As I lamented about a month ago, the A’s offense has been subpar this year. What I didn’t expect was that it was actually going to get worse after that post: I had largely chalked it down to small sample size, and how long can that continue? But from May 1 to May 29, they won 5 games and lost 20. It’s not easy to have two 8-game losing streaks in a single month, but they managed it.

Fortunately, this week has been a complete change of pace: a four-game winning streak, followed by a loss, followed by two more wins. With quite nice hitting, both volume-wise and clitch-wise. Yesterday, after they gave up two runs in the first two innings, I was nervous, but they stopped the bleeding there, and in the sixth inning Eric Byrnes made a great defensive play and then hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the inning, and the A’s tacked on a few more later to win. Yay. Hopefully this is a little closer to their true offensive performance, and once Rich Harden gets back, maybe they’ll go on a bit of a tear.

Mind you, I’m still not optimistic about their making the playoffs this year. But a rebuilding year wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Nice to see that the O’s are still playing reasonably well, if not quite as well as they were in April.