Baseball: Oakland close in on 20-game winning streak

They are one of the paupers of baseball, once a fringe candidate for "contraction", as commissioner Bud Selig called his plan to eliminate at least two major league teams. But that scheme was dropped as part of baseball's labour settlement, and just as well. For the humble Oakland Athletics are now tearing up the record books.

A 7-6 victory over Kansas City on Monday, eked out in the bottom of the ninth inning after the As had trailed by 5-0 for more than half the game, lifted Oakland to a 19-game winning streak, tying an American league record and representing the longest such streak in all of Major League Baseball since 1947.

Since the sequence began on 13 August, Oakland have overtaken the Seattle Mariners to lead the AL West, baseball's most competitive division, and now have the best record in the American League, better even than the New York Yankees, winners of three of the last four World Series.

If they defeat Kansas again tonight the As will have the American League record to themselves. The only teams ahead of them will be two venerable National Leaguers, the 1935 Chicago Cubs and the old New York Giants, who in 1916 put together an unsurpassed 26-game winning streak.

Oakland's feat is all the more astonishing in that baseball, more than any other, is a sport of fragments of good fortune which usually do not last five games, let alone 19.

Above all perhaps, the Oakland winning streak is proof that money does not yet buy everything in baseball – quite. Baseball may be dominated by super-rich franchises like the Atlanta Braves and the Yankees, and distributing revenues more evenly to correct that imbalance was the key issue in the labour contract negotiations. But Oakland is not the only exception. The Minnesota Twins, another candidate for contraction, are currently running away with the AL Central.