“It’s the injuries” is a common excuse for why the A’s, once 38-38 and in the thick of a weak AL West race, have cratered, fallen, and can’t get up. “Wait until we’re back at full strength” is a commonly heard game plan for letting a season in which 2 games over .500 gets you 1st place at the All-Star break slip away in a slow but deadly implosion.
Without question the A’s have missed, when out, Jacob Wilson and Zack Gelof, Tyler Soderstrom and Luis Severino, even Brent Rooker though he never got
his season untracked. At the same time, no one in the division is feeling too sorry for the A’s just because they have not been at full strength and have been without some key cogs.
The Mariners were without Cal Raleigh for a long stretch and Brendan Donovan last played on May 13th. The Rangers were long absent Wyatt Langford, lost Corey Seager to an IL stint, and Cody Bradford has yet to throw a pitch all season. The Astros were without Jeremy Peña for 5 weeks while Carlos Correa is out for the season and Hunter Brown only recently rejoined the rotation. The difference is that these teams weathered their adversity enough to win roughly half their games.
Here are some truths that better explain why the A’s sit at 41-55 at the All-Star break when even just 48-48 would have served them quite well…
The Myth Of “Good Offense/Bad Pitching”
This is only half true. The pitching has, in fact, been awful but the A’s offense is very much part of why the A’s have the third worst record in the American League. Following the A’s sad showing in Chicago, in which they scored 2 runs in 3 games, it’s now official: on the road the A’s have the very worst OPS in all of MLB.
That’s right, the A’s road slash line of .223/.297/.347 yields a .644 OPS that ranks a cool 30th out of 30th. Certainly injuries play a part — the A’s would have hit better on the road if they had not lost Wilson or Gelof or Soderstrom at all, but the reality is that as a group their players, when healthy, have not performed outside the hitting paradise that is West Sacramento.
A healthy (save for the last 2 games) Nick Kurtz batted a strikingly ordinary .236/.364/.394, 114 wRC+ on the road in the 1st half. That’s in contrast to a 180 wRC+ at home.
The other hitter the A’s relied on heavily in the first half, All-Star Shea Langeliers, has hit all of .236/.303/.434, 103 wRC+ on the road (135 wRC+ at home).
Tyler Soderstrom, with a 162 wRC+ at home, has hit just .216/.290/.383, 84 wRC+ on the road.
Zack Gelof may have a 148 wRC+ at home, but on the road it’s .222/.287/.374, 84 wRC+.
The point being that if the excuse is that the A’s really miss these guys, they don’t actually get as much from them away from West Sacramento as you may think. And as a team, no one puts together a worse OPS on the road than your Athletics.
Can’t Stop The Hemorrhaging
The A’s have certainly been hit hard by injuries of late and it provides a neat excuse for accepting strings of losses. But one fact remains: 2 seasons in a row now, when the A’s have begun to crater Mark Kotsay and his coaching staff have not been able to find a way to put a tourniquet on the massive bleeding.
And we’re not talking about any ordinary skid here. Last year the team plunged, out of the blue, into a 1-20 funk that conjured up the image of Bill King’s wildest alcoholic dreams. Before the All-Star break the team plunged into such a prolonged morass it effectively ended their season in June.
Fast forward a season, with higher expectations and more opportunity, and here we are at the All-Star break with the A’s, recently 38-38 and essentially deadlocked for 1st place, having spiraled into a funk that is now 3-17, only a couple games better than 2025’s historic 21 game collapse.
It’s not inherently a manager’s fault how a team plays in a game or for a week, or even in a season. There are too many factors, some based around on field talent and others around the romantic unpredictability of baseball. Nonetheless, 2 years in a row now the A’s have suddenly fallen off a cliff, and perhaps more importantly they have been unable to find a way just to slow the bleeding even if they couldn’t stop it, just to maintain some semblance of a pulse even if they came out of it the worse for wear.
A 21 game stretch that ended the A’s hopes in June, 2025, followed by a 20 game stretch in June/July 2026 that has done the near impossible: take a race in which .500 gets you within a game of 1st place, and in the span of 3 weeks fall completely off the map, winning just once a week for a full 1/8 of the season.
Ask the managers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia if the combination of high expectations and hugely disappointing performance costs you your job — and none of those managers piloted collapses this deep, 2 seasons in a row.
But those managers were canned, early enough that the team’s season was still very much salvageable, and guess what? In 2 of 3 cases, the team has risen from the dead and returned to relevance by the All-Star break. The Red Sox are suddenly just 2 games under .500 and 0.5 game back of the 3rd wild card while the Phillies hold the 2nd wild card spot and sit just 2 games back of the Braves in the NL east. That is not to say Boston and Philly don’t have more talent to work with, but it is to say they were still failing badly and only turned it around following a changing of the guard.
What Does This All Mean?
Unfortunately, from where I sit it means the A’s have a serious problem. The easy narrative is to bemoan that the A’s problem is basically their pitching, and really if they could just figure out how to pitch decently at home they would be fine. Sounds like half a problem.
The reality is that the A’s appear to have 3 fundamental problems. Not only is their pitching ranked near the bottom in many categories, but when their stats are not masked by their home hitting environment the offense has been “bottom of the barrel” as well. And their leadership has not shown it can guide a team through a long season without a crippling month in which everything accomplished before and after is rendered moot by a daily nightmare no one can shake the team from.
This doesn’t make for a “feel good” piece going into the break, but that’s kind of what you have to expect when you’re facing 4 days off to ruminate on 9 straight losses, 17 out of 20, and a division race that has, in just 3 weeks time, become “anyone’s to win — well, anyone except you.”
Not ideal.
