The A’s won 97 games in the regular season, an incredible number, when you consider that the team had the fifth-smallest payroll in baseball this year.
And for that tremendous accomplishment after 162 games, their reward is one more — a winner-take-all showdown against the team with the lowest payroll in baseball, the Tampa Bay Rays, winners of 96 regular-season games.
It’s a battle of baseball’s best bootstrappers — a face-off of the nerd vanguard.
And it’s going to be loud. Ten thousand fans at the Oakland Coliseum are louder than 40,000 in so many other ballparks in across Major League Baseball, so you have to wonder what a full house will sound like Wednesday.