Quotes of the Day

A fan's heights: First game of the American League Division Series between the Oakland Athletics — my team — and the Boston Red Sox. Ace vs ace: their Pedro Martinez vs. our Tim Hudson, the starters with the A.L.'s best earned run averages. We go up 3-2 on Pedro, despite Hudson's sudden and obvious arm strain. Hudson toughs it through another inning, then leaves in the 7th with a man on first. Ricardo Rincon takes over, promptly surrenders a two-run homer, and we're behind 4-3. We rally to tie in the bottom of the 9th. In the top of the 12th, Eric Chavez stops a screeching drive on the left side and scrambles to tag out a Sox runner sliding into third, preserving the tie. In the bottom of the inning, the A's load the bases for catcher Ramon Hernandez, who stuns the baseball world by tapping a bunt toward third. He reaches first safely, Chavez scores, A's win. THEEEEEE A's win!!! In a TIME office in New York, at 2:45 Thursday morning, a solitary fan exults, communing with the A's diaspora, savoring the purest euphoria.

A fan's depths: Last game of the A.L.D.S. The series is tied, two games apiece, and the Sox are ahead in the fifth and deciding game. Again it's 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth. Two Oakland players on base, nobody out. A bunt gets the runners to second and third, and the Sox walk another A's-man to load the bases with just one out. Now could someone please squib a grounder through the infield? Hit a fly ball? Work out a walk? Bunt, maybe? But it was not to be. (Two inside pitches called strike three, game over, A's lose.)

Moreover, most A's fans knew it was not to be. Anyway, I did. Six times in the past three post-seasons, the A's had faced a clinching game and failed to put away the opposition. The three losses to Boston put it at nine — a record, another futile record to add to the many over the past century. Indeed, after the A's had won Game 2, and needed to win one more to advance to the League Championship Series, my mood was morose and foreboding. They have us just where they want us, I thought. Those final three games were one long slow-motion shot of the executioner raising his axe and bringing it down, mercilessly, inexorably, on our hopes.

OUCH!
Every true sports fan is a manic depressive. When our team wins, we're in heaven; when they lose, we reaches for a kitchen knife and stares meditatively at our radial artery. And there is usually more agony than ecstasy. Susan Sontag defined science fiction as "the imagination of disaster"; she might have been describing the mind of a sports fan. We try to live by the old Ukrainian proverb — "Expect the worst and you'll never be disappointed" — but for that ray of hope with which we lash ourselves each spring, then see .glimmer turn to tumor as the season plods downward for six months.

Even if our team plays above .500, it will likely not make the post-season. If it reaches the playoffs, it has a seven-in-eight chance of not winning the World Series. Given that 29 of the 30 major-league teams will lose their last important game, the season-ending misery average for baseball fans is a robust .967. And that angst is acute. Ask Yankees fans which Series they recall more poignantly — any of the four championships from 1996 to 2000, or the seventh-game, bottom-of-the-ninth loss to Arizona in 2001 — and odds are they will groan and acknowledge it's the dinks off Mariano Rivera that replay on the SportsCenter of a fan's private hell.

Having lived in New York for 38 years, I am also a Yankees fan; they're my Team B, the one I can follow most closely, the one I know most about, the one I root for, except when they play the A's. And like many other Yankees fans, I twinge at the memory of the 1995 American League championship series between the Yanks and the Seattle Mariners. I had watched every game, read everything I could find in the New York papers, listened avidly to the sports talk station. Then the Yankees lost the series' fifth and deciding game in extra innings; and like a conservative Jew on Yom Kippur I turned off the TV, kept away from the radio, boycotted newspapers, refused to talk about the playoffs or the World Series that followed. I was not in denial (I knew they'd lost); I was in refusal. The mourning would come later. Mourning becomes a sports fan. And I don't mean Alonzo.

In the can-never-be-too-often-quoted words of manager Sparky Anderson, "Losing hurts worse than winning feels good." Of course, this has application beyond baseball. But baseball will do. As much as I relish the three consecutive championships the A's conjured up in the 70s — how gloriously funny was that moment in 1973 when the A's signaled to intentionally walk Johnny Bench on a 3-2 count, then got him out on a called strike three, ending a Cincinnati Reds scoring threat — the joy of those memories can't compare in intensity to ... I'm forcing myself to type this ... Dennis Eckersley's surrendering of a game-tying-and-winning homer to the crippled Kirk Gibson in Game One of the 1988 Series (we subsequently folded), or to the third game of the 2001 playoffs, when Derek Jeter did ... that thing ... and Jeremy Giambi ... well, it hurt. Still does. Even if, that time, my Team B beat my Team A.

WHY A'S?
I've never lived in or near Oakland, which is 2,500 miles from me. I have seen them play exactly once on the Oakland Coliseum's pretty green checkerboard lawn — in 1990, when I did a TIME story on the A's, who were then approaching their third consecutive World Series. (For me, visiting there was like a devout Catholic getting an assignment to cover Lourdes.)

So why am I an A's fan? Because, from 1901 to 1954, they were the Philadelphia Athletics. Philadelphia is my home town. The A's were the team I loved as a kid, and no gap of space or time can fray that bond. They moved to Kansas City in 1955, then to Oakland in 1968; they may move yet again, if some city will have them. And if they play in Nome or Baghdad I will scan the box scores, pump my fist when they win, get the blues when they lose.

I have a photo of me, age 9, posed in an A's uniform. A half-century later, I am still that boy, I suppose. Like most fans infected at childhood, I remain loyal to that elaborately scripted letter A (royal blue, not scarlet), to the white elephant that was their logo and their nickname — more important, to the team's occasional surges, like a comet streaking across the sky, and their long dark spells, where a total eclipse of their fans' hearts sometimes lasted for decades.

A'S OF OLD
For the first 50 of the A's 103 years their manager and owner was a slim, severe gent named Cornelius Alexander McGillicuddy — Connie Mack. He had been a pro ballplayer in the 19th century, but unlike other managers his dugout apparel was not a team uniform with a 46-inch waist. (The vision of 70-year-old Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, with his bloated cherub face and pear-shaped figure perpetually threatening to burst through the all-too-form-fitting pinstripes, encapsulates a whole lot of baseball's preposterous charm.) Mack wore a conservative suit, a high collar and a tie with stick pin. A baseball game was respectable entertainment, and the A's skipper was bound to dress for the occasion. He looked like John D. Rockefeller at the Standard Oil picnic softball game.

The economic rules of baseball today — free agency, the disproportion of teams' income, the whims of owners (misers or lavish spenders) — create a year-to-year volatility of talent and thus winners. The Florida Marlins, which first fielded a team in 1993, won the World Series in 1997; then they house-cleaned or were burglarized the following season and landed in last place; this year, after paying $10 million for Pudge Rodriguez and getting lucky, they are battling the Cubs for the National League championship. Major League standings in Mack's day made for much more placid statistics. Teams were longtime winners ("perennial contenders") or lovable losers ("cellar-dwellers").

Mack, who seemed a 19th-century anachronism even in the game's salad days, was nonetheless in the mold of 21st-century club owners. He would build a terrific team, win a few pennants, maybe a World Series, and then, believing he could not afford the stars whose success his system had created, sell them off and plunge into — not mediocrity — an incompetence that was both stunning and boring. Mack had a little dynasty from 1910 to 1914, with Eddie Plank and Chief Bender as his dominant starters and Eddie Collins and Frank Baker leading the offense. (All five men in that sentence were later voted into the baseball Hall of Fame.) The A's made the World Series four times in those five years, winning twice. But in 1915 the rival Federal League emerged, siphoning off Mack's best players, and in a year the A's record plunged from 96-57 to 43-100 — a 56-game drop. That must be a record.

They slumbered in last place for seven straight seasons — you did not want to be a young A's fan in that plague period — then climbed back to respectability, a rung at a time: 7th place in 1922, 6th in '23, 5th in '24, and, in '25, when Mack acquired the great minor league southpaw Lefty Grove, all the way to second. (The Yankees, with Ruth and Gehrig, somehow finished 7th that season.) Led by future Hall of Famers Jimmy Foxx, Mickey Cochrane and Al Simmons, the A's remained contenders for the rest of the decade, and in 1929 posted a 104-46 record, an almost exact reversal of their 1915 ignominy. In the World Series they defiled the Cubs in five. Perversely, Mack used Grove only in two relief appearances, relying instead on George Earnshaw, who started consecutive games, and the veteran back-bencher Howard Ehmke, who started the first and last games.

Mack couldn't ignore Grove in 1930. Though it was the greatest year for offense in Major League history (nine clubs batted over .300), Lefty was as imposing as ever, recording a 28-5 won-lost record and a miraculously stingy 2.54 ERA. (Consider that, of the Yankees' 18 pitchers that year, the only one with an ERA below 4.00 was Babe Ruth, who gave up two earned runs in a six-inning spot start.) Grove and Earnshaw started five of the six World Series games that October, and the A's beat St. Louis for a second straight crown. In 1931 they lost a seven-game rematch with the Cardinals. Again Mack sold off his stars, and the A's tiptoed down from greatness: 2nd, 3rd, 5th in the next three seasons, pratfalling into 8th place in 1935.

There the A's found competitive company. The Washington Senators — who won pennants in 1924-25 on the ancient arm of Walter Johnson and off the bat of Goose Goslin (two more Hall of Famers), and remained in contention for most of the next decade — had sunk into a torpor that would have shamed Rip van Winkle, They had winning seasons only four times between 1934 and 1960 (after which they emigrated to Minnesota) and by the mid-50s had achieved a level of failure so iconic that the best-selling book "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant," and the ensuring Broadway musical "Damn Yankees," could boast the plausible premise that the Senators needed infernal intervention — the Devil himself — to secure a league flag. You might think that Washington had earned the motto: "First in war, first in peace and last in the American League"...

...unless you were an A's fan. For decades, our team (I say "our," though I wasn't born yet; such is a sports fan's mark of Cain) was anonymously terrible. No matter how rotten the Senators were, we were worse, finishing behind them 12 years out of 13 (1934-46). If you can't get respect for being good, how about some notoriety — every bit of it deserved — for being awful? We were awful with a capital A's. We had losing seasons in 16 of our last 20 years in Philly. Eleven times in those 20 years we finished eighth in an eight-team league. I don't mean to brag, but hey, dude, we OWNED last place.

A'S OF MINE
I came of baseball age (isn't it always around first grade?) in the last sputtering years of the A's Philadelphia tenancy. I probably plighted my fated troth in 1949, when the A's fluked into a winning season and introduced a pintsize southpaw named Bobby Shantz. Except for this and the previous two seasons, when they achieved winning records (though they were never part of a pennant race, finishing an average 16 games out of first place), the A's had long loitered in the minor leagues of the major leagues — the second division, far below the contenders and pretenders. So I had no recent glory to spur my youthful optimism, no sensible hope of imminent improvement, no future Hall of Famers to show me how the game should be played. But even then, I knew the A's were my sports-fan destiny.

Anyone who roots for a bad team has two choices: change your attitude or change teams. The latter should have been simple for me. In the same city, playing in the same cramped stadium (unlovely Shibe Park), were the National League Phillies. In 1949 the Phillies and A's had identical 81-73 records. The following year, the Phillie "Whiz Kids" won 91 games and the N.L. pennant, before grabbing that bar of prison soap and getting butt-swept by the Yanks, in the second of five straight championships. That same year, the A's sleepwalked to an egregious 52-102 finish, 46 games out.

Yet I stuck with the town's lousy team. (The Phillies soon sank back into the slough of their fans' despond.) Part of my early A's ardor is, I think, is phonetic. I preferred that hard, proud "A" sound to the soft, equine Phillie. The budding wordsmith in me may also have been beguiled by a team whose name had no known plural (A'ses?) or possessive (A's'? A's's?). Look, who can explain why kids like what they like?

So I watched games on TV, listened to bald Quaker Byrum Saam and color man Bill Campbell — their voices respectively metallic and warm — on my bedroom radio late at night. (For a seven- or eight-year-old, any time at night is late.) I learned true fan loyalty back then, pursuing the small satisfactions and grudging pleasures of bad teams: giving the top squads a tough game, beating a league leader late in the season to keep it from clinching the pennant, savoring the work of our few exceptional players.

To page through The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball, that wonderful and pioneering blend of stats and seasonal summaries, is to be reminded of some of the A's accomplishments. In 1951, Gus Zernial, an April import from the White Sox, and our own diluted Ralph Kiner, led the league in home runs and RBIs (and strikeouts). In 1952, Shantz — 5ft.6, 137 lbs., and one of the game's great fielding pitchers — won 24 games in 1952, a league best. In 1953, Harry Byrd lost 20, also tops for the year. The A's never sent a midget to the plate, as the St. Louis Browns did in 1951, but the following year one of their pitchers, Bobo Newsom, was a geriatric 45. The only older roster player was Satchel Paige, also and naturally playing for the Browns.

Perhaps only to a child of the Philadelphia 50s could the A's roster summon magic. Ferris Fain (1B), Pete Suder (2B), Eddie Joost (SS), Hank Majeski (3B), Elmer Valo (OF) — the old-time-ballplayer names have a crispness that their defensive play lacked. Alex Kellner, with a 101-112 lifetime record and a 4.41 ERA, was our other mound ace. Another occasional starter, Sad Sam Zoldak, joined Zernial as the two big guys at the end of the alphabet. For so many reasons, the A's of that period should have been called the Z's.

LATE A'S AND GREAT A'S
At the end of the 1954 season, when we amassed a 51-113 record and finished an impressive (even for us) 60 games out of first place, we could hear "Goodnight, Sweetheart" being played in the empty old ballpark. Mack and his family sold the A's to a man named Arnold Johnson, who deported the team to Kansas City. There the A's became known as the farm team for the Yankees, sending them promising players, receiving Bronx retreads. It was our only brush with greatness in the era. I still followed the team, fitfully, furtively, peeking at the often-incomplete box scores in the Philadelphia Inquirer. (In those days the sports section ran whatever scores had come off the wire just before deadline, so you might get a six-inning tally — tantalizingly open-ended.) But my A's amour lay mostly dormant for another decade or so.

Say this for the A's: when they moved to Kansas City, they proved that a change of venue could not dilute their losers' nature: 13 consecutive seasons under .500, and only twice not in last place or next to last. This was after the A.L. expanded from eight teams to 10: do you know how hard it is to finish 10th three years out of four? And hard on the fans. Ask my colleague Richard Zoglin, TIME's drama critic, who grew up in Kansas City and, as an A's partisan, was prematurely aged in despair.

Only when the A's got to California in 1968 did they learn to win, to show character — characters, really, with Reggie and Rollie and Vida and the other, kookie, brawling, mustachioed, three-time World Series champs of 1972-74. Thereafter, the A's recapitulated the awesome-or-awful tendency of the Mack half-century but, praise Jesus, with shorter bad intervals between the good stretches.

Billy Martin, in a rehab pause in his fiery, five-time managerial marriage to George Steinbrenner's Yankees, brought the A's from last place to first in two years (1979-81); it was called Billy Ball and, when the A's won their first 11 games in 1981, made the cover of TIME. Martin accomplished the turn-around partly on the fleet legs of Rickey Henderson, partly by ignoring all bullpen strategy and letting his quintet of strong young starters pitch till they dropped. In 1980, when they finished second in the A.L. West, the A's notched a preposterously high 94 complete games (the Yanks, by comparison, had 29, 16 of them by Tommy John). The next year, they had 60 saves in a strike-shortened season of 109 games and made it back to the playoffs. The year after that, the starters' arms all fell off; none of the five was useful again, and the A's recommenced stinking.

They dominated again at the end of the decade, with glowering starter Dave Stewart, ace closer Dennis Eckersley and the Bash Brothers (Canseco and McGwire, just catchin' fire). And now they're back, at least into the post-season, with another kind of Billy Ball: Billy Beane's cut-rate conniving. Beane's success as an ace trader, earning four consecutive playoff spots for a team whose budget is less than a third of the Yankees', would earn him praise as the greatest General Manager the game has know — if only the A's could win a post-season series. If only Jeremy Giambi knew how to slide into home plate. If only the arms of the team's two best pitchers hadn't fallen off this year. If only...

Every opportunity carries with it an equal or greater curse. A's fans have to ask themselves: how do we want our pain? Would we rather suffer from low-level depression all summer, as our team wanders in the Texas or Tampa Bay wilderness, or advance to the playoffs and get a swift shiv to the ribs every October?

I'm thinking, I'm thinking.

THESE A'S
Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" made Beane famous this year. The best-seller showed how a small-market team, with a budget (about $50 million this year) less than what the Yankees pay just four players (Jeter, Bernie, Mussina and Pettitte), could Svengali its way to the playoffs four years in a row. The book tracked the A's 2002 season, in which Beane, as is his clever wont, traded from weakness to richer teams and got back players he could fit into his walk-and-hit offensive system. It's a terrific read, with excellent inside-baseball dish, and it made Beane look so much smarter than his fellow GMs that some suspected he'd be unable to pull off one of his patented mid-season talent raids. They were wrong.

So is the book. Yes, homegrown sluggers like Chavez, Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada are players any team would, and will, pay zillions for. But what Beane preaches — work out walks, get on base, knock 'em home — the A's don't do particularly well. They were 9th in on-base percentage, 10th in RBIs, 4th in walks; in all these categories, the Yanks and Red Sox were first or second. The team's offensive mediocrity and their tortoisity on the basepaths lost them the last three games. And in the at opening-game thriller, the A's won by doing something they famously eschew: bunt.

No, Oakland's recent success does not derive from its batting talent. It is from the three phenomenal young pitchers — Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito (another A's Z!) — whom the team drafted and developed. In 2001, they, Ted Lilly and Corey Lidle became the first starting five in decades who each had an ERA below 4.00. Even more startling: that same year, the Golden Three's combined salary was less than $1 million.

Seeing this trio mature and endure has been among my greatest pleasures as an A's fan. And when one guy goes down, another one steps up. This August, we lost Mulder, out for the year with a bum hip.) His loss might have broken the team's spirit, given them an excuse to go doggo. Instead, it inspired them. It especially spurred Lilly, previously an anonymous fifth starter, but down the stretch unhittable.: The A's won 10 straight after Mulder's injury, overtook Boston in the wild-card race and then Seattle in the A.L. West, and cruised to the division title. Another great run.

Before the Red Sox set-to, Beane puckishly predicted that this could be the first division series that neither team won — that the A's and the Sox could attack each other like Go-bots and simultaneously knock each other's heads off. It almost happened: literally, to Johnny Damon, when suffered a concussion after a centerfield collision; and reputedly, to Mulder, who some said was involved in a bar brawl during his Boston visit. But we know which bot was left standing, which one self-destructed and was annihilated. I know; I saw it. The ache in my forever-fan's gut punishes me enough; I will skip the description and the self-flagellation.

It happens I was in Miami when the axe fell on the A's season. Having witnessed the execution, I was in no mood to watch the autopsy. So I flipped off the TV and walked outside with my portable radio. I sat by a posh swimming pool (if I'm going to be miserable, let me be miserable in posh surroundings) and listened to the end of the Monday Night Football game: the Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. the Indianapolis Colts. In a bizarre comeback unprecedented in NFL history, the Colts plundered the Bucs' vaunted defense to score 21 points in the last four minutes and force the game into overtime, where they took advantage of a disputed call to kick an easy field goal. Colts win, THEEEEEE Colts win!

Let me be happy for somebody. And in baseball, let me root for someone. C'mon, Yanks — play like champions!

• Richard Corliss