The A's have lost 8 games in a row, and 11 of their last 12.

The A's are 9 games below .500.

The A's have been outscored, in 2005, by every team in the American League and by every team in the National League. National League teams only have 8 hitters in their lineups, to American League teams' 9.

The A's expected Rich Harden to turn into Tim Hudson this season, but this isn't what they meant.

The A's expected Eric Chavez to turn into Jason Giambi, but this isn't what they meant.

The Red Sox, who make up 3/8 of the A's slump, are back in town Monday night. Every spring, like swallows to Capistrano, the Red Sox ride into town, and every year Red Sox fans crawl out of the woodwork (into which, for some reason or another, they didn't retreat quite as far in the last offseason) and descend, blue-capped and loud-mouthed, upon the Oakland Coliseum. The sheer number of Boston fans, and the degree of their Boston pride, is enough to make an SFist wonder [Note: it does not, however, "beg the question"]: why don't these people live in Boston?

Boston? Must suck.

Seriously, everything we said about there being no objective or rational reasons to root for or against a particular baseball team? We take it back. Almost every Red Sox position player would be a strong contender for SFist's least favorite player on almost any other AL team. C Jason Varitek blocks the plate without the ball and has cultivated a tough-guy persona mostly on the strength of punching Alex Rodriguez in the face...while he (Varitek) was wearing a catcher's mask. CF Johnny Damon, in his autobiography Idiot, (so titled, presumably, so we wouldn't think he was Russian), writes that he "banged 9 nurses during [his] wife's 36-hour labor." RF Trot Nixon believes that Jesus Christ swung his bat against the A's in the 2003 playoffs. 1B Kevin Millar, in those same playoffs, got all of New England purporting unironically to "Cowboy Up," and also told a sideline reporter that "all the guys on the team," except for Johnny Damon, had shaved their heads to show team unity. All the guys had, too, except for Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Nomar Garciaparra and Byung-Hyun Kim. Plus, one of the owners lets the CIA use his private jet to shuttle prisoners to Gitmo.

But this is Boston, so none of these guys stands a chance. Is there a more loathsome figure in all of professional sports than Curt Schilling? Congratulated at his postgame press conference on pitching with an injury in last year's playoffs, he corrected the questioner: God, not Schilling, had pitched that game. He routinely posts to Red Sox fan message boards, and calls Boston-area sports radio, to talk about Curt Schilling. (These aren't interviews, or internet chats, or anything: he just invites himself on.) When he played for Arizona, he took a bat and destroyed a QuesTec camera because he believed it was causing the umpire to call the strike zone correctly. Read the last sentence again. Finally, or of course, shortly after the Red Sox won the World Series, Schilling took to the (wrong, victorious) Presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire and Arizona.

Baseball should be fun, though, even when the Red Sox are in town and the A's can't beat a drum, so we'll end on a high note, so to speak, with a song for our favorite Red Sock, LF Manny Ramirez:

I don't know who's on the mound, because I got high
And I don't know the pitch count, because I got high
But I've hit 400 home runs, and I know why (Yeah yeah)
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high

SFist does not claim to know anything about Manny Ramirez's actual consumption of actual illegal drugs. In fact, everything we know about illegal drugs we learned from rap music and R-rated movies when we were fragile little children. But a chubby stoner with his hair in his face and his pants hanging off his ass? We're just surprised Manny isn't from Oakland.

It's May, anyway. We've seen the A's off to worse starts, and we've seen them put a pretty good hurt on better Boston teams than this one. The game's at 7:05 on FSN and KFRC: Saarloos (1-2, 5.09) vs. Bronson Arroyo (4-0, 2.91). Go A's.