A's look less like Island of Misfit Toys, more like MLB's fourth-best team

OAKLAND -- And so, having avoided the multiple pitfalls of playing at home for 10 days, the Oakland A’s return to the place that spawned them -- Somewhere Else.
 
And they do so in a perfectly weird and totally A’s-ian way -- by hitting no homers, barely striking out at all, thoroughly entertaining a large and loud crowd, and by coming as close as mortals can come to wearing out Clayton Kershaw.
 
Exactly the way you would figure, if you lived in Bizarro World.
 
The Athleticals closed out their latest homestand with a 3-2 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers that made little thematic sense, save for the fact that it defied their usual conventions while perhaps establishing new ones for the stretch run.
 
Mike Fiers, a pigeonholed pitch-to-contact guy for most of his MLB career, flirted with a perfect game in his Elephant debut, striking out eight of the first 12 Dodgers he faced in a festival of willful nastiness, while the offense ground out at-bats against Kershaw without striking out -- well, except for Matt Chapman, who looked at a called third with one out in the fifth, marking the longest the Dodgers left-hander has ever gone in a game without at least one K.
 
The A’s hit zero homers, and scored the winning run because Khris Davis bounced modestly to third baseman Manny Machado with one out in the eighth, scoring Marcus Semien from third when catcher Yasmani Grandal couldn’t handle the throw.
 
And after being a sub-modest home team for the season’s first three months, the A’s now have won 14 of their last 17 in the suddenly cheery confines of the Coliseum and are 22-9 in one-run games, supplanting the free-falling Seattles as the game’s best in that category. They now look less like the Island of Misfit Toys and more like the team with the fourth-best record in baseball.
 
All of which greatly amused A's manager Bob Melvin. He credited Fiers’ adrenal gland for powering him through the early innings ("I think he wanted to make a good impression early on, his first time with a new team and a good crowd, and I think you saw how much that drove him"), Davis’ developing bat control ("He’s been hitting like that all year, putting more balls in play. ... That was a hitter’s RBI there") and the team’s newfound ability to make home seem more like home should be.
 
The A's slip off for three games in Los Angeles against the Trout-Ohtani Angels, then return home for series against the Mariners, Astros (Seattle is in Houston this weekend) and hit-happy Texas Rangers.
 
More important than schedule-watching, though, the A’s now are fleshing themselves out as a team that knows how to be a tough afternoon’s work -- just in time for the citizens to learn how to appreciate it with both presence and voice.
 
All that’s left now is the doing ... over and over and over again. There still are seven weeks of the season to hack through, the time of year when the faint of purpose tend to, well, faint.
 
For now, though, the A's keep making impressions that could last -- on themselves, and perhaps just as importantly, with those around them.