As they always are in September -- or at least for as long as I've been following the team -- the Oakland A's are in a pennant race. The difference is that this year it's one of those ass-backward pennant races where none of the contenders are playing very well, so it's a race to see which one can lose the most games or if they can both lose enough to fall behind the erstwhile third-place team.

All four teams in the AL West are playing equally mediocre this month. The way I see it, any game between any pair of them is pretty much a 50-50 shot. The A's are no better or worse than the others. Their one advantage is that they're still carrying a piece of the lead they had when this final stretch began, so as long as none of the teams wakes up and starts playing like a playoff team, we can still back in to the playoffs by default, sort of like AL Central champion used to do in recent years.

Does that worry me? Not at all. For the past three years, Oakland has gone into the playoffs with a great team that ought to win it all, and each time they got knocked out early by a seemingly inferior team. It can't be any worse to be the seemingly inferior team this time.

But as the big A's prepare to take on the Tacoma Rainiers tonight -- oops, I mean the Seattle Mariners -- I'm in a mood to boast about the A's minor league system. The A's have five minor-league affiliates. All five teams finished with a winning record, four of them won their division pennant, and two of those won their league championship. Does any other team have a record even close to that?

The Vancouver Canadians, Northwest League (single A short season, eight teams in two divisions), finished 42-34, winning the West division. In the five-game championship series, they were swept 3-0 by East division champion Boise Hawks (affiliated with the Chicago Cubs).

The Kane County Cougars, Midwest League (single A, fourteen teams in two divisions), finished the second half of the season 40-30, winning the Western division. (Kane County is in Illinois.) In the five-game championship series, they lost 3-2 to Eastern division champion West Michigan Whitecaps (affiliated with the Detroit Tigers). The Cougars also won the division championship in the first half of the season, finishing 43-26.

The Modesto A's (also known as the "Little A's"), California League (single A, ten teams in two divisions), finished the second half of the season 46-24, winning the North division. In the five-game championship series, they beat South division champion Lancaster JetHawks (affiliated with the Arizona Diamondbacks) 3-2 to win the league championship. The Little A's also won the division championship in the first half of the season.

The Midland Rockhounds, Texas League (double A, eight teams in two divisions), finished the second half of the season 37-33. They are the only Oakland affiliate which did not compete in its league's championship series.

The Sacramento River Cats, Pacific Coast League (triple A, four divisions of four each) won the league championship for the second year in a row. In spite of its name, the PCL's central and eastern divisions include teams far from the Pacific Coast, the easternmost being in Nashville. The River Cats finished the season 79-65, winning the Southern division. In the first round of the playoffs, the River Cats beat Northern division champion Portland Beavers (affiliated with the San Diego Padres), while Central champion Iowa Cubs (Chicago Cubs) beat the Oklahoma RedHawks (Texas Rangers). The River Cats then swept the Iowa Cubs 3-0 in the championship series.

If you look up the Modesto A's today, you won't see them listed as an Oakland A's affiliate. At the end of this season, Oakland elected to allow that affiliation to lapse, signing instead with the Stockton Ports. Changes in minor-league affiliations aren't so uncommon, but these two changes are a little more newsworthy in that both Modesto-Oakland and Stockton-Texas have been affiliated for 30 years.

Stockton is slightly closer to Oakland than Modesto is (either is within two hours' drive), but the real attraction to Stockton is its fancy new ballpark. It was the Ports and not the Rangers that declined to renew the Stockton-Texas affilition, suggesting that it was the A's who wanted the change, not Texas. (The fact that the Stockton team's current general was Modesto's general manager for five years further suggests that.)

Oakland's move has triggered a reaction throughout the California League, and it has been speculated that half the teams will change affiliates. The Modesto team is still an attractive one, and less than a day after the Oakland agreement had expired, they already had a new agreement with the Colorado Rockies. The Rockies in turn had let lapse their affiliation with yet another California League team, the Visalia Oaks, which had once been another Oakland affiliate. (Yes, they had two teams in the California League for a while.) The last I heard, the Visalia Oaks have no major league affiliation, though I expect someone will probably pick them up. (Texas, perhaps?)

Since it won't really do for a Colorado affiliate to be called the "Little A's", the Modesto team has announced that they will have a new name, but they haven't yet decided what it will be.

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