A’s wild-card preview: How it nearly fell apart (w/video)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A month and a half ago, the A’s were enjoying their national accolades, pieing one another on a regular basis and wondering which poor saps they’d be hosting in an American League divisional playoff series.

Today they are here in the heartland, preparing to face the Royals in a do-or-die, one-game wild-card series at Kauffman Stadium, sort of a consolation prize for not-bad teams who fail to claim one of MLB’s division titles.

How did they get here? Like this:

THE AMAZIN’ A’S OF SUMMER

To be fair, the A’s wouldn’t be one of baseball’s 10 playoff teams at all were it not for their fairly spectacular feats of April, May, June and July.

Coming off consecutive AL West championships, this team had every reason to expect to be a contender. The A’s were more than that in the early going. They were juggernauts. The small-market team that generally expects to place the minimum one guy on the AL All-Star team flooded the roster with seven players. As in the days of the Bash Brothers and the Hudson-Mulder-Zito years of the early 2000s, the Athletics outgrew the Bay Area; ESPN and Fox Sports came visiting to learn the names Derek Norris and Sam Fuld.

It didn’t seem to matter whom they trotted out to the mound. Oakland lost projected starters A.J. Griffin and Jarrod Parker to elbow surgeries before the season started. No big deal. Guys like Jesse Chavez and Drew Pomeranz became reliable fill-ins.

By June 21 the A’s had a six-game lead in the division. By Aug. 9 they were 28 games over .500 and owned the best record in baseball. What could go wrong?

THINGS FALL APART

As it turned out, pretty much everything could go wrong. Spontaneously, shockingly, the A’s went upside-down and lost 30 of their final 46 games.

The collapse did not play favorites as Oakland’s hitting, pitching and defense all came unraveled. First baseman Brandon Moss, arguably the team’s best hitter in the first half, batted .170 and popped just four home runs after the break. Starting pitcher Scott Kazmir was brilliant, and then he was terrible. Stars like third baseman Josh Donaldson and pitcher Sonny Gray both suffered through long stretches of ineffectiveness. The bullpen lost its touch.

The A’s post-All-Star break winning percentage of .433 is the lowest of any MLB team ever to make the playoffs. They finished 10 games behind the Anaheim Angels, which explains why they aren’t kicking back and watching the wild-card game on TV, preparing to play the winner at home Thursday.

OUCH, THAT HURTS

Health is a major factor for every MLB team - ask the patchwork Texas Rangers - and the Athletics have dealt with their share of injuries.

Donaldson has played through hip, hamstring and knee injuries for much of the year, and hasn’t seemed right for a while. He twisted his ankle on Friday night but limped around the diamond over the final weekend. Moss has been battling injuries, too. And center fielder Coco Crisp, the A’s leadoff spark plug, hit .191 in the second half of the season - partly the result of injuring his neck by running into the outfield wall in Anaheim on Aug. 29.

Closer Sean Doolittle, shortstop Jed Lowrie and catcher John Jaso all spent time on the disabled list in August and September. This team didn’t sprint to the finish line. It limped.

SAVED BY THE BELL

By the final two weeks of the season, a chilling reality had set in: The A’s could miss the playoffs entirely. They clawed. They scratched. They tried to rally one another, and still the losses mounted.

And yet there they were in the visitors’ locker room in Texas on Sunday, breaking out champagne to celebrate their wild-card berth.

They are alive and ticking in Kansas City because they found a way to win two of their final four games, including the season finale, in which Gray pitched a complete-game gem. Had they lost that one, the A’s would have played at Seattle yesterday - a one-game faceoff to earn the right to play in another one-game faceoff - and very well might have been eliminated by now.

The A’s pitchers did not walk a batter over their final five games, an Oakland record, offering hope that the staff might return to peak performance in the nick of time.

THE OTHER GUYS

The other part of the A’s how’d-they-get-here equation - “here” being Kansas City - is the Royals, who experienced a less extreme version of the Athletics’ turbulence this year. The young Royals were torrid for most of August, and were in first place in the AL Central as late as Sept. 11.

These guys don’t hit many home runs (they were last in the American League), but they led MLB with 153 steals and their bullpen is overpowering; KC was 72-1 when leading after seven innings this season. The Royals were a fun team to watch in 2014.

But they, too, hit the doldrums, starting with a four-game losing streak at the end of August, and were ultimately overtaken by the veteran Detroit Tigers. Hence the wild-card status. Not that anyone in Kansas City is complaining. This is the franchise’s first postseason appearance since 1985, when they beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series.

THE CURSE OF CESPEDES

There’s another theory about Oakland’s near-fatal malaise. It’s popular in baseball circles, because this sport is largely governed by superstition and obsession with “chemistry.” Some believe the A’s sealed their fate when they traded left fielder Yoenis Cespedes to Boston for pitcher Jon Lester on July 31.

A deeper analysis will show that the A’s stopped hitting just before the Cespedes trade, but it looked really bad when they were shut out seven times after shipping their most feared slugger to Fenway Park.

Lester is a free agent after the season, and will likely sign a lucrative contract elsewhere. A’s general manager Billy Beane got him for one purpose: to lead his team in the 2014 playoffs. Lester certainly has the credentials to justify such expectations, with a 1.92 ERA in 11 postseason starts. He went 4-1 last year while pitching the Red Sox to a World Series championship.

At Kauffman Field today, Lester can help erase the curse, the ugly finish and the tension of constantly living on the edge. One win, and the Athletics will head to Anaheim, ready to write yet another chapter to this strange and entertaining season.