It has become one of those seasons where you ask yourself, “Will Ernie Clement, a career .253/.288/.364 hitter, fall a triple short of the cycle against us for the third straight game?” And where the answer is, “Yeah, prolly.”
It has been the strangest of seasons in that while losing an appalling 16 of 17 and 18 of 21, the A’s have vacillated between two kinds of losses that could not be more contrasting: blowing late leads for crushing losses, often by one run, or getting blown out in lopsided affairs that bruise both the run differential and the ego.