A’s vs. Rays: A Wild Card Playoff Between Mirror Images

OAKLAND, Calif. — The Oakland A’s and the Tampa Bay Rays are linked in baseball’s consciousness, cousins from opposite coasts with rhyming nicknames, tarps draped over empty seats in the upper deck and a knack for doing more with less.

The two organizations can present an inconvenient sticking point for Commissioner Rob Manfred, who speaks often of Major League Baseball as a “growth industry” while acknowledging that the league cannot expand until the A’s and the Rays find new stadiums. Both have been searching in vain for years.

But both have reached October this season, with the A’s set to host the Rays in the American League wild card game on Wednesday at the Coliseum, their home since 1968, off Interstate 880 near the airport. The complex includes Oracle Arena, which the Golden State Warriors just abandoned for San Francisco. The N.F.L.’s Oakland Raiders, who share the Coliseum, are leaving next year for Las Vegas.

Last year the Athletics moved their front office to Oakland’s Jack London Square, closer to the Howard Terminal site where they want to build a new ballpark. The team — which once pined for San Jose but was blocked from moving there by the San Francisco Giants — is working through a lengthy political process in hopes of breaking ground in 2021.

The Rays play at baseball’s only permanently closed dome, Tropicana Field, which was built in St. Petersburg in the 1980s to lure an existing team and finally landed the Rays as an expansion team in 1998. Last winter, the Rays announced the collapse of a three-year effort to build a ballpark in Ybor City, and their latest plan — to share their home schedule with Montreal, with both cities building new stadiums — is laughably implausible.

The teams do what they can with their aging facilities. The A’s have a popular Treehouse area in left field with bars and a D.J., and they sell membership passes (some for as little as $33 per month) instead of season tickets. The Rays provide numerous attractions beyond the center field wall, including interactive games, a touch tank with live stingrays and the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters’ Hall of Fame.

Yet attendance for both teams remains near the bottom. The A’s ranked 24th in the majors this season in tickets sold per game, with 20,521. The Rays were 29th with 14,552, ahead of only the Miami Marlins.

“We have an organization full of people who try to make it our mission to energize this area with what we do, and I think for a ton of people, they do that,” Chaim Bloom, the Rays’ vice president of baseball operations, said earlier this season. “The challenges we face and some of the potential solutions that we’re seeking — from a business standpoint, those aren’t any secret. From a baseball standpoint, I don’t think they prevent us from trying to excel.”

Several major league teams are mired in painstaking rebuilds, a trend reflected in the standings: For the first time since 2002 — and just the second season ever — four teams lost at least 100 games. Yet the A’s and the Rays never really concede, despite payrolls that, according to Sportrac, ranked 25th in the majors this season ($92.8 million for Oakland) and last ($63.1 million for Tampa Bay).

Under Billy Beane, Oakland’s president of baseball operations, and General Manager David Forst, the A’s have reached the postseason 10 times since 2000. The Rays have made five playoff visits in the last 12 seasons, and have lost more than 85 games just once since reaching the 2008 World Series.

In other words, while some teams are built to lose prodigiously to collect high draft choices and build for the future, Oakland and Tampa Bay consistently try to cobble together rosters that give them a chance in the moment.

“If you’re pulling back into the 50-, the 60-, the 70-win territory, young players hit your big league team and they may take you to the low 80s, and then free-agency gets you to low 90s and beyond,” Erik Neander, the Rays’ general manager, said last year. “That free agency step, we don’t have. So we have to stay in a territory where we are competitive. And if we hit with some of our more talented young players who will be with us for a long time, hopefully that can elevate us to the 90-win territory.”

Last year the Rays won 90 games but missed the playoffs. This year they surged to 96 victories and acquired eight of their 12 best players — as measured by wins above replacement by Baseball Reference — in trades or free agency over the last 16 months.

Outfielder Tommy Pham arrived in a trade-deadline deal last year in a deal with St. Louis for three prospects. That same day, the Rays traded the veteran starter Chris Archer — perhaps their best-known player — to Pittsburgh for outfielder Austin Meadows and starter Tyler Glasnow.

“When I spoke to Neander, he told me they’re not selling, they’re adding,” said Pham, who hit 21 homers with a .369 on-base percentage this season. “He viewed all the additions as upgrades from what he told me, and right now, he looks like a genius. At the time, I kind of didn’t know what the team was doing. But you’ve got to be happy with where we are.”

Meadows and Glasnow starred this season, and so did the Rays’ one luxury item. They splurged in free agency last winter for starter Charlie Morton, who signed a two-year, $30 million contract. Morton, who won Game 7 of the World Series for Houston in 2017, went 16-6 this season and was scheduled to start the wild card game on Wednesday.

Oakland’s starter on Wednesday, Sean Manaea, also reflects a cunning front office move. After the A’s lost the 2014 wild card game in Kansas City, they traded the veterans Josh Donaldson and Jeff Samardzija. Yet they also traded that winter for the versatile Ben Zobrist, a two-time All-Star with the Rays who had one year remaining before free agency.

In Zobrist, the A’s knew they had a valuable player who could either help them win or appeal to other teams in a trade. When they fell out of the 2015 playoff race, they shipped Zobrist to the Royals for Manaea, a former first-round draft pick who had not yet appeared in the majors. Manaea threw a no-hitter last season and went 4-0 with a 1.21 E.R.A. in five September starts this year after returning from an injury.

The A’s may also have a bullpen force in Jesus Luzardo, a 22-year-old left-hander who promises to be a fresh and largely unknown weapon after thriving in a September cameo. Like Manaea, Luzardo arrived as an indirect result of the A’s building up, not tearing down.

After losing 94 games in 2015, Oakland signed reliever Ryan Madson to a three-year, $22 million deal in free agency — something of a curious investment, since Madson was 35 at the time.

But Madson pitched well, and in July 2017 the A’s sent him and another reliever, Sean Doolittle, to the Washington Nationals. In return, they got a package that included reliever Blake Treinen, who was an All-Star last season, and Luzardo, a future centerpiece for a creative franchise that never gives in — just like the one it will welcome to town on Wednesday night.

Tyler Kepner has been national baseball writer since 2010. He joined The Times in 2000 and covered the Mets for two seasons, then covered the Yankees from 2002 to 2009. @TylerKepner

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