A’s Win, Setting Up Decisive Series

One hundred fifty-nine games over nearly six months were gone and, as Oakland Athletic General Manager Billy Beane mused through tobacco-encrusted lips in the postgame clubhouse here, “Here we are.”

With the Angels on their way from Texas on Thursday afternoon, the A’s defeated the Seattle Mariners, 3-2, when rookie Bobby Crosby homered in the ninth inning at Network Associates Coliseum, setting up the three-game series that will decide the American League West title.

Already the A’s had lost two of three games this week to the Mariners, along with all of a division lead that was four games Sept. 5. But the A’s clung to five pitchers, held Ichiro Suzuki to a single in five at-bats (one hit short of George Sisler’s single-season record of 257) and then leapt from the dugout when Crosby lined a one-out, one-strike slider over the fence in left-center field for a solo home run.

It was, said Crosby, whose grandparents helped fill out a sparse crowd on a day that began gray and damp, “the best feeling of my life. By far.”

Like that, the A’s and Angels each had 90 wins and 69 losses, with three games to settle it, winner to the American League division series, loser to the off-season. The A’s have scheduled starting pitchers Mark Mulder, Barry Zito and Tim Hudson; the Angels Bartolo Colon, Kelvim Escobar and Jarrod Washburn, so nobody gets cheated.

“This is what most people thought it would come down to anyway,” Beane said, the A’s because of their pitching and the Angels, he added, “based on the money they spent on free agents in the off-season.”

Beane’s point: Neither arrived at Oct. 1 in quite the manner they expected. The Angels played below their expectations for most of the season, then had the A’s come back to them over three weeks in which they lost 15 of 23 games. The A’s appeared to have the Angels finished, then stopped hitting and had their vaunted starting pitching go inconsistent. Since Aug. 28, Mulder, Hudson and Zito have three wins among them.

“We haven’t played well up to this point, but it really doesn’t matter,” Beane said. “[Now] you just hope to get lucky.”

Muddied and imperfect, they arrived, the Angels off Thursday’s loss to the Rangers but lively again and the A’s getting the victory they needed to momentarily compose themselves.

Afterward, A’s outfielder Eric Byrnes marveled at the decency of the major-league divisional race, how something that began in early April could reach October without a hint of an advantage.

“That’s baseball,” he said. “That’s how it is, how it’s been for 100 years. It’s great.”

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Ichiro’s Quest

The progress of Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki in his pursuit of the single-season major league record for hits, held by George Sisler:

* Suzuki on Thursday: One for five vs. Oakland.

* Suzuki for the season: 256 hits, with three games remaining.

* Sisler’s record: 257 hits in 1920 for the St. Louis Browns.

* Like Roger Maris before him, Suzuki has benefited in his pursuit of a major single-season record by playing a schedule eight games longer than in the pre-expansion era. Yet in 44 seasons since the American League adopted a 162-game schedule (the National League did so a year later), Suzuki is the first player to make a serious run at Sisler’s record. The top totals since 1961:

*--* Player, Team Year Hits 1. Ichiro Suzuki, Seattle 2004 256 2. Ichiro Suzuki, Seattle 2001 242 3. Wade Boggs, Boston 1985 240 3. Darin Erstad, Angels 2000 240 5. Rod Carew, Minnesota 1977 239

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