Another reason for the A’s not holding a fire sale, besides the ones I listed last time, is that the A’s are not really all that far from contending again. While the A’s are currently seven games under .500, they have actually outscored their opponents on the season. And if you go even further, and adjust their runs scored/runs allowed by strength of schedule, things look even better. According to BP’s Adjusted Standings, the A’s ought to have the best record in the AL West, and should be just one game behind Detroit for third-best in the entire American League.

When a team’s actual record falls far below its projected one, it’s usually a sign of two things: 1) a bad bullpen, and 2) a bounceback to come. This is essentially what happened to Cleveland in 2006–they outscored their opponents by 88 runs, but finished 6 games below .500, thanks to an atrocious bullpen. They stabilized their pen in the offseason, and in 2007, they are contending again.

There was a period in July, while Huston Street, Justin Duchscherer and Kiko Calero were all on the DL, when there was not a single member of the A’s bullpen who was on the division winning team of a year before. The A’s won the division thanks to their pen–their M.O. in 2006 was to play solid, mistake-free defense, keep the game close into the late innings, and then outlast the other team’s bullpen with depth. There were many narrow, late-inning victories on the way to the division crown. This year, the A’s haven’t been able to win those types of games very often.

If Street, Duchscherer and Calero return to health in 2008, and are joined by an effective Alan Embree and Santiago Casilla, the A’s could return to their favorite game plan again. The major tinkering that needs to be done is to purge the team of the sub-.300 OBPs that are killing the offense. Jason Kendall is gone, so that’s one-third the battle. And hopefully, the A’s can find some sucker to take Mark Kotsay off their hands, and hope that Chris Denorfia can take over the job and put up a far more respectable OBP than Kotsay’s. The final and most difficult problem is to find an ABC (Anybody But Crosby). I’ve been watching Donnie Murphy pretty closely this week, and I don’t see any reason to think he’s Anybody.

* * *

Meanwhile, I’m facing a bit of a roster crunch at home. With three kids now, there’s just not enough space around here to keep all the stuff we’ve accumulated over the years. It’s time for a fire sale! I’m doing a major purge of my house this weekend, getting rid of anything I don’t need–clothes, trinkets, toys, games, books, etc. This includes dozens of baseball books. Everything must go! If any of you are in the Bay Area, and might want to take any of this stuff off my hands, email me at catfish AT zombia.com. Anything I have left by Sunday will be headed to Goodwill or CARH.

Well, that trade deadline was boring. Plenty of bait (Blanton, Johnson, Piazza, Kennedy, Stewart, the DFA’d Kielty) but not a single fish caught today. What’s going on here? Two things:

1. The Moneyball effect. There has two subeffects from this:
    
   • There are fewer teams Billy Beane can win a trade from, because more and more teams know how to properly value players
      
   • Beane has acquired so many undervalued players that the fleeceable teams still undervalue them, and won’t pay enough for them
      
2. The changes in free agency rules. With the latest Collective Bargaining Agreement, the team that signs a Type B free agent no longer loses a draft pick of their own, while the team that loses him still gets a free pick. That means there is less risk that a Type B free agent will accept arbitration if offered, because there’s no downside to signing such a player anymore. Type B free agents are worth at least a free sandwich draft pick, so you don’t want to just dump those guys for scraps–the player you get back has to be worth more than the draft pick.

   Nobody outside of MLB the MLPBA and the Elias Sports Bureau seems to be sure what the Type A/Type B formula is, but I’ve heard speculation that Piazza, Kennedy, and Stewart may all end up qualifying as Type Bs. In fact, some of the decisions the A’s made before the deadline may have designed to make these players Type B free agents. What we do know is that the formula is based on the past two years of performance, and you are ranked according to your position. The top 20% at each position are Type A players, the next 20% are Type Bs.

   Outfielders, first basemen and DHs are grouped together for these rankings. Someone like Mike Piazza is more likely to rank in the top 40% if he’s considered a catcher than if he’s lumped in with the huge pool of OFs and 1Bs. He played 99 games in 2006 as a catcher, and 8 as a DH. Before he got hurt, he had played 26 games as a DH in 2007. So if he DHed for 66 more games, he’d end up as a DH for free agent purposes. Piazza was ready to come back and DH in early July, but the A’s asked him to stay on the DL and try to catch. Why? Presumably because Jason Kendall sucked, but I think it’s so that he’d be calculated as a catcher. Eventually, they gave up the idea of having him come back as a catcher, and said, OK, you can DH. When did they do that? When there were 67 games left in the season. Do you think Mike Piazza sat out two games before the trade deadline? You betcha. At most, he’ll now have a combined 99 games as a DH in the past two seasons, same as his number of games as a catcher.

   I’m not quite sure why Joe Kennedy was dropped from the rotation in early July–he had one bad outing, but he really wasn’t pitching as bad as his 2-8 won-loss record would indicate. Unless, of course, the A’s wanted him to be a reliever for free agency purposes, as well. I’m not sure how they determine whether you’re a starter or a reliever–I doubt it’s strictly on games played like position players, since starters only go once every five days. But if Kennedy has a greater chance of qualifying for Type B status as a reliever than as a starter, I’m sure the A’s are all over it.

   In recent years, the A’s have found players like Travis Buck and Huston Street in the sandwich round. Is a 2-8 Joe Kennedy going to land someone with that sort of potential in a trade? Kennedy’s not a bad pitcher, and I’m sure he’s better than some of the dreck that a few contenders I can think of are running out there, but no one is going to send over a potential Buck or Street for him.

So blah, no new prospects to get us excited about the future–yet. We’ll just have to wait for the 2008 draft for our next dose of that kind of pleasure. At least there’s a good pitching matchup tonight to look forward to: Dan Haren vs. Justin Verlander. And even if there wasn’t many happy returns of the day, I shall be thankful at least that I am not a Pirates fan, wondering why my team just took on Matt Morris’ salary for no good reason.

Often during the A’s recently concluded 9-game losing streak I’ve felt like ranting here, but I haven’t had–well, not the time; I’ve had lots of time–the hands to do so. Much of my computer time these days is spent with a sleeping baby in one arm, and I’ve held off writing, waiting for a two-handed opportunity on the computer. As I’ve sat waiting, I have officially gave up on two things:

• Two-handed opportunities on the computer
• The A’s making the playoffs in 2007

So here I go, pecking slowly at the keyboard.

It’s a bit of an odd sensation giving up on the A’s playoff chances in July. The A’s haven’t been this clearly out of contention in July since 1998, the summer before Tim Hudson became the first of the "Big Three" starters to make his major league debut.

So here’s one point in support of those who said that Billy Beane’s success has nothing to do with the principles outlined in Moneyball, and everything to do with the good fortune of acquiring Hudson, Mulder and Zito: the A’s streak of contention began precisely when the first of those three pitchers arrived, and ended precisely when the last of them had departed. Interesting that both Bay Area GMs, after many successful years, find themselves this summer having to re-prove themselves by moving past the foundation of their previous success: Beane without the Big Three, and Brian Sabean without Barry Bonds. And each has to start this process this summer with a farm system pipeline that is quite dry, and a trade market that has largely ceased to overvalue mediocre proven veterans. It’s a difficult task, like trying to type a long essay while holding a seven-pound baby in one arm.

It will take all of Biily Beane’s creativity to fix this thing. 10 years ago, a Jason Kendall might have brought in a package of good prospects; now he brings in a guy described as "no one’s idea of a top relief prospect" who six months ago was probably closer to being out of baseball than to the major leagues. Beane is really going to have to dig deep to extract any value out of his tradeable assets. The good news is that if there is one thing that Billy Beane is good at, it’s digging deep and finding hidden value in other teams’ minor league systems. Justin Duchscherer, Chad Gaudin, Lenny DiNardo, Jack Cust, Marco Scutaro–these guys were all acquired without fanfare for next to nothing, and all have provided positive value in return.

Still, those guys are useful role players, not stars. The thing about having a lineup devoid of big stars is that you can’t afford to have any offensive black holes like Jason Kendall and Bobby Crosby suck everything away. Like a tennis player with mediocre ground strokes who gets a lot of free points with a big serve, one star player like Frank Thomas can compensate for a lot of other deficiencies. The A’s have been hurting (literally) in a lot of ways this year, but the biggest hurt this year compared to last has been not having the Big Hurt to hit that three-run homer once a week, that turns a 3-4 losing week into a 4-3 winning record.

In fact, Beane is so good at acquiring talent on the cheap, like finding quality in rehabbing free agents (John Jaha, Frank Thomas, Shannon Stewart) it’s rather stunning to contemplate how bad his track record is at signing mid-level free agents. Mike Magnante? Arthur Rhodes? Mark Redman? Esteban Loaiza? Even his re-signs and extensions have been bad. Jermaine Dye was a total flop in Oakland. Has Eric Chavez been worth all that money? Has Mark Kotsay?

I’m beginning to think that given Beane’s strengths and weaknesses, he ought to forego the midlevel free agents altogether, and go for a stars-and-scrubs strategy. Beane can find the scrubs for cheap better than anyone. Skip having three or four $7-12 million/year players on the team–nearly every one the A’s have had in Beane’s tenure has been wasted money. Blow it all on one superstar instead. Go ahead, Billy, go forth this offseason and spend all your money on ARod.

Then after six or seven more contending seasons on both sides of the bay, we can go complain that Brian Sabean is overrated; he just lucked into that Barry Zito-led pitching rotation, and state that we’ll finally find out how good a GM Billy Beane is, now that he at last has to build a team that isn’t just a bunch of nobodies surrounding his all-time home run king.

…with some cash for catcher Rob Bowen and minor-league LHP Jerry Blevins.

The 6′ 6" Blevins was not on anybody’s prospect list to begin the season. He had a 6.13 ERA last year, but something must have clicked for him in the offseason. He’s had a monster year in 2007. He had a 0.38 ERA with 32 strikeouts against only 5 walks in 23 2/3 innings in A-ball, before being promoted to AA. There, he’s struck out 37 in 29 1/3 IP, against 8 walks, with a 1.53 ERA. He’s been better against lefties than righties, but he’s not just a LOOGY like Jay Marshall; he’s been good against RHB, too.

So I’m very happy. The A’s weren’t going anywhere with or without Kendall this season, so to get anything with even some possible positive value for him is fabulous.

Meanwhile, has anyone seen Ray Fosse?  Anyone?  I’m kinda worried about him…

First, some Zito news, and now this: Newsday is reporting that Rickey Henderson will be the new hitting coach for the New York Mets, replacing Rick Down.

Well, this should be fun.  I’ve always thought that Rickey could be a pretty good first base coach, since he has an expert eye for pitchers’ moves, but I never really thought about him as a batting coach.  He had pretty much the ideal batting approach as a player; it should be interesting to see if he can explain and transfer that approach to others.

Barry Zito’s sky is falling for the seventy billionth time since his career began: Tim Marchman has a column today wondering whether Barry Zito’s contract is the worst of all time.

I guess my three–part series about Zito has made me somewhat of a Zito expert, so I suppose I should respond. Let us summarize what we know about Barry Zito:

1. His detractors over the years have looked at his peripheral stats and conclude he’s not as good as his ERA, because his (luck/big foul territory/good defense) masks his shortcomings.

2. Point #1 is crap.

Barry Zito’s success rests on his proven ability to reduce the BABIP of right-handed batters far lower than normal. That’s what makes him special. It’s skill, not luck (see TangoTiger for more);  it’s not the foul ground (no significant home/road splits), and it’s not the defense (he did this even when he had Ben Grieve, Terrence Long and Matt Stairs in the outfield behind him.)

Against left-handed batters, he’s pretty much been an average ho-hum major league pitcher. But because the vast majority of batters are right-handed, Zito succeeds.

So Zito is having a bad year.  I’ve heard that he’s lost his control, he’s lost his velocity.  Is the sky at last falling?

Um, no.  Let’s look at the important numbers:

If Zito was losing his stuff, he’d be struggling against both LHB and RHB this year. But he’s been just as good as ever against RHB. His bread and butter is still there, and still working just fine.

Zito’s struggles this year are entirely with left-handed batters.  Like his worst season in 2004, he’s allowed an extremely high BABIP against them.  In addition, the word has apparently gotten around about his reverse splits, and he’s facing a higher percentage of LHB this year than ever before.

Zito has had these troubles with LHB before, and fixed them.  I think he can fix them again.  I wouldn’t quite give up on him yet.

My youngest daughter, eleven days old, attended the first ballgame of her life this afternoon. The Seattle Mariners and the Oakland Athletics demonstrated to her, in many ways, what an amazing world she was born into. As a token of my appreciation, I would to sing them a song, and it goes a little something like this:

The colors of a rainbow
So pretty in the sky

Continue…

I have come in recent days to question the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson’s 231-year-old sentence that we are celebrating today:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

While I am certainly grateful for all the blessings this sentence has laid upon us, it is the last word of the sentence that I have been pondering. Indeed, the phrase “pursuit of Happiness” seems to be the only part of the sentence that is uniquely Jeffersonian; the rest of it comes borrowed from other famous Enlightment philosophies, particularly those of John Locke.

Locke wrote about “Life, Liberty and Estate”. Adam Smith followed Locke up with a discussion of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Property.” Scholars are not quite sure why Jefferson changed it from “Property”, a basic legal concept, to “Happiness”, a basic human emotion, but the effect is huge. By placing an emotion into the sentence, the sentence comes alive. It brings something tangible, something that is experienced by every human being, into a sentence that is otherwise highly abstract.

* * *

My third daughter was born a week ago today with an excess of fluid collected in her lungs. She spent the first two days of her life in a neonatal intensive care unit. As I sat by her side in the hospital, watching her with breathing tubes in her nostrils, an IV in her arm, and a gazillion wires coming from various places on her body to monitor this and that, I experienced many strong and profound emotions. I’m pretty sure none of them would be labeled “Happiness”.

* * *

Human beings have a large set of emotions they experience. These days, we simply take it as self-evident that Happiness is the ultimate emotion, the one we ought to pursue above all others. We spend a lot of time and energy obsessing about how to be happy, but is there truly a hierarchy of emotions, with happiness at the top? Or is this just an idea that Jefferson planted in our heads 231 years ago, and has grown so large today that we cannot get around it?

* * *

Happiness is a positive, but selfish emotion. It’s about me, how well things are going for me. I experienced positive emotions while sitting in the hospital, but I wouldn’t call those emotions “Happiness” because they had nothing to do with me at all. When I think about how I felt sitting in the neonatal ICU, holding this small child with all the tubes and wires sticking out of her, the one word that comes to mind is tenderness.

Tenderness is a social emotion, not a selfish one. It’s about caring for someone else, about wanting to attend to another person’s well-being, above and beyond your own. It’s both positive and negative at once: positive in that you want to make this other person grow and thrive and flourish, and negative in that you recognize how delicate and fragile life can be. The feeling is deeper, and more profound, than any shallow happiness can ever be.

* * *

My daughter is home now, healthy and growing. I got some good sleep last night, my first good rest in a long time. It is the happiest I’ve felt in weeks. But how I feel doesn’t really matter.

Look up “happiness research” on the web, and you get all sorts of information about how human beings can, do, and ought to behave. Happiness researchers will provide statistical evidence that having additional children won’t make you any happier.

Humbug. I think that happiness researchers, like happiness itself, are somewhat besides the point. Look up “tenderness research“, and all you get are articles about beef. A lot of people, I think, are barking up the wrong cow.

* * *

Humans are social beings, with social emotions, and we pursue our social connections–creating families, making friends, joining political parties, attending churches, volunteering, becoming sports fans–for reasons that go beyond our own personal happiness.

Meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder: what would our world be like today, if Jefferson had written that among our unalienable rights were “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Tenderness”?

The Angels are the current MLB Heavyweight Champions (see the Catfish Stew sidebar for details) and today, they play the Pittsburgh Pirates in a pivotal game: if the Angels win, the Heavyweight title will stay in the AL for the rest of the season; if the Pirates win, the crown stays in the NL.

The way things are going, the heavyweight crown might remain not just in the AL for the rest of the season, but in Anaheim. Are the Angels ever going to lose again? It doesn’t matter how far behind they are, or how late, they end up winning the game. Obviously, this is their year.

The Angels are on pace to win 104 games; the A’s are on pace to win 87. While it’s pretty easy to imagine that the A’s could pick up the pace after adding Rich Harden to the rotation, and Justin Duchscherer and Huston Street to the bullpen again, it’s pretty hard to envision the Angels slowing down enough for the A’s to catch them. The Angels would have to play under .500 for the rest of the year to fall below 92 wins. Clearly, the Angels are better than a .500 team, so even if they don’t win 104, they’ll almost certainly win 95-100, and make the playoffs. If the A’s are going to make the playoffs, the wild card will have to come out of the AL West.

Plus, you have to wonder how much Harden, Duchscherer, and Street will actually improve the team. The A’s already have the fewest runs allowed of any AL team; only the Padres, in their cavernous ballpark and non-DH league, have been stingier. It’s the offense that needs improvement, and it’s hard to understand how booting Milton Bradley off the team is going to help matters. On the other hand, the offensive production from the outfield hasn’t been the problem–the problem has been the three major sinkholes in the lineup: Eric Chavez, Bobby Crosby, and Jason Kendall.

I am certain Chavez will improve his first-half numbers in the second half. He says his arms are finally healthy after 1 1/2 years of pain, and he looks like he says. In the last two weeks, the ball has been jumping off his bat in a way we haven’t seen in, well, 1 1/2 years. So consider that sinkhole filled, at least.

But Crosby and Kendall are still problems. Kendall’s hole can be filled by giving more playing time to Mike Piazza and Kurt Suzuki, and the A’s have taken steps in that direction, so that’s good.

Crosby, on the other hand…he’s the unsolvable problem. Sure, every once in a while, he’ll crush some pitch with such force that your eyes pop out, but his high-effort swing contains more holes than the Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation. He’s everything that Moneyball talked about the A’s avoiding: the player who looks real good in every way except one: the ability to hit a baseball. And they’re pretty much stuck with him, because they don’t have anybody else in or near the majors who can handle shortstop defensively on a long-term basis. Marco Scutaro is OK in an emergency, but he just doesn’t have nearly the range that Crosby does. So the A’s will remain with the status quo: hoping that somehow, someday, Crosby figures something out and starts hitting. Good luck.

Before I headed out to the Oakland Coliseum for yesterday’s A’s – Reds game, Bob Timmermann noted in an email that the game wasn’t going to be televised anywhere, and momentous things tend to happen in games without TV. For instance, Shawn Green hit four home runs in a non-televised game a few years ago.

I said I wouldn’t mind witnessing a momentous event, provided the event wasn’t that my wife going into sudden labor during the game. Bob said it would be bad if we felt compelled to name the child after whoever was at bat at the time, especially since we’re expecting a girl.

"Yes, we decided to name you Ken, Jr., but you weren’t named after me, you were named after Ken Griffey, Jr. It’s a long story."

* * *

I went home thinking that no momentous event had happened at all, just a bunch of little not-quites. Instead, it turned out to Milton Bradley’s last appearance in an A’s uniform. Hmm…how to react? With disappointment? With vengeance?

It’s clearly quite an odd transaction, because when Bradley is healthy and playing, he was still one of their top three outfielders. Swisher (.909) and Buck (.873) each have a better OPS this year than Bradley (.819), but Swisher can play first base, and Bradley is better than Dan Johnson (.786). And Mark Kotsay (.738). And Shannon Stewart (.695). And Bobby Kielty (.477).

It’s the Stewart comparison that really gets me, because they’re both under contract just for this season. The only way that Shannon Stewart is more valuable than Milton Bradley is that he has stayed healthy this year. Stewart is nowhere near the hitter Bradley is, is limited only to left field on defense, and has the worst outfield throwing arm Oakland has seen since Ben Grieve. If it were me, I’d cut Stewart long before I cut Bradley. Same goes for Kielty, who ain’t no great shakes in the field, either, and is somewhat literally half the switch-hitter Milton Bradley is.

All of which leads me to conclude that either one of two things are true: either Bradley did something to wear out his welcome, or Beane already has a trade lined up that couldn’t quite get completed by Friday, when the A’s needed the roster spot.

So I’m pretty bummed out that Bradley is gone. I liked the dude. I liked the way he got psyched up when he earned a base on balls. I liked his goofy goggles.  I liked the way he attacked a fastball. I like his home run dance with Swisher.  I liked the way he played the outfield. I’ll miss him.

* * *

Here are some shots I took yesterday of what turned out to be Milton’s Last Stand:

Continue…

Milton Bradley has been designated for assignment.  Reasons unknown, press conference to follow soon.

The timing is related to Eric Chavez getting hurt again.  If he can’t play this weekend in New York, the A’s are short an infielder.  They needed to call up somebody (Kevin Melillo, in this case), and needed to send somebody off the roster as well.   The fact that Bradley is the guy to go, however, is rather shocking.

Edwin Encarnacion tries to catch a foul ball…

…but doesn’t quite reach it.

Continue…

Enough of this 3 o’clock roadblock – roadblock – roadblock. Hey, Mr. LaRussa, ain’t got no birth certificate on me yet. I’m waiting, but I ain’t got all day, all night, every day, every month, every year. So, them crazy…we gonna chase them crazy…we gonna chase them crazy redbirds out of the yown. See now? See this? Two hours, ten minutes. That’s how things are done round here. We always get to bed early, and nobody stays up late. Hey, Mr. LaRussa, I look down on you with scorn. Then I eat all of your corn.

But I must be hallucinating, watching Angels celebrating. The A’s have gone 12-5 this month, and have lost half a game in the standings. Tonight, Angels 9-4 down and win 10-9? Every year there’s some team, that somehow gets exactly what they need exactly when they need it. This must be a strange deception, by celestial intervention. The Angels have the magic. The Angels are going to the playoffs. Anythems thinking they can keep thems out of the playoffs, them crazy. For Oakland, it’s Wild Card or bust.

From end to end, the noise begins…in the human battle stations, the big ones coming in between July 23 and August 13. In those 22 days, the A’s play the Angels 7 times, the Tigers 7 times, and the Mariners 4 times. Rip through those three weeks, and you make the playoffs. Play .500 or less, forget it. Meanwhile, work, work, work, work, work ’til holes are filled. A Mets-Indians-Yankees road trip. Schedulemakers, them crazy. Sinatra didn’t sing “I want to be a part of it–New York, Cleveland, New York!” Yankees have some wild card dreams of their own. They’re hot hot hot! Hopefully, before the A’s hit town, they will sit at the table too and drink cool water. And their lungs will fill with rain, and the water rushes in.

The last time I can remember going to a game at the Oakland Coliseum like today’s, a game that just seemed to drag on and on

and on

and on and on and on

and on

and on and on and on and on

and on

*sigh*

and on

and on and on and on

and on

and on and on,

was back in the days

ex…hale…

when Tony LaRussa

–pause–

was manning the dugout.

Ah yes…

Thanks for the memory. How lovely it was.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: the day after the MLB draft was complete, the A’s shifted their top prospect, 21-year-old Daric Barton, over from first base to third on an everyday basis. He had seen some occasional time at third before, but since June 8, he’s played there every day.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but the A’s did draft Sean Doolittle, a slick-fielding first baseman from U of Virginia, in the sandwich round this year. In a chat at Baseball Propectus, Bryan Smith said:

Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin told me that Doolittle was the best defensive first baseman he’d ever seen at the level. Gotta like that.

Doolittle is considered a safe pick, a player who is likely to make the majors, but not likely to be a star. He hits for average, but not a lot of power. Which sounds an awful lot like Daric Barton, except for the "best defensive" part.

Add Doolittle to Dan Johnson and Nick Swisher, and there’s a pretty long list of fairly young players in the A’s system who can play a better first base than Barton. The line behind Eric Chavez, on the other hand, is practically vacant. Jeff Baisley made some noise this year at low A Kane County, and was promoted up to AA Midland, where he’s done OK, but that’s about it. You hate to see a 21-year-old relegated to DH duties, so the more ways Barton can get himself into the lineup, the better. Especially on a team as injury-prone as the A’s, with a third baseman as injury-prone as Eric Chavez.

Barton has made five errors in nine games at third base, three of them in one game, so the transition has not exactly been smooth. None of the errors were on throws, however. He started out as a catcher, so even if he has little range and bad hands, he should at least be able to make the throw across the diamond.

The move to third may be a struggle for Barton, but the good news is that it has done wonders for his bat. Barton had been off to a slow start at the plate this year, but since moving to third, he has hit a blistering .526/.571/.710.

At last, Adam Melhuse has escaped! The evil double shadow of Jason Kendall and MLB rules have the poor backup catcher in their clutches no longer. Melhuse was traded to Texas this afternoon for Cash Considerations.

Considerations is a lousy player to get in return, and I guess Melhuse is still technically a subject of MLB rules, but I won’t complain. He is, at least, going to a place where he’ll get more opportunity than he was ever going to get in Oakland. I am happy for him; he deserves this.

The presumed A’s catcher of the future, Kurt Suzuki, will be called up to replace Melhuse. I suppose this is what Beane has been waiting for all along–enough of the season has passed now that Suzuki likely won’t be eligible for Super Two arbitration status. It give the A’s an extra cheap year of Kurt Suzuki, plus puts some pressure on Jason Kendall to get his act together, and fast. Somebody is gaining on him.

As much as I think Melhuse has been treated unfairly by the system, Billy Beane should get some kudos for getting Melhuse a new home as soon as he was able. Likewise for releasing Jay Witasick. Players make a lot of money, and the rules are the rules, but that’s never a reason not to treat people with simple, ordinary decency. I’m glad to see my favorite team show some.

Thank goodness the baserunner in this photograph is not A-Rod. Otherwise, we’d probably never hear the end of it:

Instead, this play is probably doomed to be forgotten because (a) it had no effect on the final score, (b) nobody got hurt, (b) the Twins turned the double play anyway. How exactly Luis "Joe Montana" Castillo managed to release the ball over the head of Jack "Too Tall" Cust and into the hands of Justin "Clark caught a touchdown" Morneau in time to turn the 4-3 double play, I’ll never quite understand.

What will be remembered from this game is the performance of Joe Blanton. Blanton had had two rocky outings since becoming the victim a triple-whammy curse placed on him when (a) Ryan gave him some solid Catfish Stew praise, (b) Rob Neyer spread that praise by (subscribers-only) linking to it on ESPN.com, and (c) Ryan followed up his praise by attending his next start. Let this be a lesson to you all: no good can ever come of such optimistic behavior.

Fortunately, I am happy to report that I was able reverse that whammy by attending Saturday’s game, and saying nothing of it or my expections about Joe Blanton to anyone in advance. As a result, Blanton pitched a three-hit, complete game shutout. You may all thank me in the comments below.

Blanton was masterful today, with great control of all of his pitches. Combine Blanton’s sharpness with Carlos Silva pitching at his ground-ball inducing best (including the one that started the double play above), and you had a recipe for one of the fastest games I’ve ever seen: one hour and 48 minutes. The two pitchers were so good today that they not only removed all the fireworks from the two teams’ offenses (the game’s only run scored on, yes, a double play), they kept fireworks out of the sky as well. The game was over so fast, we had to wait for a full hour after the game for the sky to get dark enough to begin the scheduled post-game fireworks show.

I’ve been pretty busy with travel and work stuff lately, and I have some more busy times coming soon, but I shall try to squeeze in some more whammy-reversing whenever I can. I haven’t even been able to get in any player fasting or anything this year. Travis Buck and Milton Bradley both left the game early with (guess what?) ailments of some sort. I can only do so much.  But does this team need me, or what?

Chapter 1: How to recognize a very good pitcher from a very long ways away indeed

Dan Haren has been the best pitcher in baseball so far this year, but he didn’t have his best stuff today. He’s a pitcher who is always around the plate, pounding the strike zone, throwing strike after strike. But on this afternoon, his location was off, he was throwing more balls than usual, running long counts, throwing 24 pitches in the first inning, and reaching 75 pitches after four. Although the Rangers had only managed one run off Haren early in the game, and his opposing pitcher, John Koronka looked very very hittable, I began to worry that the A’s might lose this game in the end. Haren looked like he would hit his pitch limit shortly after five innings, the A’s would need three-to-four innings of work out of their quite shaky bullpen to win the game. But then, the field tilted.

It happened in the fifth inning. What had been an uphill struggle for four innings, suddenly reached a peak and started racing effortlessly along like the cake of Gloucestershire cheese in today’s scoreboard highlight of choice. A five-pitch inning was followed by a seven-pitch inning, and the next thing you knew, Haren had stretched his one last inning to three, and ended the day with eight innings pitched and only one run allowed.

And that’s how to recognize a good pitcher. When he starts the game with an ERA below 2.00, has a bad day, and still manages to lower his ERA after the day is over: that’s when you have a very very good pitcher indeed.

Continue…

Few things are less exciting than sleeping, but Sunday’s A’s-Giants game may have been one of them. I arrived back in the Bay Area after my 11-hours-jammed-into-a-French-sardine-can flight from Europe Saturday afternoon, and headed out to the Coliseum the next day still zonked by jet lag. A good nap would have been more valuable to me than watching Matt Morris put the A’s bats to sleep for nine innings with his assortment of well-located slop. On another day, I may have been able to appreciate Morris’ craftsmanship, but on this day, I was simply bored.

I would have much preferred to have seen Barry Zito’s return to the Oakland Coliseum on Friday night than this game. That would have had some emotional resonance worth remembering. Unfortunately, with a 4AM CET game time and a 10AM flight out of Charles de Gaulle Airport (which, I must add, seems to have been designed by committees of Microsoft engineers rather than Jonathan Ive), I spent the entire game sleeping inside Paris Hilton.

And that’s enough of that. To me, personally and for the Oakland A’s, 2007 has been just dragging along, starting, stopping, unable to kick into gear for one reason or another. It’s time to get a move on. Let’s get this party started.

Tomorrow, the Champs Elysées will be closed for the inauguration parade for newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy. I’ve never seen a presidential inauguration parade before, so the thought did occur to take advantage of this opportunity and go hang out behind one of the crowd barriers I witnessed being erected earlier today all along Paris’ most famous boulevard. But since there have been some violent protests following the election results, I think it’s probably safest to keep my 80-year-old mother away from that scene. We’ll probably go check out some museum exhibits instead.

Oh, wait…you probably wanted to read about a Huston Street being shut down, not a Paris street being shut down. About that…well, yeah, it figures, doesn’t it? Is there anything really intelligent to say about all these injuries at this point? "Fire so and so, blah blah blah…" I suppose, maybe, whatever. I don’t really know where to start to assign blame on this. The volume and diversity of injuries on this team is pretty much unfathomable. It’s like trying to communicate something complex to someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you. They don’t make sense, you don’t make sense, so you just kind of wave your hands and shake your head and shrug your shoulders, and sigh, and move on and hope for better luck with the next person you meet. Remind me never to express any optimism ever again.