A’s schedule updated with 7 makeup games

The Oakland A’s 2022 schedule was updated on Wednesday, and it now features a full 162 games as normal.

Due to the lengthy MLB lockout that stretched into March, the first two series of the season were canceled and Opening Day was postponed. For the A’s, that meant seven games were cut off their slate, at home against the Angels and Tigers. Now those contests have been rescheduled for later in the summer.

The makeup games were squeezed in using a combination of filling up off-days and expanding existing matchups into doubleheaders, with a few of them tacked on to the end of the schedule in early October.

• May 10: Existing Tigers game expanded to doubleheader
• May 14: Existing Angels game expanded to doubleheader
• July 21: Off-day converted into Tigers doubleheader
• Oct. 3 thru Oct. 5: Three-game series against Angels added to end of season

All of these will be A’s home games, although in an odd logistical quirk, the May 10 meeting against the Tigers will take place in Detroit with the green-and-gold simply batting last. Oakland plays a four-game series at Comerica Park from May 9-12, so this bonus contest comes on the second day of that showdown — they’ll play a Tigers home game in the afternoon, then an A’s home game in the evening, all in the same building.

After that Detroit series is over, the Angels immediately come to the Bay Area for what was supposed to be a three-game series. Now the middle game is a doubleheader. All told Oakland will play seven games in five days during this stretch, and it comes amid a longer span of what is now 15 games in 13 days in three different cities, with a flight from Michigan to California right in the middle.

The next makeup comes in July, during the All-Star break. The A’s were set to have Mon-Thu off for the break, but now that Thursday will instead be a doubleheader against the Tigers at the Coliseum. (Extra note: That same day the Rangers play a makeup in Miami, then they fly to Oakland to play the A’s on Friday.)

The rest of the games will come in October, as they will for all teams, as the league extended the season by a few days to fit everything in. The A’s were supposed to finish on Oct. 2 in Seattle, but now they’ll come back home for one more three-game series against the Halos.

It’s not perfect, but jamming seven games into a finely tuned schedule was never going to be pretty. All things considered this is about as reasonable as we could have hoped it would turn out, and every team will be dealing with the same adversity so at least nobody is selected for a competitive advantage.

On a related note, remember that doubleheaders are returning to the traditional nine-inning length this summer, after being shortened to seven frames apiece during each of the past two seasons during the pandemic.

The A’s will begin their season with Opening Day on April 8, on the road against the Phillies. Click here for more info on the rest of the schedule, and click here to see the whole thing on the team’s official site.