BALTIMORE -- It's 5 o'clock on a Monday afternoon in the pennant race.
The subject is scoreboard watching -- which these days would figure to be pretty much a full-time avocation for those mega-racing Oakland Athletics.
"I don't care about that," says Matt Stairs, earnestly. "It doesn't matter as long as we keep on winning."
|  | | Terrence Long is enjoying a banner year in his first season in the majors. |
We now roll ahead the clock to 10:30 p.m. on the same Monday. Art Howe is standing in the manager's office after a 12-3 win over Baltimore has allowed his A's to keep pace with the Indians and the Mariners, who also won. He, too, is asked if he'd been watching that scoreboard.
"I heard about that Seattle game," he says. "The ball got stuck in the catwalk to start the (winning) rally in the ninth?"
Hmmm. So how did he get news that detailed, right there in the middle of a ballgame?
"One of my players came out and told me," Howe confesses.
And which player would that be?
"Matt Stairs," the manager says.
Hmmm. The same Matt Stairs who says he doesn't care about scoreboard-watching?
"Hey," Stairs says, when confronted with this incontrovertible evidence, "we were watching (Bartolo) Colon go for his no-hitter in here, and guys were going back and forth from TV to TV. We've got four TV's in here. Might as well check them all out."
"I'd rather," says Art Howe, "he not tell me these things."
Right. He'd rather not know about anything on that scoreboard. Whatsoever.
Pause.
"Say," Howe asks, "did Colon get that no-no?"
A's continue to win, win, win
These are what you call nutty times for the Oakland A's, the youngest team to get mixed up in games this big since the Toms River Little Leaguers.
They've got scoreboards to watch. They've got Doppler radars to watch. They've got hurricanes to dodge.
They've got a wild-card race going and a division race going at the same time, with a million different scenarios. They've got possible tie-breakers out there and makeup games out there and the chance they could fly 10,000 miles in 72 hours.
They could be driving themselves insane with all of this. Instead, they just keep winning. With five regulars under 25 years old. With two starting pitchers 25 or under. (And it was three pitchers until Mark Mulder herniated a disc in his back last week).
"You know how they say when you're young, you don't really know?" observes rookie utility man Frankie Menechino? "Well, sometimes that's good. We're so young, we don't know we're supposed to be nervous."
Heading into their hurricane-imperiled day-night doubleheader in Baltimore on Tuesday, the A's were 11-3 since Sept. 2. While the Indians and Red Sox beat each other up, the A's have been presented an opportunity to spend 12 straight days playing Tampa Bay, Minnesota and Baltimore.
They've responded by beating those teams' brains in. They'd won seven of eight going into Tuesday. And the aggregate score in the seven wins was 65-16.
"Right now," Howe says, "we have some serious desire going. These guys want to go out and show the world they belong in this race."
They can't play the Devil Rays and Orioles forever, though. Thursday, the A's head for Seattle to play four games against the club they trail by 2½ games in the AL West, the Mariners. That's the biggest series any Oakland team has played this late in the season since 1992.
"But the honest truth," Stairs says, "is that I haven't even thought about that Seattle series yet. Maybe when we start playing poker on the plane Wednesday night I'll think about it then. But we've got to take care of business in Baltimore first."
What they've been trying to figure out for about four days, however, is how much of that business would include the late, great Hurricane Gordon.
The A's have already had one game on this trip hurricaned out. That was Sunday in Tampa Bay.
Then they heard enough Weather Channel updates to know that what was left of Gordon was following them around, bearing down on all those empty Camden Yards seats in Baltimore on Tuesday. So for most of this trip, the A's have spent as much time checking weather reports as scouting reports.
Looming -- if the worst-case scenario became worst-case reality -- was a potential makeup-game, tie-breaker horror show:
They could finish the regular season Oct. 1 in Oakland, then have to fly across the country to make up their rainout in Tampa Bay the next day.
Then they could possibly fly back across the country to play a tie-breaker game with the Indians in Oakland or the Mariners in Seattle the following day.
Then they might have to turn around and jet to New York to start the division series the next day.
Or it could get worse. If a game in Baltimore were to get blown away by Gordon, that could be one more makeup game.
Or there could be a three-way wild-card tie with Cleveland, plus Boston or Toronto. Depending on how that broke, that could result in two more tie-breaker playoff games.
"Boy," Stairs says. "That would be a nightmare. Wouldn't it?"
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Young and good |
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Five of the A's regular position players and three of their regular starting pitchers are all 25 years of age or younger. Below is a list of the players and their respective ages:
Position players:
Eric Chavez, third base, 22
Ben Grieve, left field, 24
Ramon Hernandez, catcher, 24
Terrence Long, center field, 24
Miguel Tejada, shortstop, 24
Starting pitchers:
Tim Hudson, 25
Mark Mulder, 23
Barry Zito, 22
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Would it ever. But GM Billy Beane is preaching the old glass-half-full approach to this mess.
"Here's how I look at it," Beane says. "We have no off days left, anyway. And we know these games won't be made up unless they have meaning. So if we have to play one game at the end of the season to determine whether we get in the playoffs or not, I'll take it. I don't care where it is."
Of course, it could turn out to be more than one game. But Beane says: "I'll take that, too."
"Same thing," he says. "Either we're going to win and it doesn't matter, or it will matter and we'll have to play. But if we do, I'd love to be in that situation."
The truth is, the A's weren't supposed to be in any of these situations -- not yet. They were a surprise when they hung in the wild-card race until mid-September last year. They're even younger this year -- with Barry Zito, Terrence Long and Ramon Hernandez (plus Mulder, before he was hurt) moving into pivotal roles.
Most nights, they start only two players over 30 -- Randy Velarde and Stairs. The average age of their other seven position players Monday night was 25 years, 2 months. And teams that young are not supposed to be in this position in the third week of September. You could look it up. But you don't have to -- because we did:
The last team to finish first with five regulars 25 and under was the 1985 Dodgers (Steve Sax, Pedro Guerrero, Mike Marshall, Dave Anderson, Mariano Duncan).
The last team to make it to the World Series with five regulars 25 and under was the 1975 Red Sox (Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, Dwight Evans, Rick Burleson, Cecil Cooper).
And since division play began 31 years ago, the only team to win a World Series (and the only other to finish first) with five regulars 25 and under was the '69 Miracle Mets (Ed Kranepool, Ron Swoboda, Bud Harrelson, Ken Boswell and Wayne Garrett).
There's a reason that's so rare. And the reason, Beane says, is that teams this young tend to "fluctuate like a tech stock."
So the A's have made their share of youthful mistakes. But there's a flip side to those mistakes. And that flip side, Howe says, is "energy."
"We have a lot of energy and enthusiasm," the manager says. "Maybe it's sort of a naivete. These guys are so naïve to this situation, it may not even bother them. It's their first time to be in the middle of something like this. So they throw caution to the winds and just play ball."
But maybe these guys aren't as naïve as everyone thinks. Because the Oakland system has been as loaded as any organization in the game, most of these players have won before. It's just that before, they did that winning in places like Modesto and Midland and Vancouver.
"I know coming up through the system, we always won," Menechino says. "All the guys who were in Vancouver last year, we all won (the Triple-A World Series). So we've all experienced what it's like to win. And I think that helps you when you experience that here."
But talent helps, too. And this is a team loaded with future stars, in Tim Hudson and Zito and Mulder, in Eric Chavez and Miguel Tejada and Long.
Hudson is 20 games over .500 (28-8) after less than two full years in the big leagues. Zito has a 2.72 ERA after his first 11 career starts. Mulder has had his growing pains, but he's also beaten the Indians, Red Sox, Angels and Giants.
The only AL third basemen with more homers than Chavez (23) are Troy Glaus and Tony Batista. Long leads all major-league rookies in average, runs scored, hits, doubles, total bases, extra-base hits and multi-hit games. And then there's Tejada, a 24-year-old human highlight film.
The world may not have caught on that this guy has more homers (27) and RBI (101) than any shortstop on the planet except A-Rod. But his teammates have noticed.
"I don't know if you can put him in the same class as the Big Three yet, just because those guys have done it for five, six years," says Tejada's double-play partner, Velarde. "For Miguel, this is just his second full year in the league. But the scary part is that he's putting up these types of numbers already, in his second year. And his numbers blow away what A-Rod or Jeter did in their second year.
"I say let's wait five years down the road and see what he does from here. But obviously, the sky's the limit."
The sky is also the limit for this franchise over the next few years -- assuming it can find the money to keep this group together. But that's an issue for another day, an issue the Oakland A's can worry about after they finish Thanksgiving dinner. For now, they've got other things on their mind.
"I'm not going to worry about the future," Howe says. "In our case, the future is now."
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com. | |
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