Elephant Rumblings: It could be worse...

Photo by Dustin Satloff/Getty ImagesHappy Wednesday, Athletics Nation!

Relative to expectations.

How things play out versus how I expected them to play out has always been a matter of importance to me. I used to taunt Yankees fans with the idea that with all their team’s money and publicity, anything short of winning the World Series is a failure. The A’s, on the other hand, have generally outperformed expectations year after year under Billy Beane’s Moneyball system—so much so in the early 2000s that Michael Lewis wrote an enthralling book about it that was made into a hit motion picture.

That success on a shoestring budget kept me warm as an A’s fan until about 2014. That’s when the pangs of…