The Oakland Futility Watch is proud to announce that the 2023 Oakland Athletics will not be the worst major-league baseball team in recent memory, as with a 44th win on Friday night in Texas, the A’s have passed the 2003 Detroit Tigers (43) wins as the “worst” team since the 162-game seasons was implemented. Longtime Oakland sports fans everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief to know this little bit of history.

The A’s got there earlier than we expected, so we have proven our objectivity (again). Oakland is playing one game better than its Pythagorean projection, no thanks to the manager, and the Athletics organization as a whole has started to rebuild its MLB roster successfully. The team currently has a 5-4 record in the month of September, including wins last week over playoff contenders from Toronto and Texas. Awesome!

This is not to say the A’s are a good team; no, far from it. Remember, they’re still 19-27 in one-run games and 7-39 in blowout games this year. The fact they’ve lost 39 games by at least five runs each is stunning, really—that’s almost a quarter of the games on the full schedule. No team should be that bad, really, even though it sometimes happens. Remember, the Kansas City Royals are the first team to 100 losses in 2023.

But Oakland has been getting better, month by month, and maybe we should give that credit to the manager (nah). After a .179 winning percentage in April, the team has improved in the following months:

  • May: .207
  • June: .385
  • July: .348
  • August: .333

In the first half of the season before the All-Star break, the Athletics posted a .272 winning percentage, and since then, the A’s have improved to a .373 winning percentage. We will take it. Even though only 3,871 fans bought tickets to Wednesday’s home game against the Blue Jays, maybe 2,000 people showed up at the most. They missed a win, sadly, and if the Oakland fans had just kept going to games this year … Yeah.