A month into the 2026 MLB season, suffice to say not everything has gone as predicted. Ask any fan of the Red Sox, Mets, Phillies or Astros, to name just a few of the underachievers. Depending upon your level of realistic expectations it’s conceivable that list could grow exponentially. Heck, I know some Dodgers and Yankees fans who are apoplectic.
It’s a lot harder to find fans that are smiling, especially if one looks past those who live and die with the Cubs (which I concede regular readers here would find nay impossible). It’s WAY harder to find fans of any kind for the current residents of purgatory, the (insert city name here) Athletics. As they are merely taking a bathroom break for an estimated three years en route from Oakland to Las Vegas they have eschewed any formal association with the city of West Sacramento and the AAA ballpark that also houses their more entrenched and beloved co-tenant River Cats, who are providing a measure of hope for those otherwise disgruntled Giants fans that now dominate Northern California more than ever.
But a funny thing has happened in the first sixth-ish of ’26 to a team that again finished fourth in the American League West despite their relocation 85 miles due northeast. They are actually leading that division–by a full game and a half no less. And the way they got to that point was actually impressive, as DICE CITY SPORTS’ Mark Hebert penned late Sunday:
Carlos Cortes delivered a two-run triple, Justin Sterner escaped a bases-loaded jam in the sixth, and the A’s beat the Rangers 2-1 on Sunday at Globe Life Field. The win gave the Athletics the series and pushed them one game ahead of Texas in the AL West…The Athletics scored twice in the first inning, then made those two runs hold all afternoon….Cortes finished 3-for-4 with a triple and both A’s RBIs. Shea Langeliers went 2-for-5, and Soderstrom doubled, walked twice and scored once.
Langeliers is a somewhat known quantity, especially for fantasy baseball fans looking for a cheap productive alternative at catcher. Certainly fans in general know about 2025 AL Rookie Of The Year Nick Kurtz. Soderstrom was slowly but surely earning his way into that world late last year. But Cortes and Sterner are practically dark web names. And manager Mark Kotsay, himself a veteran of the storied Moneyball A’s of the mid-oughts, is earning a new level of respect among not only his peers and players but fans in general for being able to coax these kinds of efforts from a team in seeming limbo who draw barely 10,000 fans a night into the clearly minor league bandbox that serves as their Travelodge.
Truth is, last year’s team actually improved by seven games over the thoroughly demoralized squad that suffered through the wake that was their final season in Oakland, played in the funereal, oversized and clearly dilapidated Mausoleum. A shrine not only to those Moneyball days but their back-to-back-to-back championship runs in the Swingin’ A’s era of the 70s and the late 80s meld that produced an additional three consecutive World Series appearances. So a more observant and less jaundiced person might have seen this coming. I’m not in that category, and I suspect you’d have to search pretty hard to find one who isn’t a recent bandwagoner.
But they do appear to be catching on. The team did embrace the name Sacramento for a recently debuted alternate jersey that at least provides some semblance of civic pride. And tonight they begin a homestand against yet another underachiever wearing uniforms that remind A’s fans of their least successful stretch of their vagabond existence–their 13 seasons in Kansas City where they were a perennial second-division tenant and jokingly referenced as still being the Yankees’ farm club–which their predecessors in old Municipal Stadium, the Blues, indeed were. Maybe the Sacramento incarnation won’t be able to match the level of success they had in Oakland or even in their original home of Philadelphia–that team won three consecutive pennants during a stretch when the Babe Ruth-led Yankees were having an atypical stretch of their own underachieving. But doing better than they did in Kansas City is certainly within reach.
And do remember that their last days in Kaycee were starting to show signs of life and color. Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter were among the eventual world champions that started their careers in Missouri. THE SPORTING NEWS even made their bonus baby Jim Nash a cover boy just weeks before mercurial owner Charlie Finley announced they were taking their talents to the Bay Area. It’s likely that whatever eventual greatness Langeliers and Soderstrom achieve will indeed be in Dice City. In this case, what happens in Vegas won’t necessarily have to stay there. At least for now, Sacramento can enjoy a winning top-tier professional franchise for a change. That’s worth an A on any scorecard.
Courage….