THE A's JOIN, THEN LEAVE, THE "7 & 7" CLUB...AND WE TAKE LEAVE OF OUR SENSES.

WE'RE now nine days and counting past the Oakland A's seven-game skein of glorious anomaly, capped by the "reverse boycott" that baseball's vodka-in-his-veins commissioner Rob "Mr. Potato Head" Manfred (known in these concentric circles as "Man Rob Fred") attempted to buzz-kill with a blunt instrument (aka the garbled syntax of a mob lawyer), and anything resembling an afterglow is indeed non-existent.

The A's uncanny ability to hang tough in one-run games abandoned them, and when we looked up from our ritual breakfast of bananas and ice cream, our potassium and sugar-glazed eyes dimly made out the fact that the ragamuffs had now dropped seven in a row, the type of symmetrical volte-face that usually occurs only in cartoons. 

And so we were moved to contact the austere but incurably helpful Katie Sharp at Forman et soeur, in hopes of identifying the teams who shared in the A's latest feat (seven-up, seven-down) so that we could isolate this "7 & 7" club, named after the famous drink that TCM's barroom braggadociant Eddie Muller snubbed in his latest book (the almost-charming, never-disarming NOIR BAR). 

Katie, who is very sharp, reminded us that it really wasn't a good idea to put Seagrams & Seven™ together too early in the day because the A's had already "been and gone" as regards the "7 & 7 Club"--in plain fact (plainer than the nose on our face, even if one too many early-afternoon tongue-exercises with ice cubes had made us blearily unaware that our nose was actually semi-existent...) because they'd just lost their eighth game in a row, a 6-1 loss to the Cleveland Guardians.

But we were determined to salvage our blog post idea despite barely being able to discern the computer screen in front of us, much less the slippery, uncooperative keyboard (sit still, you beast! Oh, sorry, that's a different set of repetitive numbers, isn't it...). And Katie didn't bar the door, providing us with a list of nineteen teams that kinda-sorta fit into the original concept, which she modified for us, repeating slowly several rimes since it was clear we needed to hear it iteratively in order for it to lodge in our brain long enough to transmit to you, dear reader: the "at least seven wins followed by at least seven losses" club. 

And so the clouds lifted, or at least seemed to move...whatever they were doing, they did it long enough for us to compile this list, and get it into a form where you (not us!) will be able to read it. And here 'tis, over at the left, or maybe above us and to the left...or maybe to the left and above--anyway, you can find it...we're getting a little sleepy even as we look for a pair of scissors with which to cut up another of Eddie Muller's ties.

What may shock you regarding that list (aside from the fact that we actually got it posted...) is the presence on it of so many successful teams. You check our math (please!) but we count fourteen of the nineteen teams on this list with final season records above .500. (The A's clearly are not going to be number fifteen.) Two teams on this list, the 1930 Cards and the 2008 Rays, actually made it into the World Series despite having this careening occurrence in the midst of their season. 

IN fact, the A's are going to trail this pack by so much that they kind of dwarf the concept of anomaly itself, staggering their way (along with us) to the realm of the meta-anomaly (best served chilled, or possibly absorbed directly through the scalp). The team with the worst record on this list, the 2000 Pirates, almost won 70 games, and one of the others, the 1998 Reds, were kind enough to get the 7-7 thang into their volte-face variant (which actually consisted of ten straight wins, followed by eight straight losses). 

Now that the A's have left the actual "7 and 7" club, there are only eight members, half of 'em from the hard-drinking Midwest. All of them actually finished the year over .500, so it would never do for the A's to have stopped there and break up such a splendidly matched set. (There's a salacious reference in there somewhere, but we are doing everything we can to not let it escape.)

When we sober up, we're going to ask Katie if there are any teams that won seven, then lost seven, then won seven, then...well, hell, you can clearly see (we can't!!) where this is going. The perfect Sisyphean (a word hard to pronounce when you're pickled...) team is one that wins four, loses four, and "rinses and repeats" like that ad nauseum (ah, yes, we wondered when that would be coming...) over the course of a full season, all the way to 81-81. Of course, no one has done that, because the 162-game schedule doesn't permit such symmetrical nonsense to occur. And waddya say we raise our glass to that fact as we stagger off into the gloaming...altogether now--"Sisyphus is not symmetrical...Sisyphus is not symmetrical...where the bleep is my designated driver?"