For 24 games, Zack Gelof was the one clean, uncomplicated thing about a franchise that has none — an Athletics team playing its home games in a minor-league park in West Sacramento, drifting between contention and teardown. The streak didn't end on a slump or a called third strike. It ended in the second inning Tuesday at Oracle Park, when a one-hop throw put Gelof on his knees and Matt Chapman — drafted and developed by the A's, now a Giant — came in without sliding and left three spike puncture wounds in Gelof's right hand. X-rays were clean. The story still bleeds.

There is a kind of baseball misfortune that feels authored. Not the slump, which is just gravity. Not the 0-for-4, which is just Tuesday. I mean the freak thing — the cleat, the railing, the sprinkler head — that arrives to remind a franchise the universe has been reading its mail.

Zack Gelof had a 24-game hitting streak. For an Athletics team that has spent two years as a traveling act — Oakland's name, Sacramento's ballpark, a future somewhere in the Las Vegas desert — that streak was the rarest commodity the organization owns: a reason to turn the game on. Over those 24 games he hit .351 with a .987 OPS, five home runs, the on-base streak running to 27, the consecutive-games-scored streak to 13. He was, briefly, the best version of the player the A's once breathlessly promoted. His manager, Mark Kotsay, said before Tuesday's game that Gelof "resembles the guy that came up and really excited us about his future."

Past tense by the second inning.

Here is the play, because the play matters. Chapman drives a ball off the left-field wall. Tyler Soderstrom throws it in. Gelof receives the one-hop relay at second base on his knees — the most vulnerable posture an infielder can take, glove down, hand flat in the dirt waiting for a baserunner who has every reason to be in a hurry. Chapman doesn't slide. He comes across the bag and his spikes find the back of Gelof's right hand: three puncture wounds, the kind of thing that looks worse in the replay than it does on the X-ray.

The X-ray, mercifully, was clean. No fracture. No stitches. Day-to-day, which in June is the most hopeful two words in the medical dictionary. This is not a tragedy. Gelof will hit again, probably soon, and the streak — already tied with Miguel Tejada's 24 from 2002 and Carney Lansford's 24 from 1984, one game short of Jason Giambi's 1997 franchise record of 25 — will live in the books exactly as long as those did.

But notice who was wearing the spikes. Matt Chapman was the A's first-round pick in 2014, the Platinum Glove third baseman who anchored the last Oakland teams that mattered, the face — alongside Matt Olson — of the last good thing the franchise built before it started selling everything that wasn't nailed down and then sold the nails. Chapman is a Giant now because Oakland let him become one. And on Tuesday, in green-and-gold's new permanent road life, it was Chapman's foot that closed the book on Oakland's best current bat. The contact was inadvertent. Everyone agrees on that, and they're right to; there is no villain here, just physics and bad luck wearing a familiar number. But the symbolism doesn't care whether it was intentional. The thing the A's developed and discarded came back and, without meaning to, stepped on what they have left.

The Giants won 3–1, which is almost beside the point but worth saying because it's the second register this desk is obligated to keep. Robbie Ray went eight innings, two hits, six strikeouts, the kind of start that quietly tells you the Giants' rotation is the reason that team is still standing in a season that's tested it. Jung Hoo Lee homered. Devers singled one in. Oakland's only run was unearned, which feels about right.

The standings say the A's are 38–41, a game and a half back in an AL West nobody is running away with, six weeks from a trade deadline that will ask the organization the only question it ever seems to face anymore: keep the good thing, or sell it. They've spent the better part of a decade answering that question the same way. Gelof — cost-controlled, 26, suddenly hitting like the prospect they promised — is exactly the kind of player who tends to become a rumor in July.

So maybe the spikes were just early. Maybe the universe was only doing in the second inning what the front office tends to do at the deadline: taking the best story Oakland had left and leaving a hole where it used to be. Three of them, actually. They'll heal. The franchise's habit of losing the things worth watching has proven more stubborn.

Get well, Zack. Hit .350 again. And — this is free advice, the only kind worth what you pay for it — next time, take the throw standing up. In this uniform, in this exile, you cannot afford to be caught on your knees.