The Oakland A's Went Over Twenty Years Without Losing a Game in Which They Scored At Least 11 Runs
In their fourth game of the 2023 season, the A's scored eleven runs in a game against the Cleveland Guardians in front of 3,035 people in Oakland. It was a shocking offensive outburst as during the entire 162-game 2022 season, the A's scored at least eleven runs just twice! Remarkably, one of those two high-scoring games also came in the fourth game of the season and it was in front of less than 10,000 fans:
they defeated the Tampa Bay Rays 13-2 in front of 9,139 spectators. (The A's and the Rays have two of the worst attendance figures in all of baseball.)
Unlike against the Rays, the A's did not win their game against the Guardians as they were beaten 12-11. It was a surprising defeat since they had gone over twenty years (!!) without losing a game in which they scored at least eleven runs. I did some painstaking research and found that prior to the heartbreaking loss against the Guardians, the A's had won at least 170 consecutive games in which they scored at least eleven runs (thank you Baseball Reference!).
They had also won their last seven (!!) consecutive games in which they and their opponent scored at least eleven runs. Those seven games included
the famous Moneyball game in which they defeated the Royals 12-11 in 2002. They also beat
the Orioles 13-12 in 2000, the Pirates 12-11 in 2004, the Twins 14-13 in 2009, the Giants 13-11 in 2016, the White Sox 12-11 in 2018, and the Twins 13-12 in 2021. The last time that the A's scored at least eleven runs and lost was a 17-16 slugfest against the Rangers in 2000. The A's should have won that game as they were leading 16-10 going into the bottom of the eighth inning!
The home loss against the Guardians was part of a franchise-record tying (!!) 55 home losses for the A's during the 2023 season. The 55 home losses made up nearly half
their
Oakland-record 112 losses. The Athletics' winning percentage of .309 (50 wins out of 162 games) was the worst winning percentage for the franchise in over 100 years: the Philadelphia A's won just 25.7% of their games in 1919.