The Oakland Futility Watch continues today, as the Athletics won two games last week to break an 11-game losing streak. In fact, the A’s won two in a row—for just the second time this season. Going even further, Oakland won the first two games of the week over the Atlanta Braves, giving hope for a possible sweep or at least a break-even week. Alas, the A’s ended up dropping four straight at that point, by a combined 19 runs.

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted. We actually went to the potential sweep game, and it was tied 0-0 after four innings, before the Oakland pitching imploded a little bit in an eventual 4-2 defeat. We even saw some old men there with brooms, rooting on the A’s, so don’t believe the misdirected media narrative about fans not supporting this team. The hardcore folks are still out there in Oakland cheering on their team loyally.

Our column picture today shows a middling crowd for a last-place team on a weekday, but the Coliseum itself is a nice place to play baseball still, despite all the naysayers—most of whom have never been to the stadiums they either rate highly or poorly. And to remind you all, we spent 7 years in the A’s press box ourselves, and we never saw a rodent. Never.

All that being said, the Golden State Warriors left Oakland for a reason (money). The Oakland Raiders left the city for a reason (money). MLB has not wanted the A’s in the Bay Area since the early 1990s for one reason (money). Las Vegas is a green pasture, as the NFL and the NHL have discovered—and the NBA will be pouncing on soon. It makes business cents for the A’s to leave Oakland and go to another city for profits.

As for the team itself, well … the 12-49 record currently is ugly. We know this. The A’s are already 27.5 games out of first place; the next-worst team in MLB is only 12.5 games behind its division leader. That’s the Kansas City Royals, who the A’s beat for their first series win in early May. But the AL Central leaders are barely over .500 themselves, and that team is eight games worse than the team leading the AL West.

Oakland is on pace for just 32 victories this season, which would set many records for futility—hence the purpose of our weekly check-in updates. The A’s run differential (-3.5 per game) is 2.2 runs worse than the Royals. And here’s a surprising fact: of course, Oakland’s SOS rates out to being the second-toughest one in MLB right now, trailing only the New York Yankees’ strength of schedule by a very slim margin.

That hasn’t helped the A’s at all. While we don’t expect the road to get easier for Oakland, we do expect the team to get a little better. In April, the A’s won 5 games. In May, they won 6 games. If they can keep that kind of improvement going, then maybe Oakland wins 7 games in June, another 5-6 in July (due to the All-Star break), 8 games in August, and 9 games in September. That “ideal” scenario puts Oakland at 41 wins, maybe.

However, the A’s are also executing one win below their PPP projection, so Manager Mark Kotsay could use some improvement, too. He made an interesting choice on Wednesday against the Braves to leave a left-handed pitcher in the bullpen and intentionally walk Atlanta’s Matt Olson (the former A’s star) so the right-handed starter could face another batter—who then got hit by a pitch with the bases loaded. Doh!

That didn’t work out in the decisive inning, costing the A’s a run. Also, earlier in the game, Oakland had two innings were it should have scored: the first and the third, where both times the A’s had a runner on second with nobody out. Oakland ended up with no runs in either situation due to poor decision making and fundamentals. On a team like this, Kotsay has to be doing better than that in order to get the A’s … better.