I watch an awful lot of baseball, and often I wonder (especially when the A’s are sucking like they do now), why am I doing this? There are so many other things I could be doing.

Time Magazine recently came out with its list of 100 All-Time Best Films. I’ve only seen thirteen of them. I watched more baseball games last month than I’ve seen great movies in my whole lifetime.

This has been bubbling up more and more towards the surface in my thoughts. Then a blog entry by Terry Teachout nailed the issue for me. A reader wrote him:

There seems to be such a glut of everything artistic these days. In jazz alone, I could go on listening to new and already-heard stuff from the same 1940s and 1950s period until I dropped dead at 100 without running out, and that’s jazz alone. Meaning, I really don’t need any more jazz to be produced. It’s all on disc. I don’t need any more cabaret singers singing Cole Porter, or young guys in suits playing Fats Navarro, etc.

To which Teachout responds:

Remember that no one, not even the wealthiest of connoisseurs, has an unlimited amount of time to spend on art. However wisely or unwisely we allocate them, there are only twenty-four hours in a day. Sooner or later, we have to choose.

I’ve rationalized to myself that I have chosen to immerse myself in baseball instead of film or jazz or painting or video games or reality TV. But why don’t I balance it out a bit more evenly?

I keep thinking that I should take this opportunity to diversify my leisure activities, to spend more my entertainment time and money on other things. Go out to a movie. I hear that new Star Wars film isn’t too bad. Take $20/month of the money I spend on the A’s and spend it on Netflix or a museum or something. After all, baseball players won’t have to wait tables if I buy a little less of their product for awhile.

I’ve said that before, though. I’ll say that I should go see X or listen to Y, but usually, I just end up watching the ballgame instead. Why do I keep doing that?

Again, Teachout to the rescue:

…there’s no substitute for the galvanizing experience of being present at the creation of a new work of art that might possibly end up being great. Nothing is so thrilling as making up your own mind instead of waiting for posterity to do it for you.

[snip]

We can’t all make art, but we can at least place a bet from time to time on those who dare to do so.

For me, that’s exactly it. I need and crave excellence; it’s built into the very fabric of my personality. I once took a personality test that said that this was my most dominant personality trait:

Strengths, whether yours or someone else’s, fascinate you. Like a diver after pearls, you search them out, watching for the telltale signs of a strength. A glimpse of untutored excellence, rapid learning, a skill mastered without recourse to steps-all these are clues that a strength may be in play. And having found a strength, you feel compelled to nurture it, refine it, and stretch it toward excellence. You polish the pearl until it shines.

The last five seasons, the A’s have been this close, falling just one game short of that next step to greatness. You can sense its proximity, and you desperately want to be there when it happens, so you stay tuned.

The A’s aren’t that close anymore. There is potential greatness, I sense, in Eric Chavez, Bobby Crosby, Rich Harden, Dan Haren, and Huston Street. As of yet, it isn’t actual greatness. I keep watching because really want to be there if and when it happens. And I appreciate Billy Beane’s efforts to create a great team.

But I’m not getting my excellence fix very often these days. I need to invest my time more wisely, to maximize my excellence income, to bring the greatest possible profit to my soul.

So I’m going to test out some new rules:

• If given an immediate choice between watching baseball and something else that might be fun, choose the something else.
• Only sit and watch the game as my primary activity if my team’s starting pitcher clearly has the potential to be great. (e.g., Zito, Harden, or Haren)
• Even then, make every effort to multi-task, and get something else accomplished simultaneously.
• For a mediocre starting pitcher, make every effort to find something to do that is completely unrelated to baseball.
• If doing something around the house, the game may be on, but only as background noise.
• If the game is a blowout, turn it off.

We’ll see how it goes.

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

Forget all that A’s draft coverage. The big news of the day is this:

Barry Zito got a hit!

He singled to left off Tony Armas, Jr. and is now 1-for-23 in his career.

* * *

Ironic Note of the Day:

Armas’s father was traded from the A’s to Boston for Carney Lansford, the father of Jared Lansford, who was drafted by the A’s today in the second round.

Cliff Pennington is a 5’11”, 180 lb. shortstop out of Texas A&M. He was one of three college shortstops taken in the first round, along with Troy Tulowitzki (7th to the Rockies) and Tyler Greene (30th to the Cardinals). Pennington hit .363/.453/.561, with 37 walks, 25 strikeouts, and 29 stolen bases in 212 ABs.

Here’s what Bryan Smith of Baseball Analysts wrote about Pennington before the draft:

The least-known player of the group is Cliff Pennington, known as a scrappy player that impresses scouts and statheads alike. Pennington has great contact skills, runs well, and shows very good defense up the middle. What power he has shown this season is unlikely to transfer over much professionally, though he could very well be hitting 30 doubles a year in the Bigs. I might go as far to say that Pennington is the most likely of the group to be a league-average player across the board in the Majors, as Cliff looks to be everything Russ Adams was coming out of college.

With Bobby Crosby at shortstop for the next five years, you’d have to think that if Pennington moves quickly up the ladder, he will eventually move over to second base.

Update: According to this Pennington fan page, Pennington went 2-for-3 with 2 walks in his battles against Huston Street. Now I’m really impressed.

Also, Bryan expands upon his comparison of Pennington to Aaron Hill here.

* * *

Travis Buck was the A’s second pick, a 6’2″, 205lb. outfielder from Arizona State. In the same Baseball Analysts article, Bryan was less impressed with Buck, who didn’t have a great year:

While Buck was Baseball America’s top-ranked outfielder heading into the season, unimpressive BB and ISO numbers have led to a freefall this year.

Buck hit .398/.451/.545, with only 4 home runs in 257 ABs in 2005. In 2004, he hit .373/.486/.573, with 9 home runs in 225 ABs.

* * *

With their next three picks, the A’s (shockingly!) went for high school pitchers: Craig Italiano, Jared Lansford, and Tommy Manzella.

Italiano, from Texas, was regarded as the hardest-throwing high-school pitcher in the draft. He’s raw, but talented. Zachary thinks his arm is going to fall off.

Jared Lansford is the son of former A’s third baseman Carney Lansford. From what I’d seen, he wasn’t projected to go quite as early as the second round, but given the connections, there was probably a deal made in advance. Lansford is a pitcher, who throws around 94mph.

* * *

Jimmy Shull from Cal Poly SLO was a curious choice in the fourth round. His 2005 stats are not very impressive: 8-7, 4.61 ERA, 85/33 K/BB, 111.1 IP. His 2004 stats were better, with 102/26 K/BB ratio in 99.2 IP.

So if you look at the choices of Buck and Shull, perhaps we’re seeing that the A’s are finding hidden value in players whose current year wasn’t as good as the previous one.

* * *

The next three picks after Shull were all high schoolers: Scott Deal (5th round) and Kevin Bunch (7th round) are pitchers, while Justin Sellers (6th round) is a shortstop.

Six of the first nine picks are high schoolers? Did someone kidnap Billy Beane before the draft? This draft has been very surprising.

* * *

Back to normalcy: college pitchers in rounds 8-11:

Round 8: Jason Ray from Azusa-Pacific University had some pretty nice stats: 5-2, 3.45 ERA, 72/32 K/BB in 73IP.

Round 9: Trey Shields had unimpressive statistics in 2005: 1-1, 5.50 ERA, 15/5 K/BB, 18 IP. But he was returning from Tommy John surgery the year before, and he’s 6’7″, 230 lbs.

Round 10: John Herrera is tall, too: 6’6″, 195 lbs. His stats at Lubbock Christian are nice, too: 9-4, 2.80 ERA, 117/35 K/BB, 86.2 IP.

Round 11: Steve Kleen is an interesting pick. He was the Pepperdine closer (4-3, 17 saves, 1.75 ERA, 47/18 K/BB, 51.1 IP) but also had decent stats as a first baseman (.350/.436/.525). He fits the A’s tradition of selecting pitchers who have both good stats, and good overall athletic ability.

* * *

Eleven rounds, and the A’s have selected ten pitchers.

* * *

Round 12: Finally, another position player: Jeff Baisley from South Florida. Hit .356/.415/.572.

* * *

Round 13: What is this? A joke? Michael Massaro from Colorado State is listed as a 5’10”, 155 lb. LHP. He has horrible pitching stats: 2-4, 6.96 ERA, 34/22 K/BB, 42.2 IP. Maybe they intended to list him as an outfielder…his hitting stats are better: (.354/.401/.531, 16 SB in 17 attempts, 243 ABs). But then again, this is Colorado, where the air is thin…

* * *

Round 14: Brad Davis, Lewis-Clark State College. 6-2, 2.14 ERA, 58/10 K/BB, 63 IP.

* * *

Round 15: Boy, where do they find these schools? In the last round, they picked someone from Lewis-Clark State College (which is different, apparently, from Lewis & Clark University), and now the A’s draft a player from another school I never heard of, Fort Hays State University. If you’re from a school like that, your stats better jump off the page, and 3B Jeff Bieker’s do: .413/.502/.880 !, 23 HR in 184 ABs. I have no idea what kind of competition he was up against, or what kind of ballparks he played in (no one else on his team had more than 7 HRs), but you gotta think that power like that is worth a gamble.

* * *

Round 16: Justin Smoak, a high-school 1B, was listed as Baseball America’s 95th best overall prospect, with comparisons to Mark Grace. Since he lasted this far, he’s probably headed to college, but the A’s will take a flyer at signing him.

* * *

Round 17: A prototypical Moneyball pick. Isaac Omura, 2B, Hawaii. .369/.464/.568.

* * *

And finally, the last pick of the day, Round 18: Catcher Anthony Recker, Alvernia College, is similar to Jeff Bieker: stats that jump off the page at a Division III school. He hit .461/.544/.855, with 16 HR in 165 ABs.

New York Times columnist Matt Miller asks, Is Persuasion Dead?

Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn’t already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy?

The signs are not good. Ninety percent of political conversation amounts to dueling “talking points.” Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when they bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to the converted. Let’s face it: the purpose of most political speech is not to persuade but to win, be it power, ratings, celebrity or even cash.

If the traditional form of persuasion is dead, it’s not because of some bug in our culture, it’s because of a feature of our brains. Certain types of brain damage have revealed that the human brain’s decision-making mechanism is separate from the brain’s logic mechanism. As I wrote on Saturday in my rant about education:

Analysis and decision-making happen in two separate parts of the brain. Analysis is a rational process, but decision-making requires emotions to work.

…if you want to improve your decision-making skills, you need to experience the emotional consequences of your decisions, good or bad, to retain the memories of your decisions.

A mastery of facts and logic alone does not make you a good decision maker. That’s not how the human brain works. To become a good decision maker, a kid needs to practice making decisions.

You can write the world’s most logical argument and still not convince anyone, because your logic was working on the wrong part of the brain. To make someone decide in your favor, you have to convince the part of the brain that makes decisions, and that system is heavily dependent on emotions and subconscious patterns and memories. Given the architecture of the human brain, logic alone is simply not an effective way to make someone decide something.

Moneyball presents the idea that Billy Beane’s success depends largely on logical processes. The counter-argument has been that Billy Beane’s success has depended largely on Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito. I would argue that the decision to draft those three were largely the result of learning from earlier decisions that failed.

• In 1990, the A’s drafted “The Four Aces”, four highly-touted pitching prospects including Todd Van Poppel, all of whom ended up flopping. It was a continuation of a trend: the only pitcher the A’s had drafted and developed in over a decade who had any sort of decent career at all was Curt Young.

  Beane wanted to understand why they failed. A few years later he looked back and compared Van Poppel, who had the size and velocity that scouts drool over, to Steve Karsay from the same draft, who was short, but much more athletic, and more successful. As a result, the A’s began looking to draft pitchers who could not only throw hard, but were also good overall athletes. A few years after that they selected a short but athletic pitcher named Tim Hudson in the sixth round. And when they selected Mark Mulder, whose size and physique is similar to Van Poppel’s, with the second overall pick in the draft a year later, they could be more confident that he wouldn’t flop like Van Poppel, because Mulder is not only big, but a great athlete, too.
   

• In 1995, the A’s were thoroughly prepared to draft Todd Helton with the fifth overall pick in the draft. Suddenly, though, Cuban pitcher Ariel Prieto defected, and became eligible for the draft. The A’s decided to pick him instead. Obviously, that was a huge mistake; one that bothers Beane to this day.

  A few years later, a similar scenario occurred. They were targeting Barry Zito with the ninth overall pick, when to their surprise a player they had rated higher than Zito (Ben Sheets? I’ve never heard them say who) was available at that pick. Because of the Prieto failure, they stuck with Zito.
   

Notice that most of those failures in decision-making paid off about five years down the line, after you could fully experience the nature of your failure. That’s why I think that even if none of the players from the Moneyball draft become superstars, the draft may not be a failure if the experience improves Billy Beane’s decision-making in the long run. The Moneyball draft may fail, but the value is in failing a different way, a way that you can learn new lessons from.

I think the A’s 2004 draft may turn out to be a great one, and if it is, we can probably thank the lessons learned from the Moneyball draft. I’m not sure what those lessons are; perhaps it was as simple as looking for a certain combination of stats and athleticism. Obviously, the A’s won’t be telling us. But it will be interesting to see if we can discern any more lessons learned after we see who the A’s select in tomorrow’s draft. I’ll be watching closely.

The A’s have won six of seven games since Bobby Crosby returned from the DL, the only loss coming at the hands of one of the best pitchers in baseball right now, Roy Halladay. No shame in that.

I went to both weekend games. Saturday evening, I sat in the upper deck and watched Joe Blanton get his first career major league victory, and Huston Street get his second career save. It was a quick, well-played ballgame that was over in just 2:20.

Blanton pitched well, yielding only a pair of early solo homers in seven innings. Ted Lilly was on his game, too, inducing fly out after fly out. Knowing Lilly, I said to myself, “we’ll just have to keep it close until we can get one of those fly balls to go over the fence.”

The game almost got away from the A’s in the top of the sixth, when with runners on first and second, no outs, and the Jays up 2-0, Vernon Wells hit a fly ball to Eric Byrnes in center field. Orlando Hudson tagged and headed to third, and I immediately shouted out for everyone in the vicinity to hear, “Throw it to second, Byrnes!” I figured the odds of Byrnes throwing out the speedy Hudson with his inaccurate noodle of an arm were quite slim, so it was better to keep the double play in order by throwing the ball to second base, keeping the runner at first. But Eric Byrnes is Eric Byrnes, and playing it safe is not in his vocabulary. To my utter amazement, he threw a bullet directly to Eric Chavez at third base, and Hudson was out.

After that, I had to endure about two innings of teasing about my outburst. When Byrnes hit a two-run homer to tie the game in the bottom of that inning, I heard someone shout, “Hit it to second, Byrnes!” But I still think I was right. If Byrnes makes that throw more than 25% of the time, he’d be lucky.

The A’s won when Bobby Crosby, Dan Johnson, and Nick Swisher combined for a two-run 7th-inning rally, and Eric Chavez added a solo homer in the eighth. Huston Street got the final four outs on twelve pitches to finish the night off.

***

Sunday’s game lasted only five minutes more than Saturday’s game, but it felt like days. The game was over early, as the Blue Jays acted as if they had never encountered sunshine and blue skies before, flubbing numerous popups and fly balls. Add in a few home runs by Scutaro, Chavez and Hatteberg, and the A’s had a 12-0 lead after three innings.

In the fourth, I started feeling drowsy and almost fell asleep. Although I think my eyes technically stayed open until the end, I don’t really remember much after that. It’s all fragments:

There were these giant colored disks rolling around. They were chasing me.

The word “Schoenwuss” lingered in the air.

Rich Harden got injured again.

Will Carroll reports Harden may miss several more weeks with a severely swollen and severed head.

John Gibbons suggested giving Millie and Jimmy candlesticks as a wedding gift.

A bagel dog disappered under a large A’s cap, and then suddenly reappeared.

Kiko Calero magically appeared on the mound, and then suddenly vanished.

The Stay-Puff man ate Mount Davis.

Sir, it’s time to go now. The game is over. We are emptying the stadium.

This is a non-baseball rant, triggered by a paragraph by Steven Goldman on the Pinstripe Blog.

As you might imagine, I spend a lot of time in bookstores. Almost every time I go, there’s a mother or father with a crying kid. The kid is saying how he or she wants a book, and the parent is saying no. Having seen this, oh, about 500 times over the years, I made myself a pledge: Should I ever have children, I might sometimes say no to buying a toy, or candy, or a goldfish. I would sternly counsel against drugs, drinking, smoking. However, when it came to books I would be the most permissive parent ever.

I probably felt that way, too, until I actually became a parent. Then I learned how much more complex these situations are than I had ever imagined.

Kids (at least my kids–I imagine this is fairly universal) rarely cry only because of the thing they’re crying about. There’s usually both a surface-level reason for crying (that an outsider could discern), and another unspoken, underlying reason that only the parent of the child can know.

Crying is a language unto itself. If one of my kids is crying about not getting a book, she’s usually communicating something else, too: “I’m getting tired now; I should probably have a nap”, or “I’m getting hungry”, or “I need to understand the rules and limits of this unfamiliar environment.” When my kids are well-fed, well-rested, and understand the rules (“you can only buy one book today”), they can usually handle rejection without bursting into tears.

So unless it’s my fault (I didn’t set the rules in advance), I’m usually not going to spend $15 to make her stop crying: (a) it might not work anyway, (b) it’s not solving the real problem, and (c) if she’s crying to test her limits, being permissive is counterproductive; she’ll cry next time, too, if it lands her an extra book. Instead, I’m going to give her the nap or the meal or the firm “no” she’s really asking for.

Goldman also presents the common argument that reading helps kids learn to think:

In this life, critical thinking skills are what it’s all about. Your wits are all that stand between you and being conned by hyenas and devoured by wolves. Reading is a great way to develop them. The only way to recognize arguments, both good and bad, is to be exposed to them.

Whether I agree with that or not depends on how you define “critical thinking skills”. From that last sentence, I suspect that Goldman would define it to mean the ability to make and dissect arguments. In that case, while I’d agree that reading is a great way to develop that ability, I’d disagree that those skills are what it’s all about. There are many different kinds of intelligences, and reading is good for developing some of them.

Steven Johnson, in his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, shows how popular culture, fueled by new technologies, helps to exercise other parts of the mind that reading develops less efficiently. Take, for example, his explanation of the virtues of video games:

Start with the basics: far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions. Novels may activate our imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding. No other pop cultural form directly engages the brain’s decision-making apparatus in the same way.

Analysis and decision-making happen in two separate parts of the brain. Analysis is a rational process, but decision-making requires emotions to work. Studies have found that people with certain types of brain damage lose the ability to feel certain emotions, and along with it, the ability to make rational decisions:

Those individuals can still use the instruments of their rationality and can still call up the knowledge of the world around them. Their ability to tackle the logic of a problem remains intact. Nonetheless, many of their personal and social decisions are irrational, more often disadvantageous to their self and to others than not.

   –Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens

It makes sense for the brain to tie decision-making to emotions. Emotions function as a memory-enhancer: the stronger the emotion associated with an event, the more likely it is to be remembered. So if you want to improve your decision-making skills, you need to experience the emotional consequences of your decisions, good or bad, to retain the memories of your decisions.

A mastery of facts and logic alone does not make you a good decision maker. That’s not how the human brain works. To become a good decision maker, a kid needs to practice making decisions. A kid needs to play.

As education funds get cut, and the jobs of school administrators come to depend on the reading and math test scores of their students, the value of play gets forgotten. Schools have become places where kids work to improve their scores, instead of play to improve their minds.

Kids need to play games, and learn to make decisions. They need to play music, and learn to recognize patterns and express emotions. They need to play sports, and learn spatial reasoning. They need to play with their friends and learn to handle social relationships.

And the best part is, kids love to play, naturally. Just as a cry tells us when a child’s needs are going unmet, an expression of interest or enjoyment tells us when they are. Evolution has had four billion years to evolve our intelligent species. We should trust and listen to its mechanisms. The best way to turn a blank-slate child into an intelligent adult is to let a kid be a kid.

Mr. Dotel enters a doctor’s office.

Mr. Dotel: Hello? I wish to register a complaint.

Dr. Yocum: We’re closing for lunch.

Mr. Dotel: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to register a complaint about this here elbow what you treated in this very office not two weeks ago.

Dr. Yocum: Oh, yes, the, uh, closer’s arm. What’s uh, what’s wrong with it?

Mr. Dotel: What’s wrong with it? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it.

Dr. Yocum: No, no, it’s uh…it’s just restin’.

Mr. Dotel: Listen, matey, I know a dead elbow when I feel one, and I’m feeling one right now.

Dr. Yocum: No, it’s not dead, it’s just restin’. Remarkable joint, the elbow. Excellent congruity of the bony architecture.

Mr. Dotel: The congruity don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

Dr. Yocum: Nononono, no, no! It’s just restin’.

Mr. Dotel: All right, if it’s just resting, I’ll wake it up! Hello, elbow! Wake up, elbow! I’m going to throw a slider now!

(Picks up a baseball, and throws a hanging slider across the room.)

Now that’s what I call a dead elbow.

Dr. Yocum: No, the elbow is stunned.

Mr. Dotel: STUNNED?!?

Dr. Yocum: You stunned it, just as it had almost finished restin’. Elbows stun easily, major.

Mr. Dotel: Um…now look here, mate, I’ve definitely had enough of this. The elbow is definitely deceased, and when I came to see you two weeks ago you assured me that my slider’s lack of movement was due to a temporary buildup of calcium. The elbow is dead. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This…is a late elbow! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! Its ulnar collateral ligament is of interest only to historians! It’s left the yard! It’s shuffled off this mortal coil! It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This…. is an EX-ELBOW!

Dr. Yocum: Well, I better replace your UCL, then.

Mr. Dotel: If you want to get anything done in this country you’ve got to complain ’til you’re blue in the mouth.

Dr. Yocum: Sorry, Bud, we’re fresh out of tendons.

Mr. Dotel: I see, I see. I get the picture.

Dr. Yocum: Listen, I’ll tell you what, tell you what, if you go to Dr. Andrews’ office in Birmingham, he’ll replace your elbow for you.

Mr. Dotel: Birmingham, eh? OK.

…

Mr. Dotel enters Dr. Andrews’ office.

Mr. Dotel: Um, excuse me, this is Birmingham, isn’t it?

Dr. Andrews: No, it’s Mobile.

Mr. Dotel leaves, then comes back.

Mr. Dotel: I understand that this is Birmingham.

Dr. Andrews: Yeah?

Mr. Dotel: You told me it was Mobile!

Dr. Andrews: It was an anagram.

Mr. Dotel: An anagram?

Dr. Andrews: No, no, not an anagram–what’s the other thing where it reads the same backwards as forwards?

Mr. Dotel: A palindrome?

Dr. Andrews: Yeah, yeah.

Mr. Dotel: It’s not a palindrome! The palindrome of Mobile would be Elibom! It doesn’t work!

Dr. Andrews: What do you want?

Mr. Dotel: No, I’m sorry! I’m not prepared to pursue my line of inquiry any longer as this has all become superfluous.

Dr. Andrews: Superfluous, sir?

Mr. Dotel: Yes, superfluous. The point of this blog entry has been already made hasn’t it? There’s no point in continuing except to show off some more pop culture references.

Dr. Andrews: Yeah…well…do you…do you want to come back to my place and watch Huston Street take over your job?

Mr. Dotel: Yeah, all right.

The draft is coming up on Tuesday. Mychael Urban has an A’s draft preview on MLB.com. John Sickels is running a mock draft on Sunday.

Baseball America is also kicking into high gear. Here’s their free stuff:
Draft order
Top 200 prospects
Best tools
Pre-draft blog

Looking back at last year’s draft, Huston Street alone makes it a good one. As far as everyone else, it’s still too early to tell. No one else has rocketed up the system like Street. On the other hand, the only early round pick who has struggled badly is Michael Rogers, although Landon Powell’s knee injury puts a big question mark on his long-term prospects as a catcher.

Here’s where the 2004 draftees are now. Some of them were signed and played last year in short-season ball; if they’re not playing now, I’m assuming they’re there still:

There nothing worse than rooting for a losing team with a bunch of players you know won’t be around next year. When my brain starts looking around for scapegoats, I immediately head for the nearest future-ex-Athletic: Hatteberg, Durazo, Byrnes, Ginter, Dotel. If you’re going to lose, lose with youngsters who have a chance to improve.

The last two nights, the lineup has featured Dan Johnson, Bobby Crosby and Nick Swisher, each of whom had at least one extra-base hit. They’re young, and they’ve got power. That’s the way I like it. Suddenly, being an A’s fan feels a whole lot better: it’s a team with a future, not just a past.

I loved the fact that Bobby Kielty hit right-handed against Hideo Nomo last night. He did this once before this season, against Tim Wakefield. Right-handed batters are hitting .327 against Nomo this year, lefties only .244. That’s what switch-hitting is for: to use platoon splits to your advantage. Kielty singled and walked off Nomo.

Dan Haren threw a complete game last night, allowing one run in nine innings. That was an encouraging performance, although I’m not quite ready to jump on the I-Love-Haren bandwagon just yet.

Haren is obviously extremely talented, with great stuff, but at this point, he’s a frontrunner. When things are going well, they go very well, as it did last night. But Haren hasn’t quite mastered the art of getting out of a jam. He has a tendency to let a small problem explode into a huge rally. His ERA (4.34) hides this problem a bit; he’s allowed nine unearned runs so far, for an average of 5.56 RA/9, which is more reflective of his problem working out of jams. Also, he’s given up more multi-run innings this year than single-run innings:

The ability to minimize the damage in a rally is, I believe, a learnable skill. It’s what made Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder such great pitchers. Turn a couple of five-run rallies into two-run rallies, a three-run rally into a one-run rally, and suddenly you’re an All-Star with a 3.50 ERA instead of an Average Joe with a 4.34.

I think Dan Haren has the talent to be such an All-Star pitcher. But nine smooth innings against Tampa Bay doesn’t really show me anything. He never had more than one baserunner on base at a time all night. When we start to see him get out of jams with some consistency, then we’ll know that Haren has truly arrived.

My family vacation to San Diego coincided with a Padres road trip, so we missed Petco Park. But no matter. We went out Saturday evening and checked out some Surf Dawgs, instead.

The San Diego Surf Dawgs are one of eight teams in the Golden Baseball League, a brand new independent league centered on the west coast. The league began play on Thursday, so the game we attended on Saturday was the third game ever for the Surf Dawgs and their opponents, the Long Beach Armada. The Surf Dawgs and their main attraction, Rickey Henderson (more about him later), play at Tony Gwynn Stadium on the campus of San Diego State University.

Home of the Surf Dawgs

The ballpark seats about 3,000 people, all on the infield. It was about half-full on Saturday evening, and from listening to the people in the crowd, it seemed like half of the people in the stands were related to somebody on the field. “The pitcher is my cousin.” “My dad’s the bullpen catcher.” “C’mon son!”

Inside Tony Gwynn Stadium

I doubt catering to the relatives of ballplayers is a sustainable business model, but if the league fails, it won’t be for a lack of marketing. In fact, I think they pulled out the table of contents in the Baseball Marketing 101 textbook and used it as a checklist.

Checklist item #1: give something away as people enter the stadium. We each got a T-shirt commemorating the inaugural weekend of Golden League play. The gift was a good way to get on our good side right away.

Checklist item #2: give some more things away after that. Just minutes after we settled down in our seats, a Surf Dawg employee came by and told us that our row had been selected for an upgrade to a luxury box. Free catered food!

Our box

In an interview with Christian Ruzich, Dave Kaval, a founder of the Golden League, explained their marketing strategy:

We’re targeting families. We’re very, very focused on the typical four-person family: wife, husband, the two kids. We’re going to cater to families with the types of promotions we do — from having the kids run the bases between innings to having a kid zone in all of our parks, with everything from speed pitch to one of those big Scooby-Doo blow up things for the kids to jump around in. Just making sure that the lowest common denominator is entertaining the children.

He wasn’t kidding about the kids. They had a kid zone with all sorts of games. They had both a Surf Dawg mascot (named Southpaw) and a clown who made beaut animals. My kids got their faces painted. And between every half-inning, there was some entertainment happening on the field, from a frisbee-catching dog to a burrito-catching contest.

Fun Zone

The marketing plan worked to perfection on my wife and kids. Everyone on the staff was friendly and approachable. They seemed to genuinely care to make sure we were having fun. My kids had a great time, and were never bored at all. My wife absolutely loved it. We have a trip planned to L.A. later this year, and as soon as we got home, she checked out the schedules online to see if we could make another Golden League game. In fact, I’d bet if there were a Golden League team in the Bay Area next year, she’d want to dump our A’s season tickets and go there instead. (Memo to the marketing departments of MLB and the Oakland A’s: we’re people, not ATMs.)

I, on the other hand, am more of a hard-core baseball fan, and I’m not going to fall for any marketing magic unless the product on the field is worth watching. The defense was not crisp, and none of the pitchers I saw had great stuff, but at least they threw a lot of strikes and made the batters put the ball in play, which made for an entertaining home team victory, if not an impressive one.

And yet, even for me, the night was magical.

When the game was over, I felt like I had stepped out of a scene in Field of Dreams. Ray Kinsella had come into my office and asked me if I could have one wish, what it would be? And I responded, “Just once, I’d like to see Rickey Henderson young again, driving the opposing team absolutely insane, working the count, taking walks, hitting homers, and running wild on the bases. That’s my wish, Ray Kinsella. That’s my wish.”

And so it was.

Continue…

Back?

I went with my family to San Diego this weekend to visit my brother-in-law, his wife, and their holophrastic 20-month-old daughter.

There’s a poetry to kids in that stage of language development, as they reduce the complex world they live they experience to just a single word.

Things going badly for your favorite team? We could do a complex statistical analysis of the phenomenon, or we could just say:

“Uh-oh”.

My niece had a vocabulary of about 30-50 words. My favorite was “beaut”. “Beaut” comes from “beautiful” I guess, but to her, it means “balloon”.

Such innocence doesn’t last long. Back in April, I believed the A’s would be like those beauts, floating with grace and ease, filling us with a sense of wonder and magic, capable of defying the concept of falling, helping us believe there is something pure and simple and good in the world.

Eventually, though, we come to learn that even the best of beauts go bad.

Every time I think the A’s may have hit rock bottom, they prove otherwise.

Luckily, I was busy and missed Wednesday’s thwacking by the Devil Rays. I didn’t suffer at all. Ignorance is bliss.

So let’s think about something else. Here is the phrase “catfish stew” translated into five Continental European languages:

Dutch: katvis hutspot
French: ragoût de poisson-chat
German: Welseintopfgericht
Italian: stufato del pesce gatto
Spanish: guisado del siluro

Heerlijk! I’ll be busy over the Memorial Day weekend, so I’ll be taking a few days off from les blogs du grille-pain. Let’s look at it as an experiment. If the A’s immediately go on a winning streak in my absence, then we’ve found the jinx.

Si ce blog est la malédiction, je peux ne jamais retourner. Ik betwijfel dit, nochtans zal gebeuren.

Auf Wiedersehen!

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when you’re watching your team play against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and you suddenly realize that the Rays might have the better team. That probably wouldn’t be the case if the A’s were healthy. But here we are.

Let’s look at some rankings:
Offense, OPS: A’s 14th, Rays 7th.
Pitching, ERA: A’s 11th, Rays 14th.
Defense: DER: A’s 7th, Rays 9th.

The A’s pitch better, the Rays hit better. Not much news there.

The Defensive Efficiency Ratio says that the A’s play slightly better defense than the Rays. If I hadn’t looked it up I would never have believed it. The A’s have made a ton of errors lately (22 in the last 19 games), including a 7th-inning error on Kirk Saarloos (he missed the bag on a 3-1 putout…which is about the third time in recent weeks this has happened…why do the A’s keep having a problem stepping on the base/plate…the game is called baseball…it should be the first skill you learn…but I digress…back to the sentence…), which turned out to be the eventual winning run. Meanwhile, the Rays made numerous excellent defensive plays that killed a couple of A’s rallies.

The Rays, though lacking talent, played sharply. The A’s had more talent, but played uninspired and sloppy ball. Today Saarloos was the worst offender. In addition to his error, he also botched a rundown–choosing to throw to first on a comebacker when he had a runner on second hung out to dry. But he hasn’t been the only one making mental blunders. There seem to be several such mistakes every day. It’s a team-wide epidemic of concentration lapses.

I don’t know how you fix a team that has seemingly ceased to take its concentration pills (that’s a joke, not an accusation), other than to make somebody lose their job.

Scott Hatteberg homered tonight, his third of the year. Despite that, I still think Dan Johnson should be here and taking some of Hatteberg’s and Erubiel Durazo’s at-bats. Durazo looked horrible at the plate today. Go make him earn his plate appearances, and write his name into the lineup. Free Dan Johnson!

Meanwhile, Nick Swisher’s rehab has been going gangbusters in Sacramento (.400/.455/.550 in 20ABs). Bobby Crosby’s rehab in Stockton is a few days behind Swisher’s, but he is 2-for-6 so far. A change is a-comin’.

Ladies and gentlemen
Ladies and gentlemen

Ginter
He is our hero
Ginter
Get rid of
Ginter
Step on Ginter
Ginter
We love you Ginter

I promise not to kill you
Ginter

Ginter
We love you Ginter
Ginter
Get rid of
Ginter
Must stop
Ginter
He is our hero

Most preseason discussions tend to be optimistic; after all, everybody wants to rule the world. But before the season started, we had an internal Toaster discussion about our worries. Unfortunately, most of my fears have turned into tears.

I didn’t mention injuries in our discussion, because they’re not really worth mentioning unless you have some players who are particularly injury prone. Obviously, these are things I could do without. But it’s hard to turn your back on mother nature. The A’s have six players on the DL right now (Crosby, Swisher, Harden, Calero, Dotel and Bradford), seven if you count Dan Meyer, who was expected to make the team but couldn’t get his arm into shape, and one more, Justin Duchscherer, who hasn’t pitched in a week and could be joining them retroactively.

Mike thought there was a good chance the new A’s pitching staff might implode. The pitching hasn’t been great, but it hasn’t been a total nightmare either. But making up for the loss of Hudson and Mulder wasn’t my biggest fear, anyway. That’s just one headline, why believe it? Nothing ever lasts forever. Here’s what I replied to Mike:

I’m more worried about the hitting imploding than the pitching. The Coliseum is a tough place to hit .300. Oakland has only had twenty .300 seasons in 37 years. Yet Kotsay, Durazo, and Kendall (elsewhere) all hit .300 last year. What happens to the offense if they all hit .280-.290? If Byrnes falls back to earth? If Crosby and Swisher are young strikeout machines? The A’s offense should improve at C and 2B, but I can imagine a scenario where none of the other 7 positions do.

Indeed, the A’s are still walking a lot, but they’ve suffered a huge collapse in batting average, which has hurt the offense overall. I was considering .290 a disaster scenario for Kotsay, Durazo and Kendall; now it’s wishful thinking. Kotsay is hitting .289, Durazo .250, and Kendall only .226. Chavez is only hitting .211, while Crosby and Swisher have been hurt. It’s a very, very mad world.

I keep looking at the A’s PECOTA projections in disbelief. Right now, only Bobby Kielty is well above his 50% projection for OPS, and only Eric Byrnes and Mark Ellis are near it. Eight hitters are at or below their 10% projections. I find it kind of funny. I find it kind of sad.

Joe Sheehan deconstructed the A’s disappointing season yesterday in a Baseball Prospectus Premium article yesterday. There wasn’t really much to disagree with, really. Here’s the crux of it:

The A’s don’t hit for average and they don’t hit for power. I mean, they really don’t hit for power. Since offense ticked up in 1993, just one team–the ’93 expansion Marlins–have posted an isolated power mark (SLG – BA) of less than .100. The A’s are at .106 through a quarter of the season; the second-lowest figure since 1992 is .120, held by a handful of teams. We can talk about park effects and changes to the run environment all day, but if you slug .350, you can’t compete.

Who could have imagined the A’s offense would be laid so low? Man, you guys, I wish you were my enemy.

I don’t think you have to look to the skies for some kind of divine intervention. This can be fixed. You’d probably have to sacrifice some defense, but to fix an historically bad offense, I’m sure it would be worth it. I love power. I believe in love power. We need a change, before it’s all too late. I could be quite naive, and I can’t actually operate on this failure, but all I want to be is completely in command, so I’m going to shout and let it all out, and I hope we live to tell the tale. This is my four-leaf clover:

• Replace Scutaro and Ellis with Crosby and Ginter. Ginter homered last night against the Giants; perhaps he can find the stroke that hit 19 homers last year. Crosby begins his rehab assignment today in Stockton.
   
• Give Scott Hatteberg at-bats to Dan Johnson. Both PECOTA and ZiPS project Johnson and Hatteberg to produce similar offensive numbers this year, around a .760-.790 OPS. So why not try the guy with the power and the upside instead of the player on the decline? With one foot in the past now, just how long will it last?
   
• Keep playing Bobby Kielty. He’s always swung well right-handed, but his left-handed swing this year is night-and-day from last year. Last year, he had an ugly, noisy and powerless stroke from the left side. This year, it’s short and smooth. Sometimes your eyes do tell the story.
   
• Ride the hot hand between Swisher and Byrnes. Like Hatteberg and Johnson, Swisher and Byrnes are projected to produce similar numbers. The difference is that Byrnes is still in his peak years, while Hatteberg looks very close to falling off the proverbial cliff.
   
• Free Eric Chavez! What has happened to the friend that I once knew? Has he gone away?
   

So kick out the style! Bring back the jam!

Down on my sidebar, you can see the current standings of the MLB Heavyweight Championship. This is where we assume that if you beat the champion, you become the new champion, just like in boxing.

Since the Red Sox won the World Series last year, the Heavyweight Championship has resided in the American League all season. Of the AL teams, only the White Sox, Mariners, and Tigers have not had a title bout yet. The Blue Jays have held the title the most, winning eleven title bouts out of eighteen.

As we move into the first weekend of interleague play, the Minnesota Twins are the current champs. The Milwaukee Brewers will be the first NL team this year with a shot at the title. Also, if the Brewers win on Sunday, they can keep crown over in the National League for a few weeks until the next round of interleague play. I wouldn’t bet on it, though; they’ll be facing Johan Santana. Good luck.

In San Francisco, across the greenish-brown and windy bay:

• The A’s concluded the hellish portion of their schedule on Wednesday with a 13-6 win over Boston. Of the nine different teams the A’s have played so far, only Seattle and Tampa Bay are currently under .500. Their next four series, however, will all be against teams who currently have losing records. Now would be the ideal time to get hot, get healthy, and turn things around.
   
• The Giants might actually be a team where the A’s “run-up-the-starter’s-pitch-count-so-you-can-feast-on-middle-relief” offensive strategy might actually work. I’ve seen a lot of Giants games this year, and their middle relief sucks. Well, except maybe for Scott Eyre and Jason Christiansen, they’re not too bad. Oops, I forgot, the A’s lineup consists mostly of left-handed batters, so Eyre and Christensen are probably the only middle relief they’ll see. Never mind…
   
• In addition, the Giants are starting three left-handed pitchers against the A’s this weekend: Rueter, Fassero, and Lowry. Sure hope Bobby Kielty will be ready to play; the A’s will need all the right-handed bats they can muster.
   
• Speaking of which, when I wrote…
  

  I’ve seen enough of Eric Byrnes. His swing is so screwed up now that his biggest strength offensively is the HBP.

  …back on May 9, Eric Byrnes was batting .208/.282/.351. Since then, he’s gone 12-for-27 with five doubles and a homer. He is now second on the team with a .785 OPS. Keep it up, Eric, and maybe someone will give us something in a trade for you after all.
   

• Billy Beane was on KNBR radio this afternoon. He’s not going to attend the A’s-Giants series; instead he’ll be at Stanford with Paul DePodesta, scouting the Cardinal as they host Arizona.
   
• Beane also said that Octavio Dotel’s elbow injury was not one that would require surgery. Worst case scenario: he rests the elbow for 15 days or so on the DL.
   

I just finished watching Eric Byrnes and Barry Zito on ESPN’s version of The Newlywed Game, Teammates.

Teammates is just horribly painful to watch. The Newlywed Game wasn’t so great, either, but at least it had the whole sexual innuendo thing going for it. You weren’t allowed to come out and say what you mean, if you know what I mean, and that was half the fun.

Now that I think of it, maybe Teammates really is a great show, too, but I forgot to watch it with my my gaydar turned on. Perhaps I need to give it a second glance, if you know what I mean.

Otherwise, the most interesting part was when Zito guessed correctly that Byrnes would say his favorite to thing to watch on TV other than SportsCenter was Fox News. Did Byrnes know that he just excommunicated himself from not only Athletics Nation, but the entire Kososphere? Blasphemy!

You are hereby banned from making any jokes, any sarcastic, cynical or snide remarks, or any other form of wise-guy commentary regarding the “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim”.

Reason: “Baseball Tonight By L’Oreal Men’s Expert.”

Perhaps we should start looking for a sponsor for Baseball Toaster. We’d need something that would be as big a mouthful as possible. Maybe something like “Baseball Toaster Presented by Fuji Tsuushinki Seizou Kabushikigaisha”.