This version of the Oakland Futility Watch faces the reality that the season is winding down to its final two weeks now, and the Oakland Athletics may finish with the worst record in baseball this season and the worst record in Oakland A’s history, too. A bad weekend series at home against the underachieving, high-payroll San Diego Padres may have made that a certainty, but with 46 wins right now, there is still positive.

Remember when the team got off to a 6-23 start by the end of April? It really was doomsday time for the Oakland baseball franchise. All the noise about the move to Vegas, combined with the dreadful start to the season, made it quite the possibility that the Athletics wouldn’t even win 40 games. That .207 win percentage in the first month of the season projected out to just 33.5 victories for the year. That was scary!

Alas, with two wins on the road last week in Houston against the cheating Trashstros, the A’s are now 46-103, and that’s four games better than where we’d thought they would be at this point when we did our realistic predictions last month. Oakland and Kansas City have been trading places at the bottom of the MLB standings for a lot of the late summer, but we see the Athletics now 1.5 games behind the Royals.

That isn’t a bad thing: the A’s could use the No. 1 pick in the 2024 MLB Draft. Maybe they get lucky and find the next Miguel Cabrera, who can anchor the roster in Las Vegas for a decade, right? We saw Cabrera play in Detroit last week, incidentally, and we will see him again this upcoming Sunday at the Coliseum, hopefully, in the last home game for Oakland this year (or maybe ever, depending on how things shake out).

But if our August predictions hold here, the A’s can finish with 51 wins. That would be the worst record in Oakland history, but there were four Philadelphia Athletics squads in the early part of the twentieth century that were much, much worse. Of course, the mediots will just capitalize on the headline hook of “worst ever in Oakland” and never contextualize anything for its dumbed-down audience. That’s why we are here, obvi.