Here we have a photograph of Mark Kotsay, who was just traded for two decent prospects, catching a fly ball while Mark Ellis, who neither has been traded nor is rumored to be anytime soon, looks on. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Danes may have been pretty miserable back in Hamlet’s day, but today, they are the happiest people in the industrialized world. Why? It’s not because they have the best standard of living. It’s because they have the lowest expectations.

My giddiness that there still existed a GM desperate enough to both take on damaged goods like Mark Kotsay and give good prospects in return is beginning to wane. And now, as my happiness levels return to normal, I’m beginning to feel like the Mark Kotsay trade is a bad thing for my happiness.

Not because the trade was a bad trade: it was a very good trade for the A’s. My problem with it is that now it alters my expectations.

Mark Kotsay had good trade value basically because used to be an excellent defensive player who used to provide average offense, and somebody hoped he might be able to do that again. That was worth two decent prospects.

Meanwhile, here’s Mark Ellis. Mark Ellis IS an excellent defensive player (in fact, he’s quite possibly the best defensive player in baseball), who DOES provide average offense, and WILL be able to do that again. So how much should that fetch in return?

Apparently, nothing. There are ZERO trade rumors involving Mark Ellis out there–none. Listen, folks, I’m beginning to get rather upset about this.

Mark Ellis, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love Mark Ellis because he’s the most reliable baseball player I’ve ever seen. He never, ever, ever makes a mental mistake. He plays basically flawless baseball, day in, day out. He might not be the fastest, strongest, or flashiest player out there, but he’s good enough of an athlete that combined with his mental perfection on the field, he’s a very valuable player.

According to Chris Dial’s defensive calculations, Mark Ellis saved more runs on defense than any other player in baseball: 24 runs over average. And if you don’t want to trust just one defensive statistic to give him the AL Most Valuable Defender award, you can take the average of the various stats, as Lee Panas over at Detroit Tiger Tales has done, and find that by nearly every way you can measure, Mark Ellis was the best defensive second baseman in the American League, saving 19 runs over average. On offense, Ellis had a VORP of 24 runs.

If we add those together (it’s a bit of apples and oranges, but they’re the fruits at hand, so bear with me) you get a 2007 total of +43 runs. Compare this to, say, Derek Jeter, whose VORP was 53, but defensively was a horrible -27, you get a total of +26.

Now I don’t really believe that Mark Ellis is a better talent than Derek Jeter. If Jeter was playing 2B and Ellis was playing SS, their defensive numbers would probably be much closer. But here’s the annoying thing:

If the New York Yankees announced that they were hoping to trade Derek Jeter this offseason, ESPN would be providing us updates every hour; Pedro Gomez would be parked outside Jeter’s home hoping to get the latest scoop, Peter Gammons and Buster Olney would spend every waking hour calling every GM and assistant GM to see if they had any news about where Jeter might be going, and MLBTradeRumors.com would be the most visited site on the Internet until the trade actually went down.

Mark Ellis provided 17 more runs of value to his team, is three years younger, and cost $17 million less than Derek Jeter, is everything the just-traded Mark Kotsay is not, is quite clearly available to be had in the right trade and what do we hear?

Silence.

Meanwhile, Seattle is apparently about to trade 18-24 years of future players for two years of Eric Bedard, and after that goes down, they’d still be playing Jose Lopez at second base, who had a defensive value of +6, and an offensive value of -9. They could improve their team by about five wins by upgrading from Lopez to Ellis, and the only rumored interest we hear from Seattle is that they want to know the price of Joe Blanton. Good luck with that.

I’m sure Billy Beane appreciates the value of Mark Ellis more than anyone, and since Ellis might end up a Type A free agent, perhaps the best course of action is to keep Ellis. If Ellis leaves, the A’s get two draft picks, and if he accepts arbitration, fine–he probably provides more value than he’d actually win in arbitration anyway. Defense ain’t where the dollars are.

But my point isn’t really that Mark Ellis is better than Derek Jeter, or that the A’s should trade him, or that other teams should give up their farm systems to get him. I’m perfectly happy to keep him around. But now that I know that damaged goods like Mark Kotsay has an appreciable value around the league, that makes my expectations for Mark Ellis shoot up to the moon. The fact that Ellis still gets less respect than Rodney Dangerfield is as rotten as the corpse of Polonius decaying beneath the stairs.

Some tidbits absorbed from staring at the A’s roster:

• The outfielder with the most seniority on the A’s 25-man roster is Travis Buck.
• The outfielder with the most seniority on the A’s 40-man roster is Javier Herrera. Herrera has never played in the major leagues.
• The outfielder who has played the most games in an Oakland uniform is Jack Cust.
• The outfielder who has played the most games in a major league uniform is Emil Brown.
• Every player on the roster was born in either the 70s (9 players) or 80s (31 players).
• The A’s have six players over 30 years old.
• The A’s have three players over 31 years old.
• Alan Embree is the only player on the roster who was alive during Richard Nixon’s presidency.
• The A’s have seven players born after I graduated high school in 1984.
• Eleven more players were born in 1983.
• Henry Rodriguez, the youngest player on the 40-man roster, will turn 21 in February.
• Rodriguez is also the lightest player, at 175 lbs.
• Joe Blanton is the heaviest, at 250 lbs.
• Five players are tied for shortest, at 5′ 10".
• The tallest players are Jerry Blevins and Andrew Brown, 6′ 6".
• If not for Rodriguez, Blevins would have the odd honor of being both the tallest and lightest player on the team. He only weighs 185 lbs.
• Eight players bat left, throw left. Of these, five are pitchers.
• Eight players bat left, throw right. Of these, one is a pitcher (Rich Harden).
• Dan Meyer is the only Rickey Henderson on the team: Bats Right, Throws Left.
• The only switch hitters on the roster are catchers: Rob Bowen and Landon Powell.

That last point leads to a particularly painful thought about the 2008 A’s lineup (as it stands today): their best four, and possibly five, hitters are all left-handed. Without the switch-hitting Swisher in the middle of the lineup, it’s hard to construct a lineup that doesn’t make it easy for an opposing manager to just run out his LOOGY during a critical point in the game to cut down the A’s offense. If you want to avoid that, you have to inject Chris Denorfia and/or Mark Ellis higher into the order than you ordinarily would based on their OBP/SLGs. Maybe you run out the projected lineup like this (Position, Name, Handedness, ZIPS projected OBP/SLG):

1. RF, Travis Buck, L, .360/.458
2. 2B, Mark Ellis, R, .335/.418
3. 1B, Daric Barton, L, .369/.440
4. 3B, Eric Chavez, L, .341/.453
5. CF, Chris Denorfia, R, .350/.438
6. DH, Jack Cust, L, .394/.470
7. SS, Bobby Crosby, R, .305/.353
8. LF, Ryan Sweeney, L, .326/.374
9. C, Kurt Suzuki, R, .325/.369

Perhaps you swap Chavez and Cust, but I personally hate having pure three-true-outcome types in the middle of the lineup; I think they fit best batting sixth or seventh, at the tail end of a string of good hitters instead of in the middle. I don’t have any numbers to support this belief, but from years of watching, I much prefer my cleanup guys to be able to adjust their game to the game situation, and the TTO guys only play one way. (The lineup tool wants Cust to hit leadoff, by the way.)

Another thing of note: Every player in that lineup except Sweeney and Crosby is projected by ZiPS for an OBP above the average player at his position. Now, swap out Sweeney with Barry Bonds. How’s that lineup look now? Is it actually–dare we say it?–good?

With good pitching, I think you can win with that lineup. The problem remains this: in order to achieve Victory 2008! we are still counting on a healthy rotation consisting of Rich Harden, Justin Duchscherer, Chad Gaudin, Joe Blanton, and one clear winner from the group of Eveland/DiNardo/Meyer/Braden. If the three hurt guys stay hurt, and the rotation looks more like Blanton/Eveland/DiNardo/Meyer/Braden most of the season, the A’s ain’t gonna win any titles, even if their lineup looks like the New York Yankees.

Mark Kotsay passed his physical, and…wow. The A’s got not only one, but two of the Braves’ top 20 prospects in exchange for Mark Kotsay. As discussed before, the A’s get hard-throwing reliever Joey Devine, who John Sickels lists as the Braves’ #5 prospect, plus–bonus!–Jamie Richmond, the Braves’ #13 prospect.

Neither prospect is without their flaws. Devine was rushed to the majors too young, where he promptly gave up some devastating home runs. He was the first pitcher in MLB history to give up grand slams in his first two games, and he also gave up an 18th-inning home run to Chris Burke in the 2005 NLDS, which ended the Braves’ season. He has also had trouble throwing strikes, but seemed to have overcome this while spending most the 2007 season in the minor leagues. A change of scenery may do him a world of good.

I’m not sure why Sickels has Richmond rated so high; his numbers in A-ball last year were decent, but not overly impressive: 3.02 ERA, 1.20 WHIP, 6.36 K/9. Richmond being #13 is probably an indication of how shallow the Braves’ system had grown after the big Mark Teixeira trade last summer. Still, while Richmond doesn’t seem to overpower anyone, he does have one excellent asset: his control. In 2006 in Rookie-level ball, he pitched 67 innings, and only walked an Eckersleyesque four batters all year. That jumped up to 25 walks in 138 2/3 innings as he advanced to A-ball last year, which isn’t too bad, either.

Still, even with their flaws, both players have some upside, which is two more players with upside than I had expected to get in exchange for Kotsay.

And now, this analysis has grown tiresome. This is the time on Catfish Stew when we dance.

David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution says he has spoken with Mark Kotsay, who was told by Billy Beane that the A’s are working on a deal that would send Kotsay to the Braves for a mid-level prospect. The A’s would probably pay at least $5M of the $8M owed to Kotsay this year. If the Braves find Kotsay’s MRI acceptable, the deal could be announced Monday.

This deal is probably going down now because the Braves other good CF option, free agent Mike Cameron, just signed with the Brewers. It’s a good fit for both teams: the Braves need a stopgap centerfielder until Jordan Schafer is ready for the big leagues, and the A’s need minor league depth.

I feel about this news exactly as I felt about the Jason Kendall trade: to get anything of value for Kotsay at this point, including salary relief, is a great move. A healthy Kotsay was one of my favorite A’s players ever: I loved his deadly accurate throws, and I liked watching his simple approach at the plate: swing at anything that’s a strike, don’t swing at anything that’s a ball. But it’s time to move on. Kotsay, in the last year of his contract on a rebuilding team, most likely isn’t going to help the A’s win any pennants, even if he stays completely healthy in 2008. If the deal goes through, I’ll be happy. If the A’s get back anybody who’s a top 20 Braves prospect, I’ll be giddy.

Update:  The A’s have signed free agent outfielder Emil Brown to a one-year deal to play the Bobby Kielty role of right-handed platoon bat.  Danny Putnam was designated for assignment to make room for Brown on the 40-man roster.  Which suggests something else:  the player the A’s will get back for Kotsay is probably on the Braves 40-man roster.  Because if the A’s were getting a player back for Kotsay who wasn’t on the 40-man roster, the A’s would probably just wait to finalize the Brown deal after the Kotsay trade goes through, give Kotsay’s roster spot to Brown, and not have to risk losing Putnam on waivers.

The only players who are both on the 40-man roster and on John Sickels’ top 20 Braves prospect list are #3 Brandon Jones, #5 Joey Devine, and #9 Jair Jurjjens.  Any of those sound too good to be true, so it’s probably not a top-20 prospect coming back.

Update 2: ESPN confirms that the A’s will get Joey Devine for Kotsay. The A’s are eating all but $2M of Kotsay’s salary. That’s great for the A’s; they’re shedding salaries commitments left and right, and have budget room to absorb some salary to get some talent back. Devine, a reliever, is a former first round pick who has huge strikeout rates, but also high walk rates, too. He showed some signs of improving his control in 2007. The A’s want upside these days, and Devine certainly has that. His walk rates may prevent him from realizing his full potential, but even if he flops, this is a great deal for the A’s.

1. stop casting porosity
2. stomach punch
3. questions without answers
4. their
5. asparagusy
6. things that come in threes
7. pitchers of eminem
8. zza zza gabor
9. dairy queen
10. winnie the pooh

1. joe kennedy
2. rich harden
3. barry zito
4. milton bradley
5. travis buck
6. mike piazza
7. daric barton
8. jason kendall
9. shannon stewart
10. todd walker

1. 2007 mlb rookie of the year
2. eephus
3. baseball
4. tinstaap
5. baseball web gems
6. other names for a fastball
7. charting pitches
8. babip
9. oakland athletics
10. 2007 baseball playoff predictions

1. Zito Thoughts, Part 3
2. Ah, That Day
3. A Picture Worth A Thousand Words
4. A’s Release Bradley, Ruin Upcoming Catfish Stew Post
5. Zito Thoughts, Part 2
6. In Memory of Joe Kennedy
7. Of Holes
8. Matt Kemp’s Magic Floating Helmet and Other Assorted Images
9. 2007 Photo Outtakes: I Don’t Want to Know
10. Zito Thoughts, Part 1

There will be a lot more of this in 2008. No, I’m not talking about Nick Swisher batting at the Coliseum. I’m referring to the empty seats. Even if Billy Beane is approaching rebuilding correctly–gathering a large cluster of young, cheap talent that can come of age together–it’s bound to hurt the near-term attendance figures. Very few people go to a major league game because the home team has a top-five minor league system.

Now some may be (and some are) asking, how did it come to this? How did the A’s let their farm system dry up so badly that they were forced to rip apart a team that made it to the ALCS just 15 months ago? Well, the most obvious answer is this: this is the way the system is supposed to work. Teams that are good for long periods of time are going to eventually have their talent dry up from having low draft picks year after year.

The A’s haven’t had a pick in the top half of the first round since Barry Zito was chosen with the ninth pick in 1999. Any pick beyond the 15th pick has historically had about a 75% chance of never amounting to much more than a replacement-level player. Even if you’re really smart about your drafts and you can figure out how to reduce those odds of failure from 75% to about 66%, your draft pick is still going to flop two times out of three. Eventually, you’re going to have a run of three or four years when your picks don’t work out, and you run out of talent.

Since Zito was chosen, the A’s have had 19 picks (excluding 2007: too soon to judge) in the first and supplemental rounds. Of those 19, seven have had careers that can be considered above MLB replacement level: Swisher, Joe Blanton, Mark Teahen, Bobby Crosby, Jeremy Bonderman, Huston Street, and Travis Buck. That’s a 63% failure rate: a pretty good percentage, actually.

So if there’s a suggestion out there that the A’s don’t draft well, or don’t develop their talent well, the evidence seems to suggest the contrary: on the whole, the A’s draft and develop talent better than the average team.

It’s when you start breaking down the whole into its constituent parts that you can find room to quibble. The A’s draft and development program has its strengths and weaknesses. The A’s are good at finding and developing players in those areas where statistical results are good predictors of future performance, namely corner outfielder/first basemen types, and pitching. As Moneyball spelled out, they’ve figured out how to beat the odds (somewhat) there. But at positions where athletic tools are an important part of the job description, the A’s tend to make as many, or more, mistakes as anyone.

The next time the A’s draft and develop a star centerfielder or shortstop or second baseman will be the first time. Part of the reason the pipeline has dried up at this point in time is that the A’s spent high draft picks in recent years to find players in these positions–specifically Richie Robnett (cf), Cliff Pennington (ss), and Brian Snyder (2b/3b)–and they have all pretty much flopped.

This leads to an interesting dilemma if you’re the A’s. If you know you suck at one thing–drafting players at the up-the-middle positions, and you’re good at something else–finding value in pitching and the corner positions–how should you approach things? Should you try to learn from your mistakes and pick better next time, or do you stick with what works for you, and figure you can trade for players to fill your holes later?

In their return for Dan Haren and Nick Swisher, the A’s seem to have opted to stick with what they know. They got nine players back: five pitchers, three corner outfielders, and one first baseman. No shortstops, no second basemen, and no pure centerfielders. (Although all three outfielders are said to be able to play some CF, all three are considered to be more natural fits in the corners.)

Haren and Swisher were their two most valuable trading chips, and they used them to get players we can be fairly confident given the A’s history that the A’s have evaluated accurately. As it stands today, the A’s farm system is much more talented than it was before the trades, but on the other hand, it’s more talented in the same areas it was talented before, and it’s still empty in the areas where it has been the emptiest. It will be interesting to see if now that the A’s have filled their coffers with their strengths, if they change direction a bit and start diving more into their weaknesses.

Having already traded away Dan Haren and Nick Swisher this offseason, the Oakland Athletics continued their rebuilding program today, sending Banjo Man, a 23-year veteran of the green and gold, to the Minnesota Twins in exchange for three promising young musicians.

In explaining the deal, A’s general manager Billy Beane repeated the rationale that he cited when trading Haren and Swisher: since the Minor League system was depleted and the ballclub appeared to have little chance of contending in the near future, Oakland would need to build a new foundation by trading star performers for promising youngsters.

Beane said that parting with the jovial Banjo Man was "very difficult" and insisted that the move was not about dumping an aging member of the team. "This was about trying to acquire as much talent in bulk as we can," Beane said. "It’s no fun doing this, from an emotional standpoint."

In exchange for the 57-year-old Banjo Man, the A’s received three young musical prodigies, all under the age of 23: Accordion Kid, Bagepipe Babe, and Tuba Dude.

Accordion Kid, 22, is the Twins’ #2 prodigy according to American Fanstand, a leading authority on ballpark music. Kid spent the year performing for the AAA Rochester Red Wings, where he was named the International League’s Most Outstanding Musical Prospect. He is expected to be ready for to make the jump to the major leagues in 2008.

Bagpipe Babe, 19, was ranked #3 by American Fanstand, and has perhaps a higher ceiling than Accordion Kid, but is further away from the majors. She showed lots of promise with the low-A Beloit Snappers, but scouts say she lets her bags sag from time to time, and needs to be more consistently firm in her presentation to make an impact at the major league level.

Tuba Dude, 21, did not make Fanstand’s Top 10 list. He is a bulky fellow who scouts say is unlikely to be a star, but could someday play a solid supporting role in the right circumstances.

A’s owner Lew Wolff praised Beane’s initiative. "I will certainly miss Banjo Man," Wolff said. "But we didn’t want to just cross our fingers and hope we’d be better this year. Billy’s building for the future but hasn’t torn the team apart. I honestly think we’ll be better. We’ll certainly be faster and younger."

Beane and Wolff indicated that more trades were in the works, but would not comment on any specific players. Below are some other members of the A’s organization that Beane is thought to be shopping:

Continue…

When I say, "Let’s Do This", Billy Beane doesn’t waste any time, does he? Nick Swisher, who in many ways has been the defining personality of the A’s franchise the last two years, is now gone to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for three prospects.

The A’s get the White Sox’ top two prospects, pitchers Fautino de los Santos and Gio Gonzalez, plus a fourth-outfielder type in Ryan Sweeney. De los Santos has a huge ceiling, but is probably a few years away from the big leagues. He’s the kind of high-reward talent that we A’s fans hoping the A’s would get back in exchange for Dan Haren. Gonzalez is not nearly as talented, but is polished and almost ready for the majors.

The trade of Swisher is a bit of a surprise, as we’ve been expecting that Joe Blanton would be the next to go. Plus, Swisher was under contract through 2012, so he could conceivably still be around when the A’s are ready to contend again. But I guess Beane is going full-bore on filling the 2011 basket with as much talent as conceivably possible. Since Swisher has been dealt, I don’t think there is any trade that follows now that would surprise me.

When you look at the combined trades of Haren and Swisher, what Beane has received in return is a possible Haren in de los Santos, a possible Swisher in Carlos Gonzalez, plus a possible Blanton or two in Brett Anderson and Gio Gonzalez. It will be fun and interesting to add all this up when the ordeal is overwith.

Citizens of the Milky Way Galaxy, our time is now. Today, we begin to choose a new future for ourselves. We need not resign ourselves to the status quo, with a broken today, and an uncertain tomorrow. We can win today AND build a better tomorrow.

So keep hope alive! Have faith in your ability to make a difference. Get out and vote! Make the right choice! You know what to do.

The bad news: the odds of the A’s adding the number "2008" to this banner are only slightly worse than the odds of Rich Harden staying healthy all season, which in turn are only slightly worse than the odds of me growing a second head, being elected President of the Galaxy, and then stealing a spaceship while visiting the planet Damogran.

The good news: if the third of these improbable events happens, the other two will follow as a matter of course.  Therefore, I would like to remind all A’s fans in Iowa to vote for me in the caucuses on January 3rd.  It’s the first step in a long journey towards Victory 2008!

If you have any questions about what I would do as President beyond my top priority of making sure the A’s win the World Series, feel free to ask them in the comments below.   I’ll be happy to answer, provided, of course, that doing so would not make me look uncool.

Hope you are having a good holiday season. And whatever road you end up taking in 2008, may you arrive at your destination both happy and healthy.

April 15: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. If Marco Scutaro’s home run on April 15th was the highlight of 2007, Rich Harden’s injury on the same day was the lowlight. Harden never made another start. For all practical purposes, we could have gone home after this game and called it a year.  Or, as it turns out, two or three years.

This exercise doesn’t look so hard in theory, but I’ve been fighting a hip strain for the last couple of weeks. This is to me like a picture of chocolate to a dieter. But at least my hip has only a strain, and not a torn labrum. The only good news about Chad Gaudin’s need for hip labrum surgery is that it totally explains his struggles in the second half of the season. He’s a better pitcher than his final numbers indicate.

Congratulations to all Dodger fans on their new, flexible backup catcher!

I’ve been dreaming of a true love’s kiss…I recently took my daughter to see Enchanted, a clever, well-executed story of when fairy tales meet the real world. I mention this because…well, I don’t really know why; I plopped this photo into the editor, and just started typing without thinking, and that’s what came out. I guess the song was stuck in my head. But I’ll leave it in, because I can totally make a metaphor out of this. You see, the land where you could find a sucker GM to take your veteran and get back multiple players who are both better and cheaper than they guy you gave up appears to now be a pure fantasy. Even Ned Coletti and Brian Sabean, who have a long history of trading away prospect gold for mediocre washed-up garbage, aren’t falling for that trick anymore, for goodness sakes. C’mon Ned…just one little bite of this apple and all your lineup holes will be filled…Nope, not happening. Billy Beane’s fairy land is gone, and he’s been shoved into the real world, where GMs now seem to understand the value of young players, where even a sure Hall-of-Famer like Johan Santana can seemingly barely net a return of one sure-fire propect, and any less-than-Santanas can only return prospects with less-than-certainties. Better get used to the fact that it ain’t only the witches that have warts anymore–the princesses do, too. (And if you want to use that last sentence as a metaphor to write an essay about the steroid mess, Be My Guest.)

All six players the A’s got in return for Dan Haren have both beauty and warts, and that makes the possible returns of this trade range from fairy tale to horror story. The most likely outcome is a mix of success and failure, where maybe two of the six reach their potential, two of them flame out, and two of them fall somewhere in-between. Let’s look at all six players, and compare them to players we know about.

Carlos Gonzalez:
Fairy Tale: Vladimir Guerrero
Real World: Jose Guillen
Horror Story: Ruben Rivera

Like the three players above, Gonzalez is an extremely talented athlete, possessing a cannon arm and a nice, powerful stroke that suffers from a lack of discipline with the strike zone. He also has a bit of an enigmatic personality, with complaints that he doesn’t work as hard as he should. Guerrero ended up putting his package into superstardom, Guillen became a solid major leaguer with some issues, while Rivera got his head screwed on backwards and his career completely fell apart. Note of caution for Billy Beane: Guillen’s career probably suffered greatly from being rushed to the major leagues at age 21 by the Pirates, when he still could have used some more seasoning in the minors.

Brett Anderson:
Fairy Tale: Barry Zito
Real World: Curt Young
Horror Story: Tim Conroy

Like Zito, Anderson is not a particularly gifted athlete, and doesn’t have much more than an average fastball, if that. But both he and Zito were extremely well-coached as youngsters (Anderson’s father is the head baseball coach at Oklahoma State), and combine outstanding off-speed pitches with a solid understanding of the art of pitching. But as Zito showed last year, the line between a Cy Young winner and a league-average pitcher is quite thin when you don’t have overpowering stuff. A career resembling that of the A’s current pitching coach is more of a realistic expectation. Conroy threw harder than Zito, Young or Anderson, but we’ll pick him as an example of a hyped-up A’s lefty who failed to make much impact.

Dana Eveland:
Fairy Tale: David Wells
Real World: Mark Redman
Horror Story: Tim Birtsas

I suppose I could have picked C.C. Sabathia instead of Wells, but this fairy tale is much more entertaining if you try to visualize David Wells in tights, acting as the Prince Charming of this Land of Large Lefties. Plus Sabathia stuck in the majors at age 20, while Wells didn’t get there until age 24, the same age Eveland will be in 2008. Redman is one of the least popular names in A’s history, and has been a below-average pitcher in his career as a whole, but he put his act together long enough to rattle off a five-year stretch of league-average pitching, which would be useful to the A’s if it comes early enough in his career. Birtsas is in the horror category both because he was a humongous lefty who never really fulfilled his potential, and because he was on the wrong end of two less-than-brilliant trades by the A’s. He came over to the A’s with Jose Rijo when Rickey Henderson was sent to the Yankees, and he followed Rijo to the Reds in a later trade for Dave Parker. Although Parker helped the A’s win the World Series in 1989, Rijo dominated the A’s in the World Series the following year.

Aaron Cunningham:
Fairy Tale: J.D. Drew
Real World: Matt Murton
Horror Story: Billy McMillon

Cunningham seems certain to be a major leaguer of some sort, but what kind? He is a card-carrying member of the League of Typically Underappreciated Outfielders Who Do Everything Well, But Nothing Great, where J.D. Drew is king. In the A’s organization, you can easily see how he could end up with a fate like Matt Murton, where he gets stuck behind some more established names (Swisher, Cust, Buck, Gonzalez) and never really gets trusted with a full-time opportunity to show what he can do over multiple seasons. Or worse, a fate like McMillon’s, where he rides the bench so long his skills rot entirely, and a career is lost for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Chris Carter:
Fairy Tale: Richie Sexson
Real World: Tuffy Rhodes
Horror Story: Rob Nelson

From what I hear about Chris Carter, he sounds like the perfect candidate for the Japanese Leagues: a big power hitter with plenty of holes in his swing for major league pitchers to exploit, so he ends up like Tuffy Rhodes in Japan, where they don’t care about a gaijin’s holes as long as he keeps hitting home runs. Sexson was able to overcome his holes and put up some big numbers until last year, but now he’s playing like he wants to go to Japan, too. Maybe that’s why he signed with the Japanese-owned Seattle Mariners in the first place. Rob Nelson is, in a nutshell, not Mark McGwire.

Greg Smith:
Fairy Tale: Kirk Rueter
Real World: Kirk Saarloos
Horror Story: Kirk Dressendorfer

Like the other Kirks above, Greg "Kirk" Smith (for lack of a better nickname) will probably not have a career as long and glorious as James T. Of the three comps, Dressendorfer probably had the most talent, but he failed his Kobayashi Maru test miserably, and only ended up pitching a total of seven major league games. Saarloos and Rueter, on the other hand, both managed to make a decent career out of their slop-throwing repertoires. Rueter managed to turn his slop into a long career of league-average pitching, and that’s probably Smith’s ceiling, as well.

And did they all live happily ever after? Keep turning the pages…

Now that it’s clear that the A’s are doing a full-scale rebuilding project, what’s the plan? Who do you sell off, and who do you keep?

The conventional wisdom is that the A’s are trying to build the strongest possible team for the estimated opening of Cisco Field in 2011. With that in mind, I made the chart below. It shows all the players on the 40-man roster, plus a number of top prospects, in order to figure out which players the A’s have control over until that magical 2011 date.

Basically, anyone above the red line is now trade bait. Unfortunately, six of the eleven players who can become free agents before Cisco Field opens are currently coming off injuries, and probably wouldn’t fetch much in a trade until perhaps July, after they’ve proven themselves healthy. But Ellis, Embree, Blanton, Street and even maybe DiNardo should be popping up in trade rumors soon.

The chart:

Legend:

1. Steroids give you hallucinations.
2. Steroids lead to excessive photon absorbtion, exposing you to harmful doses of ultraviolet radiation.
3. Steroids cause smog and odd-colored sunsets.
4. Steroids cause holes in the ozone layer.
5. Steroids are responsible for global warming and the melting of the Arctic ice cap.
6. Steroids cause hurricanes.
7. Steroids cause federal agencies to respond very slowly to natural disasters.
8. Steroids render intelligence agencies unable to distinguish between Iran and Iraq, and to get confused about which one is working on creating WMDs.
9. Steroids are why Bono still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
10. Steroids render you unable to distinguish between an iPod and a Zune.
11. Steroids explain the existence of people who like Dave Matthews.
12. One dose and you yelled, "Timber! Watch out for flying glass!" Your ceiling fell in and your bottom fell out, you went into a spin and you started to shout, "I’ve been hit! This is it! Damn, that zit! Anyone want to buy some authentic backne signed by Raul Padron?"
13. Backne is gross.
14. Steroids make you grow back hair.
15. Back hair is gross.
16. Steroids make your hairstyle indistiguishable from chia pets.
17. Steroids make the sky look like Bobby Kielty’s hair.
18. There is no evidence that Bobby Kielty ever took steroids himself, but if he did, he only took the right-handed ones.
19. Adam Everett’s glove took steroids, but his bat didn’t appreciate the peer pressure, and refused to participate.
20. Steroids make people make up ridiculous facts about steroids and write them down.

Jack Cust is in the Mitchell Report. If you’re going to have a steroid-usin’ DH, might as well have the best one.

Adam Piatt and F.P. Santangelo are also mentioned (surprising names to me), as well as the usual Canseco/Giambi-era suspects.

Just wondering: are all the people who planned to boycott the A’s if they signed Bonds also planning to boycott the A’s if they keep Cust?

Kevin Goldstein at Baseball Prospectus came out today with his list of Top 11 A’s Prospects.  Daric Barton (pictured above) is the A’s sole 5-star prospect on the list.  I’d agree with Goldstein’s high rating:  to me, Barton is the most impressive A’s rookie hitter since Jose Canseco.  Barton doesn’t impress with his power, but with his mature-beyond-his-years approach at the plate.  If Barton has a hole somewhere in his swing, I haven’t seen it.  He has an impeccable eye for the strike zone, and has shown himself capable of turning any pitch in any location into a line drive.  Whatever AL pitchers threw him during his September callup:  high, low, inside, outside, straight, bendy, fast, slow–Barton hit them all.  I am very much looking forward to watching the A’s finally having a player who makes the other team wonder, "How the heck do I get this guy out?"

Beyond Barton, the prospect pipeline is neither hopeless nor inspiring. There is one 4-star prospect, pitcher Trevor Cahill, and seven 3-star players who possess both upside and question marks.  Sure, maybe all these players will turn out to be solid and/or star major leagues, but the most likely scenario is that this mediocre farm system produces mediocre major-league performances, and you end up with a team that finishes around .500 every year for the next four or five years.  Meh, bleh, bleh. 

If you’re an A’s fan who hates Barry Bonds, don’t mail all your A’s gear to Billy Beane just yet. It’s quite possible that all this chatter about whether or not Barry Bonds will join the Oakland Athletics is really just a minor subplot in the truly big story going on: whether or not Max Scherzer will join the Oakland Athletics.

If Billy Beane actually intends to blow up the current A’s roster and rebuild for the future, the explosion begins by detonating Dan Haren. In order for Billy Beane to push the button on a Haren trade, he’s going to want to be sure that he gets something in return that is likely to provide Haren-like value when the A’s are ready to contend again in 2009 or 2010. The Arizona Diamondbacks are apparently the team closest to being able to pull off a trade for Haren, but the Diamondbacks’ best pitching prospects are not particularly close to the major leagues.

The Diamondbacks’ Top 10 Prospect list on Baseball America has five pitchers on it, but four of the five just launched their pro careers in 2007. The only pitcher on the list who pitched professionally in 2006 was Brett Anderson, and he has only advanced as far as the High-A California League, where he pitched well for a 19-year-old, but was not unhittable, either. A lot can go wrong with a 19-year-old arm between A-ball and the major leagues. If I’m Beane, I like Anderson, but I need to get one sure-fire major-league pitcher in return, as well.

This brings us to the aforementioned Scherzer, who completely dominated the California League in his debut, and was quickly promoted to AA. Scherzer’s success caused MinorLeagueBaseball.com to name him the 35th-best prospect in baseball. The only question about Scherzer making the majors is whether he can develop a third pitch to be a starter, or if he’s a closer in waiting.

If I’m Beane, there’s no way this deal happens without Scherzer, but the Diamondbacks are naturally reluctant. Initial reports out of the Winter Meetings put Scherzer on the Diamondbacks’ list of "untouchable" young players, along with Justin Upton, Chris Young, Stephen Drew and Mark Reynolds. So, as rumor had it, among the Diamondbacks six best young near-major-league-ready players, only Carlos Gonzalez (MinorLeagueBaseball.com’s #23 prospect) was available in exchange for Haren.

Not good enough; no Scherzer, no deal. Beane left the winter meetings in Nashville without trading Haren, and started making noises like he planned to keep the roster intact, and go for it in 2008. The fact that the Angels didn’t end up with Miguel Cabrera helps make that decision seem more plausible. Next thing you know, quotes like this show up in the press:

"There is no doubt in my mind that Oakland will sign Bonds," one major-league executive said Thursday as the winter meetings wound down. "I’d be shocked if it didn’t happen."

Well, that set off quite a storm of discussion, didn’t it? If you’re the Diamondbacks or some other team that had Dan Haren as Plan A or Plan B, and all over ESPN they’re discussing Barry Bonds joining the A’s, you’re thinking, hmm…maybe I won’t be getting Dan Haren after all. Because if the A’s trade Dan Haren and rebuild for 2010, there’s certainly no reason for the A’s to put up with the headaches that come with Barry Bonds.

The recipe, in summary: drop a large spoonful of Barry Bonds rumors into your "we-are-contenders" broth, stir well, and let simmer for two days. Then get a taste of this:

Arizona has been the most aggressive suitor for Haren, with a package of up to five prospects, including outfielder Carlos Gonzalez, pitcher Brett Anderson and, as a possible player to be named, pitcher Max Scherzer, the 11th pick of the 2006 draft. Were the A’s to conclude a deal with the Diamondbacks, it could happen early in the week.

Bon appetit!