Kansas City, Seattle - none of them had even had their first MLB franchise very long before losing it. Even so, each was granted a shiny new replacement within the decade. Obviously MLB was able to easily ignore the protests of those fanbases that didn't have any political clout in Washington (Montreal and, ironically, Washington.) But baseball has managed to ignore any complaints from fanbases that still had a team in the area (Boston, St.Louis, Philadelphia) and that may prove to be Oakland's unhappy ending as well. No one who actually lives in Oakland is likely to happily accept the San Francisco Giants as their local team. It's probably not going to matter. So the A's play out their last years in Oakland, with their sights set on making Las Vegas their fourth home city in 2025. Attendance has crashed - the A's were averaging 20,000 a game as recently as 2019, but have been drawing just half that in the three post-pandemic seasons.
Well, who wants to watch a terrible team that's leaving town in two years. We have to go back more than a century to find an A's team with a worse record than this year's group, back to the wretched Philadelphia A's of the 1910s, after Connie Mack broke up his first great team and sold off all his good players. The 1915, 1916, and 1919 teams couldn't even manage to play .300 ball - this years A's have cleared that low, low bar. It has been something of a running theme through A's history - they build great teams (Mack's teams of the 1910s and early 1930s, Finley's teams of the 1970s, Billy Beane's teams of the early 2000s.) And they can never afford to keep them.
Oakland visited Toronto back in June, and took one of three games because winning one of three is what they do.
The Story So Far
Friday 23 June: Oakland 5 Toronto 4 - The A's jumped on Chris Bassitt for three first inning runs, but the Jays took a 4-3 lead thanks largely to Guerrero's three run homer in the third. Oakland tied the game in the fifth and the game was turned over to the bullpens. In the ninth inning a solo homer by Langeliers off Romano broke the tie. Guerrero led off the bottom of the ninth with a double but advanced no further as May retired Chapman, Merrifield, and Varsho.
Saturday 24 June: Oakland 3 Toronto 7 - Berrios worked six competent innings, fanning eight, and Guerrero and Jansen led the offense, each homering and driving in five runs between them.
Sunday 25 June: Oakland 1 Toronto 12 - Springer homered on the second pitch he saw and the Jays took a 4-0 lead through three. This was more than enough for Kikuchi, who allowed just two hits over seven innings. The Jays piled on a bunch of late runs, highlighted by Espinal's two run double and Biggio's three run homer to turn this one into a laugher.
The Jays will see a couple of southpaws, today and Wednesday.
Matchups
Monday 4 September - Berrios (9-10, 3.70) vs Waldichuk (2-7, 5.92)
Tuesday 5 September - Bassitt (13-7, 3.81) vs Neal (1-0, 6.55)
Wednesday 6 September - Ryu (3-1, 2.48) vs Sears (3-11, 4.60)
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20230904090407516