It’s been seven years since the A’s were a truly bad team, so I’m not sure how to deal with this, with looking for silver linings every day instead of basking in golden sunshine. Things seem backwards, upside-down, as if the dry season had flipped to winter and the rainy season was now summer.
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I wasn’t really paying attention to the A’s last couple of games, but sources tell me that the A’s lost two consecutive games to some team called the Washington Generals, who, until they faced the A’s, had lost 1,270 games in a row. Washington manager Red Klotz can now retire a happy man.
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The Florida Marlins must feel ripped off that they’re the only NL East team that won’t get to play the A’s. I’m sure they, too, would like the A’s help in launching a long winning streak of their own.
ESPN.com had a nice new story about Dontrelle Willis and his agent, an excerpt from a Jerry Crasnick book called “License to Deal”. This sentence, though, threw me:
They broke down enough societal and generational barriers to bridge the gap from affluent Burlingame to hardscrabble west Alameda.
Hardscrabble?
hardscrabble adj. Of a bare living gained by great labor; “the sharecropper’s hardscrabble life”; a marginal existence.
Makes us West Alamedans sound like dust bowl farmers suffering through a drought. And all this time, I thought I was living in a nice, middle-class neighborhood.
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The A’s concluded their draft today. If they’re lucky, one of those late round picks will follow in the footsteps of Dallas Braden, a 24th-round pick, who threw eight shutout innings Tuesday night for AA Midland. When your team is suffering through a bad year, you survive on any scrap of good news you can find.
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A rainstorm passed over Alameda tonight. The water pattered my roof, gurgled down the gutters, and melted away into the earth. I couldn’t sleep.
1. Speaking as a renter in west alameda trying to buy a house in the area, I wouldn't call it hardscrabble! Being an A's fan right now though....
2. It's even cloudy down in Southern California, but I think we will avoid any rain.
Rain in June would be pretty rare down in these parts.
3. Another silver lining: the Braves bullpen, if the A's are behind in the late innings, let's hope Bernero and Kold will implode and give the A's a come-from-behind victory. These two guys helped ravage my fantasy team (that and Odalis Perez and Harden being on the DL), it's time for some payback.
Maybe West Alameda was hardscrabble back in the days of Dontrelle's youth. You know, before the housing boom where a house in the middle of the ghetto would cost at least $400K. I wouldn't know. All of my Alameda relatives are Bay Farm Chinese.
4. My brother-in-law has lived in the same apartment building that Dontrelle grew up in for almost 20 years. I've lived two blocks away for 12 years now. The neighborhood has hardly changed at all. It is and has been a middle-class neighborhood.
5. One of Dontrelle's neighbors was one of my coworkers when I worked for ARPD a few years ago. I think I met him when he was still with the Cubs organization. I promptly forgot about him until my coworker made a big fuss about, "He got called up" a year or so later. Didn't put 2 and 2 together until Dontrelle Mania swept the island.