Baseball is cruel. It’s easy for fans of the Oakland Athletics to feel that way after a muted 5-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays — the second consecutive year where the postseason quest was ended early in a do-or-die, single-elimination game.
The A’s were able to scatter seven hits across nine innings but were never able to do much more than that. They didn’t have a single extra-base hit for the game and only scored on a three-bag error and a sacrifice fly.
This was a hollow loss for the team, who played in front of a record-setting crowd of 54,005.