Once, long ago, I had a picture inside a 4 x 6 glass frame, propped up by a stand atop my clothes dresser. I’d see it every day but it was only every so often that I really looked at it. It made me smile, sent the good chills down my spine, and it would all come back:
The Streak. The Home Run. The MVP.
The Pitcher. The Road Trip.
All of it.
In the late summer of 2002, the A’s won 20 games in a row. Twenty years later, just writing that sentence is absurd. Because I mean, c’mon, no team wins that many games in a row. Not even by accident.
It was worth a book and a movie called “Moneyball.”
That’s how Sunday’s gathering at the Coliseum and the reunion of that 2002 team will feel to me. Exactly like a movie, because until then, you could’ve written 100 baseball scripts and not come up with anything as ridiculous as a team going 3 1/2 weeks without losing a game.
That’s why seeing Art Howe will be so good. Besides being one of the greatest gentlemen I’ve ever met, let me remind the oldsters and inform the youngsters that he won 102 games in 2002, did not get a contract extension, then won 103 more in 2003. If you think that’s an easy thing to do with any set of 25 professional athletes, go find Brad Pitt and ask him to do it.
That’s why seeing Scott Hatteberg will be so affirming. His career was about over in the winter of 2001. By the fall of ’02, he’d cemented his legacy. Life can turn on a fastball.
About those 20 consecutive wins, the last was a 12-11 rollercoaster at the Oakland Coliseum and the most stressful night of my baseball-writing life. The thrill of 50,000 people when Hatteberg launched his walk-off home run into the night sky came only after the agony of 50,000 people as they watched an 11-run lead turn into a zero-run lead.
At 11-0, I thought it might be one of the easiest nights of my baseball-writing life. Conventional wisdom gets you nowhere with baseball.
Miguel Tejada would agree.
Few thought Tejada could be an MVP. Even fewer thought he could reach the upper echelon of AL shortstops, which at the time glittered with Derek Jeter (Yankees), Alex Rodriguez (Rangers) and Nomar Garciaparra (Red Sox). When I advanced those possibilities in stories about the team, I’d been met with a lot of pushback
On the Sunday before Labor Day, Tejada batted with the A’s down a run with one out in the ninth inning against the Minnesota Twins and hit a three-run home run — “TEJADA WINS IT! DO YOU BELIEVE IT?!” radio broadcaster Ken Korach bellowed — for win No. 18. The next day, he walked off the Royals with a sizzling single up the middle — “TEJADA WINS ANOTHER BALLGAME!” Korach roared — capping a 7-6 win in a game the A’s once trailed 5-0.
Tejada became the AL MVP that weekend. And I was the Chesire Cat.
This brings me back to the picture that used to sit on my dresser. In it, my son Clayton is 8 weeks old and in an infant seat near me atop the dining room table. I’m on the phone, pen in hand, notebook open, talking to Tejada who had been announced as the MVP that day.
Clayton’s mom took the picture as a symbolic reminder of how life and a baseball season can take turns you never would have imagined.
So can a winning streak.
The streak began on Aug. 13, a 5-4 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays.with the A’s getting eight innings from Barry Zito and a three-run homer from David Justice. In the third victory, the A’s got seven shutout innings from Cory Lidle. Lidle, the fourth pitcher in the famed Big Three rotation, never allowed a run during the streak, a span of 32 scoreless innings.
The Big Three — Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito — accounted for 57 of the team’s 103 wins that year, struck out 493 batters and posted an aggregated 3.05 ERA in 675 innings. It’s worth noting that all three were ordinary during the streak and received no love in the movie.
The Streak was at five when the A’s went on the road for four games in Cleveland, three in Detroit, three in Kansas City — three bad teams. Justice joked that the A’s couldn’t win all of them unless they won the first one. They did.
He said it again the next night. Then the next. Then the next . . .
They won all 10. In win No. 12, led by subs John Mabry and Greg Myers, the A’s overcame a five-run deficit over the final three innings to beat the Tigers.
After extending the streak to 15 with three wins in K.C., a labor dispute between the players and owner came to a head. A strike loomed in 48 hours. The season and the streak were in jeopardy.
Fortunately, the players and owners reached a compromise. The A’s returned home to sweep the Twins in front of three of the most electric crowds in Coliseum history.
I don’t know where that picture of me and my son has gone. Along the way it got caught in the tides of life and disappeared.
Tejada is 48, and this is the ninth season since he retired. He never won another MVP.
Most people know Hatteberg only as the Chris Pratt character in the movie. Lidle died in a plane crash in 2006. Hudson and Zito won World Series rings for the Giants. Mulder got his with the St. Louis Cardinals.
The A’s no longer hold the distinction of having the longest winning streak. Cleveland won 22 consecutive games in 2017.
But that changes nothing for me.
“. . . And that one is gone, and it’s 20 consecutive victories . . . “
What a moment in time. Once. Long ago.
