The Houston Astros have started looking like one of the best teams in baseball again, winning eight of their last 10 games and creeping up behind the Texas Rangers in the AL West standings. Meanwhile, the division-rival Oakland Athletics remain the very worst team in MLB.
The Astros smacked the Athletics around on their home turf on Sunday, winning 10-1 with 13 hits and seven home runs. Oakland managed just six total hits on the day. After the game, the Astros' Twitter account flamed the Athletics, with a clip of a Yordan Alvarez home run captioned “10 runs in front of tens of fans.”
https://twitter.com/astros/status/1662951102600339460?s=20
The empty outfield bleachers show precisely what the Astros are getting at. Attendance at Athletics games this season is indeed very bad, hosting less than 9,000 fans per game while no other team is below 12,000 per game. The team on the field is putrid as the ownership group, led by John Fisher, looks to cut costs and fan interest so that it can relocate the franchise to Las Vegas.
The Athletics players and coaches are essentially being held back from winning due to their ownership being cheap and hellbent on moving the team. All the losing that they have done is not sitting well with them. Selling off the many star players that have come up through the ranks leaves the team in a rut that seems impossible to dig out of.
While the Athletics look to break an 11-game losing streak, the Astros will keep trying to string together victories and try to make it back to the World Series.