It is! Sadly, I am not here, as I have a hearing to attend. Much as I think we're in for another crummy season as A's fans, I cannot deny that hope springs eternal for the upsides of the A's young players, and that I have surely futile dreams that 2017 will be 1999 all over again:

• Matt Olson as Jason Giambi? Doesn't work because Giambi was in the league for years already, though 1999 was the year he became Jason Friggin' Giambi
• Franklin Barreto as Miguel Tejada? Tejada had played much of 1998 in Oakland, but hit poorly. He really started the climb to the MVP (cough) he would eventually become in 1999. Barreto's 2017 was more like Tejada's cup of coffee 1997, though, so we could be a year early.
• Matt Chapman as Eric Chavez? Chapman's actually ahead here, as Chavez had made only a brief 16-game cameo in 1998 before playing 115 games in '99. On the other hand, Chapman is three years older.
• A truly mediocre starting pitching staff: Gil Heredia, Jimmy Haynes, Mike Oquist, and Kenny Rogers seem pretty well analogous to Kendall Graveman, Daniels Gossett and Mengden, and Andrew Triggs. Sean Manaea doesn't really have a counterpart because he's no Tim Hudson, but he's also no Omar Olivares.
• Had A.J. Puk not likely been knocked out of commission for the next 12 to 18 months, we could have dreamed about him bursting onto the scene like Hudson. Now I guess that job falls to Grant Holmes? And he's not likely to be up to that particular task.
• That was the year of the Jason Isringhausen trade, which doesn't make a perfect analogy to Blake Treinen, since he was acquired last year, but it's close enough.

All comps are bad comps, but the upshot of 1999 was an up-and-coming team with a mix of young future stars and old stopgaps overachieving and staying in the hunt for the playoffs until far later than it was supposed to, anticipating the 2000–06 run. Asking the 2019–25 A's to be what those A's were is asking for disappointment, but like I said: hope springs eternal, and maybe this year that hope has a historical analogue right at hand.