Tyler Soderstrom came off the bench in the sixth inning Saturday night, doubled home the go-ahead run, and the Athletics beat the Colorado Rockies 7-5. That's four straight comeback wins. Read that again, because I had to: the team we've spent two seasons writing as a punchline — a big-league club squatting in a Triple-A park, a logo with no city in front of it — is four games into a run where they keep falling behind and refusing to lose.

First, a correction the wire won't make for itself. You'll see "Las Vegas" attached to this game in a few places. It wasn't in Vegas. The A's play their home dates at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento — a 14,000-seat minor-league yard — while the stadium in the desert exists mostly as a rendering and a grievance. The Vegas confusion is almost poetic: their Triple-A affiliate actually is in Las Vegas, so the franchise has a phantom future city, a borrowed present city, and an abandoned past one. Three places, no home. That's the off-field story, and it remains a disgrace. John Fisher took a team out of Oakland and parked it in a farm stadium to run out the clock.

But here's the part I've been getting wrong, and I think most of us have: the baseball team is good enough to watch.

Go look at the standings instead of the headlines. Coming into this weekend the A's were hovering right around .500, third in the AL West, roughly two games behind Seattle. Not 20 back. Not playing out the string in June. Two. They've got Jacob Wilson — a .290-ish shortstop who hits everything — back off the injured list this week. They've got Soderstrom, the 24-year-old who keeps turning up in the box score at the moment the game tilts. They're doing it with Brent Rooker, their best bat, on the IL with a knee bruise. A roster nobody can name is two games out of first, and the building is half-empty because we all decided a year ago that this was a funeral, not a season.

Now the cold water, because I'm not going to sell you a fairy tale. That .500 record sits on top of a run differential around minus-41 — they've been outscored on the year by a meaningful margin. Teams that win four straight comebacks are usually teams that had to come back four straight times, which is its own kind of warning label. The honest read is that the A's have been better at the end of close games than at the start of them, and that gap tends to close. Bullpen variance and one-run luck are not a foundation. If you're tempted to back this team because they're "hot," that's exactly the recency trap I'm not putting a number on tonight — this is analysis, not a bet. The line stays in my pocket.

But the regression argument is a forecast, not a verdict on what already happened. What's happened is real. Four comebacks are four comebacks. Soderstrom's double cleared the bases of doubt in real time, in front of whoever drove to West Sacramento on a Saturday. And there's something I find genuinely moving in it — a young team playing meaningful June baseball for an organization that has publicly stopped caring whether anyone shows up. The ownership quit on these guys. The guys didn't get the memo.

I've written the grief version of this story more than once. The Bay Bridge Series is dead. The team that stayed is a soccer club. All true, all still aching. But grief has been the only lens we've allowed the A's, and it's started to flatten them into a symbol when they're also, you know, a baseball team — one with a shortstop who slaps singles and a kid who comes off the bench and changes the game.

So here's my actual take: stop reading the box scores as obituaries. The front office earned every ounce of contempt it gets. The 26 guys in the clubhouse earned something else this week, and almost nobody noticed. Two games back, four straight comebacks, a phantom city in the desert and a real one — somewhere — still pulling for them.

I'll be watching Sunday. Not betting it. Watching it.

Line not pulled — analysis only.