Holiday season is upon us. Here in the Land O’ Athletics, we are apparently going to celebrate either Thanksgiving (we are grateful for what we have!) or Christmas (time to shop for shiny new presents!), but not both. Brown, or green?  Buster Olney today blogs thusly (insider only):

Early next week, Oakland executives will sit down to consider what they might get in return for trading pitchers Dan Haren and Joe Blanton.

…

And the potential trades of Oakland’s pitchers would come like dominos, in all likelihood; if Haren were to be traded, then so would Blanton, in all likelihood, and then perhaps Huston Street and others.

Gentlemen, start your wish lists.  Stores open early Friday morning for your shopping convenience. May your holidays, however you decide to celebrate them, be healthy and productive.

While we ponder for a moment the concept of an Angels GM who actually makes a trade, and consider the likelihood that this trade is a precursor to another Angels trade, and wonder what all this means for the future of the AL West, we’ll pause to remember a happy moment that came courtesy our old departed friend, Marco Scutaro.

Without a doubt, the highlight of the 2007 season for the A’s came on April 15, when Marco Scutaro hit a two-strike, two-out, walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth off Mariano Rivera. Playing primarily as a backup utility infielder his whole career, he nonetheless has managed eight career walk-off hits. Those timely hits, combined with his six RBI in the 2006 ALDS, has given Scutaro a solid reputation as a clutch hitter.

Today, A’s GM Billy Beane traded Scutaro to the Toronto Blue Jays for two minor-league pitchers. This alone probably shouldn’t be taken as a signal that Beane has decided to blow the team up and rebuild. Scutaro (.693 OPS in 2007) is arbitration eligible, and Donnie Murphy (.731 OPS) emerged last season as a cheaper version of Scutaro, someone who can play multiple infield positions and provide some tolerable offense along with it.

In return, the A’s receive two unheralded A-ball pitchers, Graham Godfrey and Kristian Bell. Both were low round draft picks who had some middling success this year. Neither one strikes out a lot of batters. Godfrey (3.98 ERA, 6.02 K/9) has a "a low nineties fastball, a slider and a change-up" according to Batter’s Box. Bell, oddly, had matching mediocre earned run and strikeout rates this year, (5.33 ERA, 5.33 K/9). This is especially odd considering that Bell is apparently capable of throwing lightning bolts at will.

The song "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" is turning 100 years old next year.  Can I tell you one of my biggest pet peeves?  I hate the fact that nobody ever sings the words "root, root, root for the home team" anymore.  Nowadays we root, root, root for the "Giants" or "Dodgers" or "Cardinals" or "Pirates" or "Angels" or "Cubbies".  Or even more annoyingly, we root, root, root for a team name that doesn’t even scan properly, like "Mariners" or "Indians" or "A’s" .

This matters.  When everybody in every city roots for the "home team", it tells us something.  Your home team may be different from mine, but in the end, all across America, we’re all doing the exact same thing.  We all have our separate homes, but our homes are united in something bigger than ourselves.

When we change the words to explicitly spell out our own provincial preferences, this message gets lost.  We prioritize our division over our unity.  I’m sick enough of this type of crap in politics, where issues get polarized and people get mislabeled for the sake of party victory all the time, all without considering the effect it has on the country as a whole.  The attitude is, if you’re not a Republican/Democrat/Red Sox fan/Yankee fan like us, we can just assume you’re stupid/evil/spoiled/whiny, so who cares about you, anyway?

It makes me sad.  If this continues, in a decade or so, there will be a whole generation of fans who will have grown up never having heard the original words in the third-most-sung song in America.

If anyone in MLB is reading this:  please, do the right thing.  Don’t change the words.  Honor the composer’s intentions.  Honor the role baseball plays in bringing America together.  Fix your 7th-inning-stretch scoreboards.  Bring back the "home team".

Whatever happened to that 23-year-old shortstop who hit .308/.390/.544 in AAA Sacramento once upon a time?

I thought a kingdom was in sight
That I would have the right to claim
But with the morning’s early light
I didn’t have a dream to my name

You know the saying that all who love are blind;
It seems that ancient adage still applies.
I guess I should have seen right through you,
But the moon got in my eyes.

Scott Long emailed me today and challenged me to match his ARod/Neil Diamond post with something similar about Eric Chavez. Sorry Scott, but Chavez is simply not the kind of player who inspires anyone to burst into song. He’s a good, if somewhat overpaid, player who lacks any sort of clutch magic in his bat that drives men to the muses. Did you know he hit his very first walk-off homer this year? He’s no ARod or Big Papi or even Marco Scutaro in that regard.

However, I will note that on Friday afternoon, I was working quietly alone in my office when suddenly I heard someone belting out the National Anthem, seemingly right below my window. "How odd," I thought. I got up and looked out below, but could find neither Christian de Neuvillette nor Cyrano de Bergerac serenading me.

I didn’t realize until later that the sound which through yonder window broke was to my West, and my Romeo was about half a mile away at Encinal High School, before the big game against cross-town rival Alameda High. (The hosts won, 25-8.)

I suppose it’s a true test of patriotism, if not self-discipline, to find yourself all alone somewhere and the national anthem starts playing. Do you stand up to honor America?

I guess I passed that test, even if it was more out of curiosity than patriotism. On the other hand, I once found myself sitting on a toilet when a pretty large earthquake hit. For all I knew at the time, my life was in peril, but I remained utterly frozen on my seat. Perhaps I needed a device that would play the Star-Spangled Banner in my bathroom in the event of ground shaking, to ensure maximum motivation to get up.

(Hmm…is that last paragraph a good example of the kinds of creative output that Eric Chavez inspires? Go ahead and make a musical out of that story, Andrew Lloyd Webber!)

Fellow Alamedan Natasha Miller, the singer in the above photo, gave one of the better anthems I’ve heard. If we can’t line up the obvious choices–Neil Diamond or Englebert Humperdink or Tony Orlando and Dawn–she would be a fine choice to provide the recording for this all-important life-saving device.

Count me among those who are pleased that the Devil Rays have changed their colors. It’s so much less confusing to me when the A’s are the team in green.

The Oakland Athletics and the City of Fremont both issued announcements today that the A’s had finally submitted their development plans for the Cisco Field ballpark village.

I’m sure you will all want to immediately download the development application document, and turn directly to page 69, where you can, at long last, get that detailed map you have been so anxiously awaiting of the existing sewer lines in the ballpark area.

The process moves forward now with a 12-to-18 month debate over how to mitigate the impact on all the displaced ninja turtles.

The GM meetings are going on right now. How is Billy Beane approaching this offseason? My thoughts about 2008 always boil down to this: the following five-man rotation, if healthy, is probably the best rotation in baseball:

• Dan Haren
• Rich Harden
• Joe Blanton
• Chad Gaudin
• Justin Duchscherer

With a rotation like that, your rivals could have two Derek Jeters and three ARods, and you could still compete with them.

But if your rotation is mostly this:

• Dan Haren
• Joe Blanton
• Chad Gaudin
• Lenny DiNardo
• Dan Meyer

You better hope your rivals don’t have too many Jeters and ARods, because you’re not going to win 95 games.

Right now, there’s only one superstar slugger in the AL West, and that’s Vladimir Guerrero. None of the four teams have particularly imposing lineups. Pitching and defense win this division. So maybe you take a chance and see how well Rotation A can hold up in 2008. If it holds up for at least half the season, you still might be able to win the division, even if you need to resort to Rotation B for the other half.

But suppose the Angels sign ARod and Barry Bonds? Now, you pretty much need Rotation A to hold up the whole year, don’t you? And how likely is that? With Rotation B, the Angels can match you pitcher for pitcher, and their lineup blows yours out of the water. In which case, it’s probably best to just blow up this team and rebuild, because the Angels will win the division in 2008.

Of course, Billy Beane understands this:

Oakland GM Billy Beane said he will decide in the next month whether to supplement the core of his team or break it up. Beane said he is monitoring the health and rehabilitation status of several key players, including Eric Chavez, Justin Duchscherer (whom Oakland intends to convert to a starter), Rich Harden and Mark Kotsay. "That’s why we’re at a fork in the road," Beane said. "We’re either going forward and going for it or cutting it down and rebuilding. There is no middle ground in our market. When we hit the bottom, small market teams like us don’t bounce." Beane said he would decide a course of action by the start of the winter meetings Dec. 3.

I was looking for a photograph to represent the A’s 2007 season in a nutshell. I settled on this one. Partly because, in a nutshell, there was something not quite right about the A’s in 2007, and these guys look like they’re doing what you would do if there was something not quite right with your nutshell. And partly because we can use these two players, Dallas Braden and Bobby Crosby, to represent both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Oakland Athletics organization.

One of the things the A’s under Billy Beane have been exceptionally good at has been finding good pitching. Contrary to their stats-only Moneyball-based reputation, the A’s formula for finding pitching is based on a combination of stats and scouting. The A’s look for pitchers with good stats who are also good athletes. Before Beane took over, the A’s consistently failed for decades to draft and develop good pitching. Pick after pick flopped, including the much-hyped Todd Van Poppel. Beane turned this around, using Van Poppel as a example of what to avoid: the big body with the big arm who lacks any evidence of success. Beane started drafting pitchers with good stats combined with good athleticism. Neither Tim Hudson nor Rich Harden nor Huston Street nor Chad Gaudin are particularly tall fellows, but they all exhibit great body control. Justin Duchscherer and Barry Zito were both fairly tall, but didn’t throw particularly hard. But they all got outs, nonetheless.

Dallas Braden was a 24th-round draft pick of the A’s in the 2004 draft, a soft-tossing lefty the A’s decided to take a chance on. Shortly after he was drafted, Braden started messing around with a screwball. The screwball befuddled minor league hitters, and he quickly climbed the ladder. But he had some elbow troubles in 2006, so in 2007, the A’s asked him to throw his changeup, which was also considered quite good, instead of the screwball, to keep his arm healthy.

Finding Dallas Braden is an example of what the A’s do right. What happened to him in 2007 is an example of what the A’s have done wrong. Braden got hurt, so they asked him to change his repertoire. Then a bunch of other pitchers got hurt. So the 23-year-old Braden got called up to the major leagues, before he had much of a chance to learn how to win with this new repertoire. He was basically asked to perform an experiment at the major league level. It didn’t go so well: he went 1-8 with a 6.72 ERA in 72 2/3 innings.

Still, there were signs of success. The first time through the order, batters hit .250/.327/.364 off him. The second time through: .274/.335/.425. Third time: .500/.518/.870. So we learned something: either Braden should be a reliever, or he needs more time in the minors to learn how to get batters out multiple times per game, and/or he needs to go back to throwing his screwball to get major league hitters out consistently, potential elbow problems be damned.

None of which is so unusual in the development of a young pitcher. But preferably, you’d like to see that development take place in the minors, not in the majors. Braden still might turn out to be a good pitcher, but he still has some learning to do, and at age 23, he still has time to do it. But the injuries to Harden and Esteban Loaiza in the rotation, as well as to Duchscherer, Street and Kiko Calero in the pen caused a cascade of player moves throughout the organization that pushed players like Braden into roles they were not quite ready for.

* * *

Nobody, except perhaps Rich Harden, symbolizes the A’s injury frustrations more than Bobby Crosby. He won the rookie of the year in 2004, and made some strides at the plate in 2005. But he’s lost a large chunk of each of the past three seasons, and has been regressing horribly at the plate. Whether Crosby’s development has been hurt by all the injuries, or he just was not all that good to begin with, is hard to tell. But .226/.278/.341 is hard to live with.

Still, Crosby also represents another traditional strength of the A’s under Billy Beane: good defense. Look at these numbers comparing the AVG/OBP/SLG against the A’s when Crosby has been healthy compared to his large absences:

When Crosby has been the everyday SS, the opponents’ batting average has been about .024 lower than when he’s been missing. Now, obviously, that’s not all Crosby’s doing, but clearly he’s a very good defensive shortstop.

But the bigger problem here is that there really isn’t any good alternative to Crosby in the system. And that’s because it seems the A’s have a systemic weakness at drafting and developing talent in the middle of the diamond. Going into next season, the two positions where the A’s could clearly use some improvement are at shortstop and centerfield. But the A’s have nobody in the minor leagues who you can turn to and say, "that’s the guy who is clearly going to own SS/2B/CF someday." In fact, since the A’s made Rick Monday the first-ever draft pick back in 1965, I could only find ten players the A’s drafted who spent any good length of time (3+ years) as a regular MLB player at 2B, SS or CF:

1965 Rick Monday CF
1970 Dan Ford CF
1973 Dwayne Murphy CF
1976 Rickey Henderson CF
1981 Mike Gallego SS
1985 Walt Weiss SS
1988 Darren Lewis CF
1993 Scott Spiezio 2B
1998 Eric Byrnes CF
2001 Bobby Crosby SS

Basically, the A’s haven’t drafted an all-star quality player up the middle of the diamond in over thirty years. Of course, Miguel Tejada came along in there, but he wasn’t a draft pick.

Why this lack of draft success? Perhaps it’s just bad luck, but 30 years is an awful long streak of bad luck for three key positions. There are a lot of exciting young players at 2B and SS and CF in baseball these days, but the A’s have exactly zero of them. At this point, the burden of proof is on the A’s management to go out and find a good player at one, if not all, of these positions.

Perhaps those three positions are the three positions where scouts matter more than stats, where athleticism matters more toward future results than past production, and so the A’s, with their stats-heavy focus, either miss in their evaluation of these players, or find them too risky to be worth investing in.

Maybe the A’s simply know what they’re good at (finding pitching, corner players), and not good at (finding 2B/SS/CF) and figure they can trade what they have for what they’re missing later. That’s fine, too, as long as you can find that trade. Show us what you got, Billy Beane.  Let the hot stove begin…

You look down, you see up. You look backward, you see forward. But if you reflect on 2007, can you see anything clearly about 2008? The 2007 Oakland Athletics, with all the injuries, are more like a funhouse mirror than a calm pool of rainwater. The results are distorted. After years of relying on great defense, they suddenly turned into one of the worst defensive teams in baseball. Their much-maligned offense actually scored the third-most runs in the AL on the road. The offense just seemed bad overall, because the Oakland Coliseum itself has evolved into the most difficult place to score in the American League, moving farther below the average ballpark in run-scoring than Coors Field is above it.

So as we begin today to reflect back on the 2007 season, through a series of photo outtakes, we do so knowing full well that what we saw was distorted by where and when we saw it. It was an odd year.

The A’s are clearing out their 40-man roster, trying to make room to protect some potential Rule 5-eligible prospects. They tried to sneak Chris Snelling through waivers, but he was claimed immediately by Tampa Bay. I’m not so much surprised that he would be claimed, but by Tampa Bay? The Rays have outfielders coming out of their ears: Baldelli, Crawford, Dukes, Gomes, Upton, Young. Do they really need a seventh-string injury-prone outfielder on their roster? Well, maybe this will be the year they finally trade an outfielder for a pitcher or two.

And yet, the A’s managed to sneak a boatload of AAAA pitchers off their 40-man roster and back down to Sacramento: Connor Robertson, Jason Windsor, Shane Komine, Ron Flores, and Brad Halsey. So many teams starving for pitching, and nobody wanted to take a free chance on those guys? I guess everyone else is too busy trying to clear room on their own rosters to notice anyone else’s housecleaning. Meanwhile, the A’s lost one pitcher who pitched worse than any of those other fellows. Jay Marshall was claimed by the one team who should be too busy these days to notice, the Boston Red Sox.

Meanwhile, two middle-aged mediocre freely replaceable middle relievers, Ruddy Lugo and Colby Lewis, are still on the 40-man roster. Weird.

I’m not a big believer in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but sometimes when a concept is expressed in a different language or using a different metaphor, it’s like coming to the top of a steep hill, and a whole wide valley opens up beneath you.

For instance, you’ve probably understood the idea of "Earned Run Average" for years; it doesn’t thrill you much anymore, does it? Ah, but what happens to your understanding of that concept if you start calling it "Traffic Vibration Rate" instead?

Suddenly, you’re not looking at ERA as just a number of baseball events divided by another number of baseball events. You’re imagining the advancement of baseball runners to be like cars on the freeway, sometimes getting congested, and other times moving unobstructed. You imagine the pitcher not just as a trigger of single individual events, but as a source of oscillation over time. Runners flow around him, like a stream around a boulder. Baseball is governed not just by the laws of averages, but by complex systems of fluid dynamics.

And then, on further inspection, we imagine that the game inhabits the very paradoxes of quantum mechanics: each baseball event is not just a particle, but it is also a wave. Like string theory, all matter consists of tiny vibrating strings, and the rate at which they vibrate determines how they manifest themselves in our perceptions. Each particle exists as an individual unit, but each wave interacts with every other particle/wave in its vicinity, amplifying and/or cancelling its effects. The fastball up-and-in exists as a fastball up-and-in, but has a profound effect on the curveball down and away that follows.

The pitcher is no longer just a single man throwing a single ball. He is, in his moment of throwing, at one with the universe: both creating it and being created by it. He is a happy young boy, standing barefoot along the shore, skipping stones atop the waters, making waves that cross a wide, wide ocean.

The Oakland Athletics claimed Jose Garcia off waivers from the Florida Marlins yesterday. This shocks me, because I had Jose Garcia as my sixth grade teacher thirty years ago, and that would make him what? At least 60, probably 70 years old or so? Not only that, he missed the entire 2007 season with Tommy John surgery.

Now don’t get me wrong, I liked Mr. Garcia a lot; he was a good teacher. But Billy Beane’s search for "undervalued" players has gone completely off the deep end. Sure, Mr. Garcia’s previous minor-league numbers look good: 203 career strikeouts in 198 1/3 innings is excellent. But the A’s suffered through all of 2007 with injury after injury, and now they add another injury-prone player to their roster? I know the prognosis for Tommy John surgery is usually quite good, but that’s not a prognosis derived from a population of people who are eligible to collect Social Security checks. The Marlins must be completely flabbergasted that they were unable to sneak Mr. Garcia through waivers.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen Mr. Garcia since I left Lincoln Elementary School back in 1978. Maybe he’s in phenomenal shape. I’m skeptical, but I guess we’ll find out in March. I look forward to seeing him again.

Good news, everyone! Billy Beane has recognized that there were issues with the Oakland A’s medical and training staff in 2007, and has taken a big step towards correcting the problem. His solution is a classic example of that famous book you all know about.

No, not Moneyball. The step Beane has taken comes straight out of Scott Adams’ book, The Dilbert Principle, which states that organizations systematically promote their least competent employees to management, where they can do the least amount of damage.

Former Head Trainer Larry Davis has been promoted to a newly created desk job called "Coordinator of Medical Services". Steve Sayles takes a step up from Assistant Trainer to fill Davis’ old role, while Walt Horn moves up from AAA to complete the shuffle.  In addition, A’s team orthopedist Dr. Jerrod Goldman has resigned, replaced by Dr. John Frazier.

Good to know that the A’s know when to apply new principles of management, and when to use the old, time-tested solutions.  That’s the true test of intelligence.  Next year, the A’s will be fully healthy all year, I’m sure!

In my preseason predictions over on the Juice Blog this year, I picked the Cubs to win the World Series. Last year, my preseason prediction was right, as I picked the Cardinals to win it all. The year before, I didn’t make a preseason World Series prediction, but my postseason playoff prediction formula correctly predicted the White Sox as champions. This formula, which relies solely on the number of errors each team committed during the season (and accurately picks the Division Series winner 67% of the time), fell apart last year with a number of ties in error totals. This year, there are no ties: it predicts the Cubs to lose the Series to the Yankees.

The formula says:

(LDS: pick the team with the fewest errors)
Rockies (68 errors) over Phillies (89).
Cubs (94) over Diamondbacks (106).
Yankees (88) over Indians (92).
Red Sox (81) over Angels (101).

(LCS: reverse it, and pick the team with the most errors)
Cubs over Rockies.
Yankees over Red Sox.

(World Series: pick the team with the fewest errors)
Yankees over Cubs.

OK, so which one do I choose as my final answer–my formula or my preseason choice? Picking the Yankees is boring. I’ll go with my preseason one–the errors formula works better in the LDS than in later rounds, anyway. Plus, I’d rather have fun than be right, any day. Go Cubs!

Feel free to leave your own playoff predictions in the comments.

* * *

Congratulations to the Seattle Mariners for winning the highly coveted title of Heavyweight of the Year. They swept the Texas Rangers in the final weekend of the year to take the crown.

* * *

I should probably add the disclaimer that while I’ve had some success in making predictions in general, I totally suck at predicting the AL West.  Whenever I pick the A’s, the Angels win the division, and vice versa.  Clearly, I know nothing at all about that particular division.

Your week has been rough, Mr. Met,
And I see that you’re very upset.
But nobody blames you
For losing those games, you
Are still our dear round-headed pet.

I know you envision the threat
That a tabloid or local gazette
Will find you at fault
And launch an assault
On your wonderful spherical tête.

That will not happen, I’ll bet.
They’re looking for someone to get,
But try to imagine
If you were Tom Glavine–
Now there is a guy who should sweat.

The Peterson/Randolph duet;
Minaya–plus Phillips, Duquette–
It’s always the leaders
That newspaper readers
Catch in their scapegoating net.

Don’t do a thing you’ll regret.
A mascot has no need to fret.
You’re not the guy
They’re trying to fry,
So please do not fall.
Just back off that wall,
Let Mets fans instead
Use your ball-as-a-head
To cheer for tomorrow
To move past the sorrow
Of this awful collapse
And one day perhaps
The fans will forgive, or forget.

There will be an epic battle this weekend, quite possibly the greatest finish ever. Three games, winner takes all. It is so compelling that it clearly needs an Muhammed Ali-like name, so we can remember it forever with just the phrase. So get ready for: The Battle in Seattle!

Yes, this weekend’s Mariners-Rangers series is one for the ages! It’s the one you’ll be telling your grandkids about! For the winner of this series will crowned the 2007 MLB Heavyweight of the Year.

For those of you unfamiliar with this crown, it works like boxing: if you beat the champion, you become the champion. We start out each season with the previous year’s World Series winner. Every game the champion plays is a title bout.  If the champion loses, a new champion is crowned. The team that finishes the regular season with the most title bout victories is declared the Heavyweight of the Year. (In case of ties, the team with the fewest losses wins.)

The Mariners are the current champions. See the Catfish Stew sidebar for the full MLB Heavyweight standings.

Going into this final weekend, the Chicago White Sox are in first place, with 13 wins. But oddly, the White Sox have actually clinched a second-place finish, despite their current lead in the standings. That’s because the teams tied for second with 11 wins, Seattle and Texas, play each other this weekend. By Sunday, one of them will at least match Chicago’s 13 victories. And since the Chicago will have more title bout losses than either the Mariners or the Rangers, the White Sox can’t finish in first place.

And so, we are left with possibly the greatest Heavyweight finish in the history of major-league baseball: a three-game, winner-take-all series for all the marbles.

Seattle Mariners. Texas Rangers. The Battle In Seattle! It’ll be great. I just can’t wait.

Am I bad person for laughing out loud at the video where Milton Bradley got tackled by his own manager and ended up injured?

Where is Ken Macha when you need him?

How is Jorge Velandia still playing in the major leagues?

Suppose, for a moment, that the A’s sign Barry Bonds next year…and you wanted both Bonds and Jack Cust in the lineup on the same day…which one would you put in the field? Would you play a real centerfielder (Kotsay/Denorfia) beside your choice and sit one of (Swisher/Buck/Barton)?  Or would you put Buck or Swisher in CF?

When Bob decided to rename the divisions after the best player from the winning team who played his entire career with that team (Tim Salmon, for instance), it got me wondering. Which retired A’s players actually qualify? The A’s don’t keep players like Tim Salmon for their whole careers; they all leave one way or another. Which one of the following possibilities (those with over 100 career games) would Bob have picked if the A’s had won the AL West instead of the Angels?

Or would Bob have weaseled out of this tough decision and just went with an active player like Eric Chavez or Mark Ellis instead?

How did Rusty Greer become a prototype? Seems like every other OF prospect is compared to him these days. Seems pretty random to me. Can I start using Toaster writers as my prototypes, instead?

It’s driving me nuts, and I can’t put my finger on it: whose swing does Daric Barton remind me of? I want to say it’s kinda like a cross between Ted Williams and Jon Weisman, but that’s not quite it.

Doesn’t Jerry Blevins remind you of Bob Timmermann with a better fastball?

Isn’t disallowing Dallas Braden from using his screwball like not allowing Mark Donohue to write long paragraphs? You’re taking away his genius.

When is Philip going to fork over my hard-won Cesar Izturis bobblehead to me?

Is anybody out there interested in sharing some partial season tickets for next year? One of the people in my group is dropping out. Email me at catfish AT zombia.com if you have any interest.

If you look at the Athletics franchise career leaders in OPS and OPS+, you’ll find a bunch of Hall-of-Famers (Jimmie Foxx, Eddie Collins, Home Run Baker, Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Reggie Jackson, Rickey Henderson), a few Hall-of-Juicers (Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi), a couple of classic baseball names (Matt Stairs, Gene Tenace), and…Bob Johnson.

Bob Johnson is largely forgotten in Athletics lore.  His name appears in the top ten of nearly every batting category in franchise history, so being forgotten hardly seems a fair fate.  He played 10 years with the A’s, averaging 25 homers and 104 RBI.  His career rate stats were .296/.393/.506.  So why is he forgotten?

Part of it is that he started late; he was 27 years old in his rookie season, and he never accumulated the kind of career totals that would make him a Hall-of-Fame candidate.

But I think a lot of the reason is because his name was "Bob Johnson".  Johnson had a nickname, "Indian Bob", from his 1/4 Native American lineage.  But that’s not the kind of nickname we repeat in these days of political correctness.  So he remains "Bob Johnson", a name that could not be better chosen to blend into the background and fade from attention.

* * *

Daric Barton made his major league debut this week, and has impressed mightily.  So far, he’s hitting .353/.450/.471.  Those numbers are positively Bob Johnsonesque!  Barton’s debut is probably the second-most exciting thing to happen to the team all year.  The kid can hit.  Dan Johnson’s days as Oakland’s first baseman are numbered.

And yet, Dan Johnson is the source of the most exciting thing I’ve heard all year:  he got a nickname.  Dan Johnson has one of the few names that could possibly surpass Bob Johnson in forgettability.  In ten, fifteen years, will anyone remember Dan Johnson and his brief tenure in Oakland?  Certainly not, especially if we keep calling him "Dan Johnson".

But now there’s this:  apparently, Marco Scutaro was recently making fun of Johnson for the way he was chasing down a popup in Oakland’s large foul territory, saying he ran after it like a crab.  A nickname was born:  Dan "Crab-Man" Johnson.

I hereby declare a new law:  Dan Johnson shall be henceforth be called "Crab-Man Johnson" in all forms of conversation.  Anyone who fails to use the nickname shall receive a $100 fine.   All in favor, say aye!

Dan Johnson was just passing through, a forgettable face in the crowd, in a forgettable year for the franchise.  But Crab-Man Johnson is a classic baseball name that will likely live forever.  It leaves a smile on my face.  This season shall not have been in vain.