A couple of years after the club were on the silver screen in the adaptation of the film Moneyball, the Oakland Athletics will be on your TV quite a bit (at least relative to how often they’ve been in the past) in the month of August.

The A’s, who currently hold the best record in baseball and made a ton of noise at the trade deadline, will appear six time’s on MLB’s TV partners in some form during the month, including twice on Sunday Night Baseball and a rare MLB Network showcase game on the west coast. Though Oakland is in one of the 10 biggest markets in the United States (San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose combines to form one), the A’s are often seen as second banana to the San Francisco Giants. Also, even the most ardent A’s fan wouldn’t argue their aging stadium is one TV networks are dying to broadcast games from.

Oakland will make two consecutive appearances on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball this month, a rarity for even some of the bigger market teams. The A’s visit the Atlanta Braves on August 17th, making their first appearance on Sunday night since May 28, 2006. That’s right, they haven’t been on MLB’s biggest TV showcase since the Bush administration. The very next week, they host the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim at O.co Coliseum, their first home game on Sunday night since September 4, 2005.

The very next week, the Angels and A’s (the teams with the two best records in the sport) will meet up again, and this time the big telecast belongs to MLB Network. Bob Costas, Jim Kaat and Tom Verducci will have the call. While he hasn’t been calling games with much regularity the past two decades, this factoid may shock you: the August 28th game will be the first time Costas has called an Athletics since the 1989 American League Championship Series. That was when he was working for NBC and broadcasting games with Tony Kubek in that network’s final season of play.

The A’s will also serve as either the lead or backup game for MLB Network three more times in August. Though they’ve made the playoffs the past two seasons, it’s really starting to feel like their year, at least from a narrative sense. Good to see MLB’s TV partners jumping on the bandwagon as they race toward the postseason.

About Steve Lepore

Steve Lepore is a writer for Bloguin and a correspondent for SiriusXM NHL Network Radio.

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