OAKLAND, Calif. — How often do the baseball gods serve you up a second chance, an opportunity so similar to a previous one it is as though someone pushed the “Rewind” button?
The A’s have precisely that sort of do-over Thursday at their hellhole of a ballpark, O.co Coliseum.
Once again, the small-payroll A’s will try to defeat the high-payroll Detroit Tigers in a winner-take-all American League Division Series. Once again, the A’s are the home team. Once again, in order to advance to the AL Championship Series (against the awaiting and hosting Red Sox), the A’s must find a way to beat Justin Verlander.
“Yeah, and I just pitched there in my last start,” Verlander said Tuesday night, after the Tigers saved their season with an 8-6 victory over Oakland in Game 4. “So I guess you know what to expect a little bit, what the crowd is going to be like, and it’s going to be fun. It’s what you play the game for. It’s exciting.”
On Oct. 11, 2012, Verlander started ALDS Game 5 at the Coliseum, with the A’s having won Games 3 and 4 to tie the series. The 2011 AL Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player ended Oakland’s season with a four-hit, one-walk, 11-strikeout shutout, a 6-0 victory.
As Verlander mentioned, he started Game 2 of this series in Oakland and pitched brilliantly, throwing seven shutout innings and allowing (another déjà vu alert) four hits and a walk while striking out 11; the A’s won, 1-0, in the bottom of the ninth. The availability of Verlander for this start, on the standard four days’ rest, allowed Detroit manager Jim Leyland to use his Game 1 starter and winner Max Scherzer as a two-inning reliever in Game 4. Scherzer wound up getting the win.
The A’s couldn’t hold onto leads of 3-0 and 4-3.
“Look, they have a good offensive club,” Oakland manager Bob Melvin said. “You’ve got to finish it out for nine innings. Just because we had the lead doesn’t mean you’re going to win the game.”
Melvin bypassed Game 1 starter and loser Bartolo Colon in favor of Game 2 starter Sonny Gray, the rookie who matched Verlander in Game 2 with eight shutout innings.
The stakes are clear for these two franchises, neither of whom has won a World Series title since the 1980s (the A’s in ’89, the Tigers in ’84). The A’s, in the playoffs for the seventh time in Billy Beane’s 16 seasons as general manager, have won just one postseason series (the 2006 ALDS over Minnesota) in that period and would like to show their [bleep] works in the playoffs, to steal from a famous Beane quote in “Moneyball.” Their 2013 payroll is about $60 million.
The Tigers, whose beloved owner Mike Ilitch is 84 and in his 22nd year on the job, want to honor their boss’ commitment and $150ish million payroll. In the playoffs for the third straight season and the fourth time in eight years under Leyland, who turns 69 in December, they’re in danger of taking on the silly, undeserved reputation of the Braves or the recent Yankees — a club that can get to October, but can’t navigate through it.
“The season is on the line,” Verlander said, plainly enough. “This whole season, the way we battled and played as a team, comes down to one game. May the best team win.”
The A’s will have to solve Verlander, or at least outlast him, to be the best team this time.