In case you missed it yesterday, the A’s and Giants decided to play the exact same game on Saturday that they played on Friday. Once again the A’s won, 6-0. Once again, the A’s got a dominant start, this time from Jesús Luzardo. He pitched six innings, struck out seven, walked no one and allowed six hits. Once again the bullpen took it from there flawlessly. Once again, the A’s got a few big hits, this time a two-run homer from Jake Lamb and a two-run triple from Tommy La Stella, neither of whom was even on the team at the beginning of the season, to give them the offensive punch to cruise to the victory. The A’s are now one game away from clinching the AL West title. The finish line is near.

And in case you missed any of the 50 games before this series, let us recap the season so far, by taking one sentence from each of the previous blog entries.

Perhaps we should feel ashamed to have enjoyed it. None of us have done this before. It takes a leap of faith to believe in something that you can’t really see. You have to stare the trouble straight in the eye. And the time of day has lost all meaning because it’s summer vacation in a pandemic.

The powerless usually don’t win most of their battles. I felt the weight of all those days to come. But the honest truth is, most of the time, when I think about the meaninglessness of this baseball season, it’s not because I’m trying to be rational. The rhythms of a shared sporting culture provide structure to our lives. Oh, and Ramon Laureano wears big yellow socks for some reason.

Nobody reads old blogs. And so, a mustache. Is an apology enough? A steady competence works, too. My self-esteem was more hurt than anything.

A brawl in a pandemic is an immoral act. So what’s the point of being competent if nobody notices it? For a few minutes, all the troubles of the human world disappeared. That’s why he’s being suspended. But it did not get fixed.

Happiness is ephemeral. And then just around noon, seemingly out of nowhere, there came a thunderclap that was as loud as any natural sound I had ever heard. I don’t know where to start, I don’t know where to go. We’re trapped inside the walls of our house, and everything on the outside of those walls is hostile and wants to kill us. Humble them.

It’s a short season. I’ll take ordinary. That’s easier to remember in baseball, when the next game is tomorrow. So how do we sleep at night? It’s half a baseball season in a world turned upside down.

We have to care for the sick among us, without somehow getting sick ourselves. Nobody took that option. My mind is such a big jumble right now. Wake up, people! They’ve all had good days and bad days.

It could all fall apart at any moment, off the field or on. A well engineered technical system tests for errors at every step, and has contingency plans to handle those errors. Some good defense, and some mistakes. So everything was on the ground was dusted with a thin layer of ash. I opted out.

We’re all out of outrages to give at this point. I’m beginning to expect the worst, without any energy to hope for the best. It’s the mind’s reaction to losing something you love. Hence there is no policy that dictates what the definition of safe air quality is. And maybe the next day it snows again, but it doesn’t matter.

We are all experiencing what the world is like when a cynical leadership is imposed on us. My mind was elsewhere all night. The finish line is near.