Pressure Is on Brandon Moss, Josh Donaldson to Carry A's Postseason Offense

The Oakland A's are limping into the playoffs, which makes Josh Donaldson the perfect man to carry them.

After tearing through the first half like world-beaters and stockpiling at the trade deadline, Oakland pulled up lame after the All-Star break. The formerly potent offense sputtered. The losses piled up.

As Carl Steward of the San Jose Mercury News put it in a scathing (and perhaps premature) postmortem Sept. 20, "The puzzle pieces that made the A's the best team in baseball the first four months of the season just don't seem to fit very well anymore." 

And so Oakland found itself, on the season's final day, scrambling just to squeak in as the second wild card. They did, defeating the Texas Rangers 4-0 and fending off the no-quit Seattle Mariners.

Donaldson went 0-for-4 with a strikeout. His mere presence in the batter's box and at third base, though, was impressive.

Already nursing a sore hip and hamstring, Donaldson tweaked his left knee diving for a ground ball Sept. 26. He stayed in the game and later scored a run, hobbling around the bases with a noticeable grimace.

"It's an inspiration to get a guy in the lineup who's that banged-up," manager Bob Melvin told MLB.com's Jane Lee.

The A's will need more than inspiration if they're going to get past the Kansas City Royals in Tuesday's Wild Card Game, let alone make a run at the first World Series in the Billy Beane era.

They'll need their bats, which not so long ago led the American League in scoring, to wake up.

Donaldson, who leads the club with 29 home runs and 98 RBI, will have to lead the way, bum knee and all. And he'll need help, specifically from Brandon Moss.

Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images

No player encapsulates the Athletics' second-half struggles better than Moss. The outfielder/first baseman clubbed 21 home runs before the break but has managed just four big flies and is hitting below the Mendoza Line since.

He's also dealing with his own health woes, a hip injury that will require offseason surgery, per John Hickey of the San Jose Mercury News.

Moss hit a double and knocked in a run in the wild-card clincher Sunday, but he wasn't the hero.

That'd be starting pitcher Sonny Gray, who twirled a six-hit shutout. Along with Jon Lester and Jeff Samardzija—the trade-deadline cavalry—and Scott Kazmir, Gray solidifies one of the 2014 postseason's best rotations.

Oakland has the pitching to make a deep October run. Beane, the "moneyball" general manager, made sure of that when he dealt top prospects and Cuban slugger Yoenis Cespedes for Lester and Samardzija, two of the strongest arms on the block.

Still, you can't win unless you score. That's where Donaldson and Moss, the ostensible middle of the order, come in. Others—right fielder Josh Reddick, center fielder and leadoff hitter Coco Crisp—can and must step up.

TONY AVELAR/Associated Press

But this is the time of year when the burden falls on star players to play like stars. You could argue Donaldson and Moss aren't exactly stars, though Donaldson finished fourth in AL MVP voting last year and has the fifth-highest WAR among major league position players, per FanGraphs.com.

Here's their chance to make the opposite argument, to shrug off any recent struggles and shine on the game's biggest stage.

"That’s what you prepare for as a little kid," Donaldson told the San Francisco Chronicle's Ron Kroichick, after he launched his third walk-off home run of the season Sept. 21 against the Los Angeles Angels. "I relish the moment."

Spoken like a guy with a spring in his step.

All statistics courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.