by Charlie O Mallonee

OAKLAND–I want people to know that I don’t look at the failures or the successes of a baseball team or any sports team for that matter to be a life or death issue but right now it’s very, very tough to be positive about the Oakland A’s. Their 1-6 in their last seven games, their current record is 59-79.

The A’s going into Tuesday night’s game against the Astros 20 games below .500 and it’s virtually impossible for them to get back to .500 out there in the course of the season. The A’s have the worst record in the American League and if it’s comforting there are some teams in the National League that have worst records but that really doesn’t comfort me.

Right now the A’s have the fifth worst record after 138 games in A’s history. That gives you some prospective on how bad this team is. If the season stops now they would have the fifth worst record of any team in Oakland. When I’m looking at that I’m going “wow” because when you look back to some of the days in the 80s when things were so horrid you don’t want to equate that to something that’s necessarily that’s there.

The Athletics are seven games behind Seattle and I kept pushing the fact that it was really important if they could to pass Seattle for fourth place. Frankly at this point with the schedule that’s left, the difficulty of the schedule that’s not going to happen. If it does happen it would be nothing short of a baseball miracle at this point because the A’s are going in the wrong direction.

The A’s are 16 games behind Houston for first place in the division and their 14 games out of the wild card. So even though they technically haven’t been eliminated their about to be eliminated from any chance at post season play. The call ups this September haven’t been overwhelming. A’s left hand pitcher Sean Nolan went on Sunday against the Mariners threw pretty good, he pitched strong innings he gave up three runs they were all earned but that’s not horrible, he gave up five hits, he struck one and walked three but I write that line off to being your first MLB start. A good outing for Nolan.

Charlie O does the A’s podcasts each week for http://www.sportsradioservice.com