A's ‘disappointed,' lost late magic in downturned season

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Matt Chapman stood atop the visiting dugout with his head in his folded arms as the Seattle Mariners celebrated the 4-2 victory over the Athletics at T-Mobile Park on Thursday night, eliminating Oakland from playoff contention.

For the first time since 2017, there will be no green and gold in the postseason.

This one hurt, and you could see it all over the team’s faces -- even through a Zoom call. 

“We’re bummed out, you know,” Chapman said after the game. “We haven’t really been playing very well over this last month or so, so it kind of sucks when you know, even though we’ve been playing not very well, we’ve still had an opportunity and we just couldn’t get the job done.”

Chapman said it didn’t necessarily come down to a singular game, but shouldered the blame for some of the fallout.

“I think everybody, you know, everybody put the work in, everybody showed up, we just came up short. You know, for me, personally, I’m very upset with how I finished this season. I know I’m capable of more and I know that. It just hurts when I feel like I could have done more to help this team and when I’m playing at the level that I usually do, I feel like I can help this team win more baseball games.”

Chapman, much like the A’s, had a very streaky season. He would be swinging a hot bat one moment, then he would ride a cold streak. He struck out for the 201st time of the season Thursday night, the most in A’s single-season history.  

However, he wasn't alone. Outfielder Mark Canha listed every aspect as to what went wrong for Oakland this season.

“We just didn’t play well enough across the board,” Canha said. “We didn’t -- we didn’t baseball well. We didn’t do the little things. We didn’t hit well enough, we didn’t pitch well enough, we didn’t -- we didn’t make it happen. We needed to get the ball rolling and get some momentum and we never could. It was just -- we did some good things down the stretch, we did a lot of good things, we just didn’t play well enough, consistently.”

“We didn’t have that magic at the end of the year we usually have,” Canha added. “That’s usually our calling card. We usually come back to win those close games, historically been good at that. We didn’t have it this year.”

The key term throughout the night was “disappointed.” The kind of disappointed where you saw the potential but weren't able to see it come to fruition. 

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“I mean, we expected to go to the postseason,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said. “This year we had our opportunities and here, down the stretch, we didn’t play well enough to get there. So guys are very disappointed.

“It’s very disappointing when you have high expectations and you expect to go to the postseason -- you have a history of doing it. You know, it’s one thing to come out of a pack, and you know, play like the Mariners are right now, but for a team that has a history of going to the postseason, it’s extremely disappointing.” 

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