Attempting to Explain the Oakland A's Collapse Through Sports Movies

To put things simply, this is not a great time to be an A's fan.

The last two years and leading up to the All-Star break this year, it was wonderful. This scrappy bunch of young players and overachieving journeymen were a joy to watch. Even with two straight first-round exits from the playoffs, each season felt satisfying and fun. This year started out that way as well, with the A's destroying their competition and putting up the best record in baseball and far and away the best run differential.

Oakland made one trade, giving up a key part of their future for some stellar pitching, signifying that they were really going for it. Then right before the trade deadline, they pushed all of their chips in the middle, giving up Yoenis Cespedes for one of the best pitchers in the game right now, Jon Lester. It was World Series or bust.

Since then, it's been nothing but bust. After the Lester trade, the A's are 15-23 and have gone from leading their division to almost falling out of the Wild Card. I have no way to explain what is happening. I'm totally lost right now. The only way I can make any sort of sense in what is going on is by comparing it to the thing I know best: sports movies.

Maybe they're Major League 2. The last two years they were a team nobody believed in with an owner who seemed itching to move the team. So they won the pennant. They had the borderline psychopathic closer, a Cuban slugger with a weakness for curveballs, and Bartolo Colon seemed exactly like the kind of veteran pitcher who wouldn't think twice about drinking Jobu's rum. Major League was fun. Those A's teams were fun.

But in Major League 2, stuff started to go to their head. They got too good, started letting it go to their head and forgot to play the game the right way. Is that what's happening with the A's? Did success go to their heads? Did baseball stop being fun for this team? Do we need to get Sean Doolittle a pair of glasses with a skull on them?!?

Or maybe they're D2: The Mighty Ducks. Maybe they're the team that brought in some new blood to elevate the team, but it mostly just messed with their chemistry at first. Is Lester Dean Portman? Is Jeff Samardzija Dwayne Robertson? 

Maybe Adam Dunn will end up being Russ Tyler, the big goofy kid who can do one thing and one thing only and ends up bringing the team together. In Dunn's case, his knuckle puck is hitting home runs. Whatever the case may be, Jim Johnson was definitely a cake eater.

I seriously am just at a loss for what is going on. The only comfort I have is that both of those movies ended up with the team fixing everything at the last minute. I keep waiting for that to happen with Oakland, but things only keep getting worse.

Maybe they're Bull Durham. Maybe Sonny Gray and one of the A's seven catchers are fighting over the same woman.  

Maybe they're Angels in the Outfield, but the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are the actual Angels from the movie and the A's are just getting screwed over by another team in their division having the advantage of a bunch of celestial beings bending foul poles around home run balls. I demand an investigation into this!

I'm starting to lose my mind. This is what the A's are doing to me. They need to figure things out before I start looking for clues to the season in The Da Vinci Code or something.