There came a point for all of us–maybe at the first sight of Jar Jar Binks, maybe at the nails-on-the-chalkboard “romantic” dialogue between Anakin and Amidala, or maybe, if you’re a diehard believer, at that final shout of “Noooooooooooooooo!”–but in any case, at some point, you were forced to admit to yourself that no matter how much you admired the vision that George Lucas had for his Star Wars franchise, the execution just isn’t going to match the vision.

Ordinarily, I’d be walking on cloud nine after a five-game winning streak, including sweep of the Yankees, but the news of the Rich Harden injury, punctuated by Will Carroll reporting that Tommy John surgery now increasingly likely, has left me screaming “Nooooooooooooo!” to myself all weekend. The thought of Harden missing most of this year and next still haunts me.

* * *

Whether constructing a work of art or a baseball team, there are many paths to excellence. Sometimes, excellence arises from combining a bunch of pieces that work perfectly together. Sometimes, you stumble upon one or two of such quality that other details can be flawed, and it’s still excellent. And then there’s the rare moments of transcendence where you combine one or two great pieces with their perfect complements.

The original Star Wars films worked pretty well because they had three excellent things: a great villain in Darth Vader, a great actor in Harrison Ford who took a bunch of corny lines and made them sound plausible, and an interesting universe for the characters to inhabit. We barely noticed the flaws with the films because these three excellent things carried us past them.

But the prequels had neither the villain nor the actor, and suddenly all the flaws started sticking out like sore thumbs. In hindsight, Lucas needed to do one of two things:

• Use the stars-and-scrubs formula again

  You need a great bad guy. In the prequels, Anakin isn’t bad yet and the Emperor isn’t really revealed as the bad guy until the third film. Perhaps you show the Emperor being evil right from the start.

  You let a great actor act. Let Samuel L. Jackson be Samuel L. Jackson. I want Jules Winnfield as a Jedi, not some cardboard cutout called Mace Windu.

• Used a fully balanced attack

  Without stars to cover for the flaws in the details, you have to fix all the flaws in the details. You may not have any pieces that stand out, but you need every piece to fit together right, or the whole thing falls apart.

  No overly convoluted plots. No wooden dialogue. No annoying characters.

Or…maybe…both? Add the perfect complements to a few great pieces, and build something timeless.

* * *

Losing Harden depresses me for this reason: he’s the only eye-popping, shake-your-head-in-disbelief, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him dominant talent in the whole A’s organization. He’s the only Darth Vader/Han Solo the A’s have, a guy who can make up for the flaws in the rest of the story. There’s no one else on the major league roster, and no one in the minor league pipeline, who has this quality. Everyone else just does their part to move the plot along, some better than others, of course. But Rich Harden is a plot by himself.

The A’s hoped that maybe Eric Chavez would be such a player, or Bobby Crosby, but it should be clear that neither of them is that sort of player. They’re both a level below that: truly good, not truly great.

Losing Harden limits the A’s options. There’s no chance of transcendence, where a great player is complemented by a great balanced attack around him. You can’t do the stars-and-scrubs approach, because without him, there’s no big star.

* * *

That leaves two choices: find yerself another dominant player, or build yerself a flawless team.

I think it’s possible, that when all these injured players get back and hit their stride, that the A’s might have this kind of balanced, flawless team, with good, solid players at every position. But given what’s happened so far this year with all the slumps and injuries, no one can be blamed for being skeptical that this will come to fruition.

* * *

I need some kind of silver lining in this dark cloud to make me feel better. And that’s where the Barry Zito conundrum comes in.

This is Zito’s last year. If the A’s are going to win this year, without Harden, they’re going to need Zito.

However, Zito is also the A’s best trading chip if they want to land another dominant player. To trade or not to trade, that is the question.

I chatted with Bryan Smith earlier this week, and he said the 2007 draft class looks “awesome”. That helps give Billy Beane a little leverage in any possible trade, because the two draft picks the A’s would get in the upcoming draft is worth more than picks in a weak draft. He can afford to set a high price for Zito.

If his price isn’t met, and Zito can’t land the A’s their next dominant player, Beane will just take his chances: that this team will be good enough with Zito to compete for a title in 2006, and that the those extra picks in that awesome draft class will bring them the kind of dominant player or perfect puzzle pieces they need to keep competing in the future. Either way, it’s good.

There, I just found myself a new hope.

This blog is on a bit of a hiatus, if you hadn’t noticed. Priorities, and such, you know.

Meanwhile, if you need a sports poetry fix, check out Football Poets, for all the World Cup poetry you could possibly need.

Mike Rouse got called up from AAA Sacramento, made his major league debut against in Yankee Stadium Friday night, and immediately became the darling of all headline writers everywhere. His first two games have been a rousing success, helping the A’s offense arouse from its slumber by hitting .571/.625/.714 with 2 runs, 2 RBI and a stolen base.

All those puns will get old very quickly, but if a groan-inducing phrase Twister is what it takes to get some more offense out of the A’s, I will listen to all the bad puns you can rouse up. In fact, if it will help the A’s win some more games, I’ll even Risk the Trouble of taking back my moratorium on Milton Bradley puns. When it comes to wins, we’re like Hungry, Hungry Hippos around here.

Boy oh boy oh boy am I glad this election is over. I am so tired of having to answer phone calls from the likes of Al Gore, Dianne Feinstein and Jerry Brown. Doggone celebrities can’t leave me alone.

And that’s not all. My phone has also been buzzing because Alameda High School recently won the North Coast 3A high school baseball championship. (Philip Michaels was there). I suppose I should be happy that my fine island has produced yet another baseball success story, but my enthusiasm is a bit dampened. Partly because I attended Alameda High’s main rival, Encinal High School. But mostly because of this fact: Alameda High’s coach is named Ken Arnerich. And his son, Kenny Arnerich, was the winning pitcher in the championship game.

Thus, I now present the transcript to over half my telephone conversations in the past week:

“Hello?”
“Hello, may I speak to Ken?”
“This is Ken.”
“Hey, wassup Ken, this is Mumblemumblemumble!”
“Who?”
“Mumblemumblemumble! Howzitgoin’?”
“Do I know you?”
“Oh, am I talking to the father or the son?”
“You have the wrong number, dude.”
“Oh, sorry.”

I suppose I should not be so annoyed. Perhaps I should respond to this celebrity intrusion with more enthusiasm, like how Annika responded to an email she received from Robert Redford about gas prices:

Dear Mr. Redford,

Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god OMG OMG OMG!!!!

I can’t believe I got an e-mail from you!

…[snip]…

Okay lemme see. All the President’s Men was an awesome movie too. I liked that one. What else? The Natural! That movie kicked ass so much more than the one with Kevin Costner, which was too weird. I don’t know what the point of that one was. Like why would he build that baseball field? What was the deal with that? I liked that you made your own bat in The Natural, even though it ended up breaking, but you still hit a bunch of home runs with it.

Did you notice that in The Natural you started out as a pitcher, but then you switched to a home run hitter — just like Babe Ruth did! That was the cool part. Well, one of the many cool parts. The whole movie was cool, for a baseball movie. My favorite baseball movie of all time was Bull Durham, which you weren’t in. But Kevin Costner was in it, which is funny because he also did that one where he built the baseball field, which was kind of sucky as I said before.

That’s so great. Now I’m totally regretting not responding that one time I got an email from Britney Spears. Not some mass-market email, or spam email faking Britney Spears, but an actual honest-to-goodness email from Britney herself. I happen to own a domain name whose name is perilously close to that of a music label. Until I blocked them, I used to constantly get emails from people who misspelled that domain name, asking if they’ve received the CDs or sheet music, informing me of meetings, upcoming sessions, inviting me to release parties, and so many other mundane details of the music business. I’ve thought it might be fun to show up at one of these meetings sometime, but unfortunately, most of them were in New York City.

Anyhoo, the day before some special she had on HBO, Britney herself made this oh-so-common spelling error in JC Chasez‘s email address, and his invitation to a party (along with Justin Timberlake, Lance Bass, Joey Fatone, and others) on “FIRDAY, NOVEMBER 30 AT THE TIMBERLAKE/SPEARS ESTATE” (yes the entire email was in ALL CAPS) reached my inbox instead.

I guess I just wasn’t in a snarky mood that day. Oh well, opportunity wasted. I wish I had had Annika’s response as a model. What are the odds that those email addresses I possess still work?

SORRY BRITNEY JEAN I MISSED THAT PARTY THAT YOU AND BOBBEE PLANNED FOR CHRIS AND DANI WHO ARE (WERE?) FINALLY TOGETHER ONCE AGAIN...BUT OMG OMG OMG OMG I *TOTALLY* WISH I COULD HAVE BEEN THERE!

But too late, I guess. But, hmm, maybe it’s not too late for…well, time to go. I gotta replace my answering machine message with a recording of “We Are The Champions”.

Well, the Kendall fast worked, and now the Loaiza fast, where I would not watch Loaiza until he threw five consecutive shutout innings, is over. Esteban Loaiza came off the DL today and pitched brilliantly, throwing only 77 pitches in seven innings, allowing just one run, a seventh inning solo homer by Ben Broussard. The A’s won, 4-1.

Since this fasting idea seems to be working pretty well, I think it should continue. Which A’s player is currently annoying me the most? Probably Joe Blanton. His inconsistency from start to start is maddening. One start he throws a shutout, the next he gives up more runs than innings pitched.

So I shall now begin a Joe Blanton fast. I’m not going to watch Blanton again until he runs off three consecutive quality starts.

Here’s hoping he can end this fast quite quickly. If Rich Harden needs Tommy John surgery (not in the immediate cards, but since he has a “high-grade strain of the UCL” according to A’s trainer Larry Davis, you have to imagine it could happen), the A’s will need both Loaiza and Blanton to find their grooves ASAP.

You gotta wonder…if Rick Peterson were still here, would the A’s have had all these pitching injuries?

Harden’s back is fine, but now his elbow hurts. Criminey!

This really pops my balloon. I had visions of the A’s getting on a roll, climbing back up the standings, and winning this very weak, very winnable division. I have a hard time seeing that happening now. And if Esteban Loaiza looks bad today against Cleveland, I’ll be really depressed.

Rich Harden is turning into the next Mark Prior, and the A’s are turning into the Chicago Cubs right before our eyes. You think you’re going to have a great rotation for years to come, and then poof!, it all turns to ashes. Next thing you know, all you have is Carlos Zambrano/Dan Haren and a bunch of band-aids.

The A’s didn’t choose until the 66th pick in 6/6/06 MLB draft. That’s a lot of sixes. The A’s chose Trevor Cahill, a converted shortstop, who has a commitment to Dartmouth. Is it a sign of the apocalypse that their first pick was a high school pitcher? To me, the interesting thing to me about this pick is not that he’s a high schooler, but that he might be tough to sign. Which may not be a sign of the end of the world, but another sign (giving up a first round pick to sign Esteban Loaiza being the first) that the A’s think this year’s draft is terrible. If we’re gonna spend $X on a player, let’s pick one we think is worth $X, even if we don’t get him.

With their third round pick, the A’s picked Matthew Sulentic, a high school outfielder. He’s small (5’10”, 170), but may have had the best hitting stats of any high school player in the country (.600+ BA, 20+ homeruns). The scouting report says his “makeup is off the charts.” He’s signed with Texas A&M.

* * *

Rob McMillin has a little rant about how the A’s are still getting credit for creative draft strategies (they drafted high schoolers!) that really aren’t all that creative:

Brandon Wood, anyone? Nick Adenhart? No love for the Angels? How about Scott Elbert, Blake DeWitt, and Chad Billingsley for the Dodgers? Is a trend only a trend when the A’s find themselves chasing the other guys’ tail lights two freaking years after other teams have identified this alleged inefficiency?

I agree with his rant. The “inefficiency” angle on the MLB draft makes no sense to me. If teams were allowed to trade picks, then there would be opportunities to exploit inefficiencies. But since you’re stuck with whatever draft position you end up with, drafting “strategy” is little more than a test to see who can come up with the most accurate sorting algorithm.

Sort these 700 players in order of their future value.

Every team will have a different algorithm, and even a small difference in measurement from the majority of other teams picking can make you look like you only like college players (A’s), or high school players from Georgia (Braves), but really, your list is probably only slightly different from everyone else’s.

I ought to sue somebody. I put a cheap-brand sunscreen on before I went to the A’s game yesterday, and I might as well have worn magnifying glasses for all the protection it gave me. When I got home, my arms and neck were as red as strawberries. Ticks me off; I did the right thing, and I still got badly burned.

What ticks me off more than the actual pain of sunburn is that I have tickets for Rich Harden’s return from the DL today. I know that I should stay out of the sun today to give my skin a chance to heal, but doggone it, I paid good money for good seats for this game, and I want to use them. Maybe I’ll put on a long sleeve turtleneck, and sweat it out. I can’t decide.

Harden’s return this afternoon helped them win a 2-1 game yesterday. Dan Haren pitched well, but threw too many pitches. It was obvious in the third inning that he would only get through six innings at most, and I was dreading the fact that the A’s would have to go to that weak bullpen for at least an inning. In the fourth inning, I said, “I bet the A’s lose this game in the seventh.”

The seventh inning was indeed trouble, as the Twins scored a run to tie the game 1-1. Randy Keisler failed to retire the one batter he faced, and Kiko Calero gave up a couple of hits. But then Brad Halsey, who had been in the rotation during this stretch of injuries, came out of the pen and got the A’s out of the jam with only one run scoring.

That’s the importance of having depth in your pen. If one guy is having a bad day, you can try someone else. If you only have one guy you trust, you’re stuck with him, whether he’s having a good day or not. That’s where Harden’s return helped the A’s win the game. When Calero wasn’t sharp, Ken Macha had Halsey to try, and it worked.

At least, it worked in the seventh. In the eighth, after the A’s scored a run to take the lead, Halsey allowed the first two batters to reach, and Macha called on Huston Street to get a six-out save. It was Street’s best performance of the year. His fastball was jumping; the Twins were lucky if they even fouled it off. He walked Tony Batista to lead off the ninth (Street threw him nothing but sliders, for some reason), but otherwise the Twins could do nothing with him. It was the first time that the 2006 Huston Street looked like the 2005 Huston Street. Nice to see.

While Jason Kendall was turning the round number in his home run column to a different shape, there have been a number of A’s going in the other direction in the last few days:

• Barry Zito got his 1000th career strikeout in his 200th career start.
• Mark Kotsay hit his 100th career home run.
• Ken Macha got his 300th career win as a manager.
• Bobby Crosby hit the 6000th home run in Oakland A’s history.

Here are some lists associated with those milestones:

Continue…

Jason Kendall just hit his first home run as an Oakland Athletic!

Holy Toledo!

If the A’s come back and win the division, this may be the moment where things turn around. If Kendall can homer…all the bad luck may be reversing itself, right here, right now.

I can hope, anyway.

Update: It’s his first home run since July 27, 2004, off Paul Byrd of the Atlanta Braves.

The A’s are way too depressing to even think about, let alone write about. Let’s just forget them for awhile.

Instead, I want to share my favorite OMG! moment on today’s Internets, this blog entry from David Byrne:

Here is a photo from a NY Times article on a Northern California company that specializes in games and content for mobile phones. The CEO and founder of the company, Trip Hawkins (is that a movie name or what?), stands center. Looks like he spends time at the gym — and at personal grooming.

The guys slouched around him — overweight, balding slobs — are the guys who, I presume, do the grunt work in the company. If ever there was an image of animal social hierarchy this is it.

That, my friends, is Silicon Valley in a perfect nutshell. There’s a set of Alpha Males, driving around in shiny new BMWs, wearing expensive designer “casual” clothes, discussing all their latest and greatest deals, bragging about their latest round of golf, perfecting their preening to impress anyone who will listen. Then you have a set of out-of-shape dudes in t-shirts and flip-flops who don’t have time to play golf, and wouldn’t care to if they did, because they’re too busy, you know, makin’ stuff. The Venn diagrams of these two sets barely touch.

I shoulda learned to play the guitar. I shoulda learned to play them drums. Money for nothing and the chicks for free.

I remember one time I was wearing a 49ers t-shirt with a picture of Ronnie Lott on it. I walked into the CEO’s office (in one of those rare moments of Venn diagram intersections), and I think the words that came out of his mouth were, “Oh, Ronnie Lott! I played 18 holes with him yesterday,” but the words I heard him say in my brain were, “I am an alpha male. I hang out with alpha males. You, however, can only manage to wear the image of an alpha male. Therefore, you are not an alpha male.”

When I get frustrated about the A’s, and I don’t feel like blogging about them, I think about that moment. Athletes are the alpha males of our popular culture; their status-to-actual-societal-value ratio is way out of proportion. So why the hell do I keep feeding their egos by doing exactly what they want me to do, and obsess about their success?

I really ought to have more dignity than this. I should be an alpha male! I should be the obsessee, not the obsesser! But it’ll probably never happen. I’m such a beta male, it’s pathetic. And probably, if you’re reading this, so are you.

The A’s just got their butts handed to them by Seth Etherton and the Kansas City Royals.

*sigh*

And *sigh* again.

I have griped about Frank Thomas and Jason Kendall round these parts this year, but of late, they haven’t been problems. When Thomas returned to the familiar confines of US Cellular Field last week, he rediscovered his batting eye; he’s not swinging at balls any more, he’s swinging at good pitches to hit, and hitting them hard. He looks much more like the Frank Thomas of years past than the Frank Thomas of April. As for Jason Kendall, he has stopped grounding out to third so much, and as a result, is performing about as well as you’d expect.

The problem is this: yes, Jason Kendall is performing to expectations, but Jason Kendall was expected to be the worst hitter in the A’s lineup. Instead, Jason Kendall’s .675 OPS was the median OPS in tonight’s A’s lineup. And with the exception of Jay Payton replacing the injured Milton Bradley, it was pretty much the lineup Billy Beane expected to be fielding.

The A’s lineup tonight breaks into three distinct groups:

Performing well above expectations

Nick Swisher: 1.037 OPS. PECOTA 90% percentile projection: .912 OPS.
Eric Chavez: .917 OPS. PECOTA 90%: .929 OPS.

Performing around expectations

Frank Thomas: .821 OPS. PECOTA 50%: .800 OPS.
Mark Kotsay: .748 OPS. PECOTA 50%: .745 OPS.
Jason Kendall: .675 OPS. PECOTA 50%: .671 OPS.

Performing way, way, way below expectations

Bobby Crosby: .642 OPS. PECOTA 10%: .671 OPS.
Mark Ellis: .629 OPS. PECOTA 10%: .655 OPS.
Jay Payton: .606 OPS. PECOTA 10%: .594 OPS.
Dan Johnson: .545 OPS. PECOTA 10%: .686 OPS.

The pitching struggles have been well documented, but if Crosby, Ellis, Payton, and Johnson had been performing anywhere even near shouting distance of their expectations, the pitching injuries would have only been a small blip on the season.

I’ll give Ken Macha some credit here: he actually had the A’s five best performing batters clustered 1-5 in the A’s lineup tonight. But it’s hard to win when nearly half your lineup is clunking along at their 10% PECOTA projections.

The season is almost two months old now. The time for excuses is over. These four players need to step up and step up now. Because if the A’s get swept by the Royals, the A’s 2006 season might die right here and now, of embarrassment.

I usually don’t remember dreams, but I’ve been recalling more in recent days, for some reason. Last night, I dreamed I was talking with Billy Beane, and he asked me how well I could pitch. Well, I guess that’s just a sign of how horrible the A’s bullpen has been with those five pitchers on the DL. If I’m even subconsiously contemplating the idea that I could do a better job than them, well, then things are really, really bad.

Before this dream, fortunately, the A’s managed to get through a game without using any of those replaceable middle relievers. Barry Zito pitched into the eighth, and Huston Street took it from there. The A’s seven-game losing streak was mercifully over.

A victory tonight would sure make this roadtrip less painful. Kirk Saarloos rarely pitches beyond the sixth inning, even on a good day, but maybe tonight he can make an exception. Better to dream for a miracle like that, than to dream that I can suddenly learn how to pitch.

I shared an A’s game a couple of years ago with Markos Moulitsas, and he asked me if I ever participated in the Daily Kos discussions, and I said no, and he asked me why, and I don’t quite remember what I said, I think I made up some lame excuse about focusing on baseball blogging. The truth was that I didn’t really feel like my political views had a solid philosophy behind them that I really believed in, so arguing about political details felt like a pointless waste of time to me, like arguing about wallpaper patterns before you have any sort of blueprint to your house, but I was afraid that if I tried to explain this to Markos that it would come out wrong (your blog is a pointless waste of time!) so I left the truth unsaid.

Lately, though, I find more and more that I am starting to have a general philosophy of things, and that I am getting closer and closer to being able to articulate my beliefs. I feel like I am circling around the same themes, firing bullets at some central target which I keep getting closer and closer to hitting.

And as I get closer to having my own philosophical legs to stand on, I feel like I am now more ready and willing to argue the wallpaper patterns, so to speak.

Here’s another bullet fired around that target. Yesterday, Steven Goldman of Baseball Prospectus made a very political argument in discussing Michael Barrett’s suckerpunch of A.J. Pierzynski. An excerpt from Goldman, with a quote at the end from Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:

It’s not that Americans lack the skills for a good rhetorical bout, but that the art of negotiation is something that the culture doesn’t prize as highly as the sudden stroke, the force majeure. We like to hit people, or at the very least fantasize that hitting someone cuts a problem to the quick in a way that talking can’t do. Americans rejected the League of Nations and to this day many of them hate the United Nations. Membership in diplomatic organizations restricts our ability to unload a good haymaker when that irresistible urge arises. There is a streak of primitivism in American culture, “a persistent preference for the ‘wisdom’ of intuition, which is deemed to be natural or God-given, over rationality, which is cultivated and artificial.”

This paragraph is, if I may read between the lines a bit, criticizing three groups of people:

1. Michael Barrett
2. Iraq war supporters
3. Anti-statheads

It implies, by carefully selecting words such as “fantasize” and “primitivism” and by placing quotation marks around the word ‘wisdom’, that intuition is inferior, and that rationality should be the preferred, superior choice whenever possible.

And that’s where I’d choose a different wallpaper.

Let me start by choosing a few selected words of my own. First, I’d like to kill the word “intuition”. It has a negative connotation that puts it at a disadvantage in any argument against rationality. A decision made by intuition runs through a pattern recognition algorithm in our brains. So let’s replace “intuition” with the phrase “pattern recognition”.

By choosing the words “pattern recognition”, we can also get rid of the word “primitivism”. Because the pattern recognition algorithms in our brains are anything but primitive; they are extremely complex. We can easily program a computer to follow a rational algorithm, but nobody has even remotely figured out how get a computer to match a human brain’s pattern recognition ability. Rationality is far, far simpler (dare I say, primitive?) than pattern recognition.

Goldman then goes on to quote the BP book Mind Game, where they conclude via statistical analysis of teams pre- and post-fights, that baseball fights do not benefit the fighters. To which I say, of course they don’t.

Fights begin out of anger, and anger is an emotion that has evolved over millions of years. What evolutionary purpose does anger serve? To make a creature willing to overcome his self-preservation instincts, and risk physical harm to itself in order to communicate to another creature that it is behaving inappropriately. Anger is supposed to be costly.

Ever had a bird attack you when you get too close to its nest? You’re 20 times bigger than the bird, and you could probably kill it with one blow. But it doesn’t care; it’s angry at you. And it works, too. You’re not hanging around that nest to get pecked at; you’re gonna skedaddle away. Anger is a complex, effective interspecies communications tool, evolved over hundreds of thousands of generations of animals.

Rationality, on the other hand, is a brand new tool in the evolutionary chain. Only humans have it. It hasn’t been tested by hundreds of thousands of species over hundreds of millions of years. It’s been tested by one species over maybe a hundred thousand years.

Being skeptical of rational choices is the rational thing to do. I believe that our pattern recognition algorithms are often so much more sophisticated than our rational algorithms, that when they disagree, the rational argument is wrong more often than not. The rational argument is always missing something: some assumption, some variable, some pattern that the sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms don’t miss. Over time, after further analysis, and years and years of study, when all the variables are finally in, the rational analysis often ends up at or near the same place the pattern recognition algorithm started out with in the first place.

Now, don’t mistake me. I’m not saying pattern recognition is always better than rationality. Humans have both, and there’s a reason we have evolved both. Rationality has given us a huge advantage over other animals. There’s probably a time and a place where communicating with A.J. Pierzynski with a fist would be more effective than using a more rational communications tool, but Michael Barrett probably didn’t pick the right one. Given the context, Barrett’s anger didn’t seem appropriate or justified. What I am arguing is that we should not simply dismiss our intuition and emotions as primitive and inferior out of hand.

If you ask me, this is the reason the Afghanistan war has been (viewed as) more successful than the Iraq war. Americans were angry at the Afghan government after 9/11. Anger makes you willing to risk personal suffering. Iraq, on the other hand, was invaded based more on rational arguments than anger. WMDs, therefore blah blah blah. Americans weren’t really all that angry at Iraq. Which had two effects: (1) the decision was more likely to be flawed, because the rational mechanisms for making the decision to invade Iraq were less sophisticated than the complex, emotional mechanisms used to decide to invade Afghanistan, and (2) the lack of anger made Americans less willing to endure the physical suffering that the war would entail, making success even that much less likely.

To make a long point short: to maximize your odds of success, make sure your logic and your intuitions/emotions are in full agreement before making a decision.

* * *

All of which brings me around to the reason I started writing this blog entry in the first place, which was that I was angry with Ken Macha about today’s loss to the Rangers. The grand slam to Rod Barajas when the A’s had a 7-0 lead was infuriating. I can’t communicate my anger with Macha by throwing a good haymaker at him, so instead, at the risk of being ridiculed in public with my arguments, I am issuing this longwinded complaint instead. My anger must out!

The A’s are infamous, thanks to Moneyball, for being rational about their decision-making. Take the emotions out of it, Billy Beane likes to say. To which I say, that’s just wrong.

Sometimes Ken Macha drives me nuts, and sometimes it’s because I think he’s making an irrational decision, but I think the ones that drive me the most nuts are the ones that seem too rational. It’s like Macha won’t trust his pattern recognition tools at all, and requires rational, empirical proof that X is Y before he’ll act on it.

This manifests itself in the worst way when Macha is trying to decide whether to yank a pitcher or not. He seems unable to trust his eyes that a pitcher has run out of gas. He has some logical algorithm: if the pitcher:

(1) hasn’t maxed out his pitch count, and

(2) hasn’t yielded over five runs yet, and

(3a) hasn’t gone five innings yet, or
(3b) has gone five innings and still hasn’t given up a run this inning,

then

(4) leave him in the game.

Meanwhile, anybody with eyes can see that Brad Halsey has completely run out of gas. He loads the bases, but since no one has scored yet, there is logically, I suppose, insufficient evidence that Halsey is done. Whatever. Halsey serves up the grand slam to Barajas. Suddenly, a game the A’s should win by a blowout becomes a huge Texas comeback. Thank you, Ken “One Batter Too Late” Macha!

The human brain is constructed with the emotional center in charge of decisions, not the rational system. That is exactly as it should be. Let the rational inform your decisions, of course, but in the end, trust your pattern recognition system.

Nature has evolved over millions of years a persistent preference for the wisdom of intuition. This wisdom needs no quotation marks.

Ah, now I see why Lew Wolff was nice and gave me his front row seats a couple weeks ago. I am pretty much their ideal customer. They should be nice to me.

Now that the A’s have secured an option to buy a Major League Soccer expansion team, is there anyone else they should be targeting more than me, a baseball-bloggin’, soccer-playin’, technogeeky sports nut?

I’ve even covered the right cities. I live in Alameda (borders Oakland), I grew up in Newark (borders Fremont, presumably where the A’s will be moving), and I went to San Jose State for a couple of years, so I got me some Downtown San Jose in me, too.

My only scar? I haven’t been to an Earthquakes game since…hmm…well I remember when Paul Child was the big Quakes star in the old NASL, and that I once got to see Pele score a goal at Spartan Stadium against the Earthquakes. That must have been about 1975. I remember seeing an indoor Earthquakes game at the Coliseum Arena with Steve Zungul scoring a bunch of goals. That was probably back in 1984. So, I guess that makes it 22 years since I went to an Earthquakes game. I haven’t been to a soccer game at all since the 1994 World Cup, unless you count the ones I play in every week.

But that just means there’s room for sales growth, right? So go ahead, Mr. Wolff, send me your best marketing pitches. Package up a couple Earthquakes games with my A’s season tickets. I’m listening…

Last night’s loss to the Chicago White Sox reminds me of an old Arthurian legend called the “Perilous Bed.” This is one of the trials of Sir Gawain. It’s a silly story: Gawain tries to go to sleep on this bed, and it bucks him around like a wild stallion, generally making it impossible for him to sleep. Gawain “defeats” the bed, by simply staying put. The lesson: some monsters can’t be slain, they have to be endured.

Most people expected the A’s to be one of the better teams in the AL this year, and at this point, with five pitchers on the DL, they clearly are not. There’s a long list of other A’s players I’d rather see on the mound with a lead in the eighth inning against the World Champions than Steve Karsay and Randy Keisler, both of whom should be mopping up innings in blowouts, if they’re even in the majors at all. And if your first option in the tenth in a tie ballgame is Ron Flores, you are truly hurting.

It doesn’t get any easier in the next couple of days, with Javier Vazquez and Mark Buehrle lined up to face Oakland. If the A’s get out of Chicago with one victory out of three, they should count themselves as fortunate.

That’s why last night’s loss hurts. If you’re going to endure having five pitchers on the DL, you desperately need to win games like that. Every win is precious, another step closer to defeating the endurance test monster. But if you let those slip out of your grasp, you get perilously close to falling off, into a losing streak that will be the death of you.

Barry Bonds! Barry Bonds! Baaaaaaaaarry Bonds!

I got to watch Bonds hit his 714th homer on TV just before we had to leave the house for my daughter’s 2:30pm softball game.

I thought it was a extraordinary thing. Not so much the home run, but the fans’ reaction to it in the Oakland Coliseum. Bonds has been booed pretty consistently at the Coliseum over the years. Every time he steps to the plate, or his name is announced, the boos rain down from the stands. Even moreso recently.

And yet, when Bonds hit #714, it seemed like everyone in the house, A’s and Giants fans alike, gave him a standing ovation so long he had to take three curtain calls. It was as if the A’s fans were saying, OK, we don’t much care for you, Barry, but we respect your accomplishment. We respect the number.

How remarkably civilized. It was as if 35,000 people suddenly remembered their manners, the lessons they were taught as children.

Play hard, play to win, but always respect, appreciate, and thank your opponents. The world is a better place when you do.

And I missed most of it. I had a soccer game at 8:30pm last night, so I only saw innings 1, 2 and 9 of last night’s ballgame. Dan Haren again outdueled his BFF, Noah Lowry, 1-0. The A’s won their fifth straight game while Texas lost, so the A’s moved into first place all by their lonesomes.

I love well-pitched ball games, so I’m a little bummed I missed most of this one. My wife and kids went to the game and sat in the left-center bleachers. The game was so good that everyone came home raving about it, even though they didn’t win the $1,000,000 prize.

I’ll be missing most of today’s game as well, as my daughter has another softball game up in the Oakland Hills. This time, I’ll bring a charged battery for my camera.

….said A’s radio announcer Ken Korach.

The A’s climbed back to a first place tie in the AL West with last night’s 7-2 win over Seattle. Considering that the A’s currently have five players on the disabled list, plus another on the bereavement list, you can’t really complain much about the status quo. Things could be far, far worse at this point (see 2005).

I’m guessing Randy Keisler gets back from his grandmother’s funeral today, and the A’s open up his roster spot by placing Joe Kennedy on the DL. Kennedy hasn’t played in nine days, and it looks like he’ll miss a few more, so it seems the logical thing to do. That would make two starters, three relievers, and an outfielder on the shelf.

Thank goodness for Billy Beane and his commitment to pitching depth. The A’s pitching is stretched pretty thin right now, but with the depth, it’s stretched to the point of nervousness, not helplessness.

I usually feel pretty calm and comfortable with Justin Duchscherer out there in the eighth, and without him, the last couple of eighth innings against Seattle have made me bite my nails a bit. And I’ll probably bite a few more with Saarloos out on the mound today. I don’t particularly like it, but I can live with it.