There will be a lot of A's-related factoids that'll come out of this if they win the division. They'll be only the fifth team to come back from a deficit of 13 games or more -- the last one being the 1995 Mariners.

The one that gets me, though, is that at the end of June, the A's were three games behind the Cleveland Indians. Forget that they were 13 games behind the Rangers -- they were behind a team that would eventually go on to lose 93 games.

That says as much about the Indians as it does the A's, of course. But it's easy to look back at the end of June as some sort of weird fork in the road. We were so sure we knew what those teams were at the time -- not awful, not good, and mostly boring. Turns out that the A's were about to have one of the greatest stretches of the decade and the Indians were about to have one of the worst.

Imagine the Indians playing the Tigers in a game for the division right now, charging back behind a myriad of rookie starters. Considering their start and the relative strength of their division, it was likelier than the A's.