Tonight, I feel like taking a walk down memory lane.  By making that my first sentence, I figured I could at least get 67MARQUEZ interested in this diary.  But I am shooting for more than an audience of one here.  If only I had some demo tapes lying around of me singing an A's-themed adaptation of La Bamba at karaoke night fifteen years ago...unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight when I was 7 to realize that such a performance might make for a valuable contribution to an A's "blog" ("mommy, what's a blog?"  "I don't know, sweetheart") sometime in the future.  Unfortunately, at that time I was excited only excited about Rickey Henderson when he joined the Blue Jays.  Hey, I'm from Buffalo, what did I know?

So for me, A's-memory lane doesn't go back all that far.  But AN-memory lane is a different story.  The Cutthemullet user ID is somewhere in the 700s, and even that number doesn't do my tenure here justice, because I was on this site before the user IDs existed, back when Athletics Fan And Runner had many different heroes in the course of the same thread (one post would be signed "Mike Gallego Is My Hero", another would be "Carney Lansford Is My Hero", etc).  And the resident villain was jrbh; this was pre-oaktoon and reztips.  So while most people who post here now probably don't even remember jrbh at all, how many can remember when that dude went by...Jeff Beresford-Howe?  Jeff Beresford-Howe, the only person I'll ever cross paths with whose idea of the good life starts with a move to Davenport, Iowa.  Sorry if I offended streetfan69, who I remember from FormerHuntsvilleStar's AN geography diary to be an Ion (that has to be the way to refer to Iowa residents), but he might be a Rockies fan now, anyway.  I mean, I remember hearing about a professional poker player who had once accepted a $10,000 bet that he couldn't live in Des Moines for a month...and atter 2 weeks, he was down that 10 grand.  I don't really know the specifics there as far as how the friend could be sure he didn't actually leave Des Moines, like if he was being monitored by Joe Jackson or what, but in any event it wasn't long before that guy was going to be looking to strike up a conversation with 1,000 teenage girls at the mall. 

One more thing about Jeff jrbh Beresford Art Howe:

jrbh: Jeff Beresford-Howe:: Reg: ?

Now we're taking a walk down SAT memory lane...

If you guessed "Reginald Stephen Shipp Bixby" (and why wouldn't you guess that), you are correct.  Reg, I hope you read this and post some links to the threads where jrbh was threatening legal action.  See, that's how things worked in the time before community guidelines, and that is why the guidelines should be abolished.     

Alright, so, to get to the point of the diary.  I just brought up a couple memorable instances from AN prehistory (there is no record of 1.0 threads in the archives).  From that era, we have to rely on oral history.  So the first objective is to try to draw the McFoods and the xbx's (no bhaskars, just x's) and the Jennifers and, hell, the Blezes out of the woodwork and get them to comment here so that we can compile a log of 1.0 actitvity before everyone thinks that AN was born the day PaulThomas joined the site.

The second objective is the one for everyone, and the one that more people would care about.  What I want is for people to pimp some old diaries.  Yes, what was once a crime is now being encouraged.  Link to a couple old favorites, written either by yourself or by another AN user, promoted either by virtue of the content of the diary itself or because of the insight/hilarity of the comments.  I've got five I want to broadcast here.  The first one is a true classic.  I got off to a very strong start by referring to Taj Adib as Taj Mahal, and from that point on I never really looked back:

 What Would Baseball Be Without Asterisks

For the next one we're going back to the beginning of the 2005 season.  What you need to know before going into this one is that before the '05 season, Barry Zito had decided to tie his on-field performance to a charitable cause: for every strikeout he recorded that season, he was going to donate a certain amount of money to soldiers who had been injured in combat.  He named his foundation Strikeouts for Troops.  Well, after his first few starts it appeared as though the troops were going to have to turn elsewhere for financial aid, and that inspired me to write the following:

Surely The Troops Deserved Better

 The next three were written by others, but commented on rather extensively by me.  In no other diary have I ever commented so extensively as in this next one, which saw boilerdan's tribute to Emil Brown transformed into a forum for a spirited debate about the existence of hot streaks, and better yet a forum for 74mk to summarize that spirited debate.  If nothing else, scroll down, look for the post that was rightfully colored green due to the recommendations it received, and read that.

 DFA's Finest Moment

In 2005, I was initially preoccupied by Barry Zito's desire to keep his entire salary, but when the Larry Krueger comments took AN by storm, I found myself waxing philosophical in an apparent effort to reassure myself that Larry would never consider me to be brain-dead:

The Meaning Of Life Can Be Found Near The Bottom Of This Thread

And how could I write this diary and not include the single best diary in the history of AN:

SB Nation Was Not My Idea

So if AN was burning and I had to save a few diaries from being engulfed in flames, I would certainly be looking to salvage these.  Yeah, that's right, I went with the burning house over the desert island.  So go ahead and tell the AN world which ones you'd grab before the whole shithouse goes up in flames, or whatever Morrison says at the end of the live version of Roadhouse Blues.  Post your favorite(s), least favorite(s), whatever's memorable; I look forward to hearing from everyone.

 

Not to go all vegasgm on you guys (or whoever has irked the community the most with criticism of the trade), but c'mon.  Who doesn't ask for more talent than this for...talent such as this?  Let's not all be Beane apologists here.  Sure, there are minor salary gains here; perhaps Sean Gallagher is better than Chad Gaudin, let alone Harden, perhaps other dominoes will fall and another trade will be made in short order...but in a vacuum, this is nothing better than a bad trade.  With the inclusion of Gaudin, Beane caved into the needs of a contender that isn't really all that good.  Post-Sabathia, the Cubs are at best second-best in their division--only so because of STL pitching injuries (to their top three starters, basically).  There was no need to make this deal at this time.  No rush.  The irony here is that the Cubs' panic benefitted them.  It netted them one of the five best pitchers in baseball.  Harden, Santana, Webb, Halladay, Sheets.  So I would say.  That may in fact be in proper order.  You do not part with someone like that for subpar talent such as this.  You demand elite talent.  This is better than 2007 Josh Hamilton, and the Reds issued an ultimatum for Volquez in that deal, and had their request honored. 

There is no proper rationalization here.  As a longtime AN poster/reader, I respect iglew/mdl and Taj Adib, but I cannot agree with their justifications of such a mediocre (at best) return here.  Given the current wild card/divisional contention, as a fan, this is downright unacceptable.  There is really no upside here or later.  Where does Gallagher fit in 2009?  As a #3, at best?  If Gio and Simmons were to get hurt, or something?  And unless some team REALLY overvalues Patterson (Dusty, where are you), that acquisition is so useless.  Murton is basically a recalamtion project at this point--potentially good, but hardly (and here I use "hardly" loosely, and perhaps for pun value...) a centerpiece of a trade for a bona fide ace...and he other guy, well, let's invest in yet another young catcher, because we haven't already done that all too many times before, right?  Hopefully he's 40 pounds overweight, too. 

Fucking horrible trade.  A's win in spite of this bullshit.  Go Oakland.  Trade Street and Blanton for nothing, and win more.  Front office idio[syncra]cy.

Here's a short story I wrote recently.  My fiction debut, if you will.  Why not post it on AN?

"The Market of Convenience"

So this man walks into a convenience store.  7-11.  Maybe.  He asks for a few lines of cocaine and a box of Cheez-Its.  Man behind the counter rolls his eyes.  Such a predictable order, especially in this part of town.  

Poll

Like it?

33%

yes

7 votes

28%

no

6 votes

38%

uh, baseball?

8 votes

21 votes | Poll has closed

Continue reading this post »

I watched the A's today.  No I didn't, actually.  Somehow they won tonight, even though Swisher shouldn't have played.  Luck luck luck, bork bork bork.

But I watched them a few weeks ago.  They sucked.  The manager is bad.  He really IS the luckiest man alive, Bob Gehrig.  First of all, he lets Kendall play.  This guy can't run, throw, catch, or hit.  He should've played JD Closser that day.  

Continue reading this post »

Alright, even though it would be really easy to leave them as I copy-and-pasted them, in alphabetical order, I'll organize the teams into their proper divisions:

AL East:

New York Yankees Over 96.5 (-115)    
  Under 96.5 (-115)
Boston Red Sox Over 91 (-125)    
  Under 91 (-105)
Toronto Blue Jays Over 86.5 (-110)    
  Under 86.5 (-120)
Baltimore Orioles Over 73 (-115)    
  Under 73 (-115)
Tampa Bay Devil Rays Over 67 (-130)    
  Under 67 (Even)

Continue reading this post »

Not going to read the diary, sorry Taj Mahal.  That's quite a structure you've built there in India/Atlantic City, but I'm going to have to ignore it.  I'm cheering for this year's team.  F*** 2009.  F*** 2010.  F*** 2011.  We'll be restocked by then, motherf***ers.  The GM advantage is too much to ignore.  These morons can't ply their trade.  Let's face it.  We're by far the smartest fan base in all of professional sports, worldwide.  No doubt.  We then hold our leaders accountable.  We're in good hands, and shiuld they falter, we seize on that s***.  I'm sick of long-term prognosticating.  We're not equipped to do that.

If AN took over the A's, we'd win the division every year.  Anyone doubt that?  Speak up.

Drunken Socialism reigns supreme.  Always has, always will.

Poll

a's

58%

row vs wade

54 votes

41%

fuck them

39 votes

93 votes | Poll has closed

Eventually I'm going to catch up to the Super Bowls...only 37 more entries to go.  If I can make these drunken posts on frigid Feburary nights, than it's surely attainable...by May.  Or perhaps by the middle of March if I dedicate myself to making it a daily routine (neither a bad idea nor out of the realm of possibility...)

American football.  So excting.  So exciting that...it had me asleep by halftime.  Not even the artist fomerly known as...could awaken me from my slumber.  That guy's really really overrated, too.  Unless it's the Bills or has fantasy implicationas, I can't watch the NFL anymore.  It's so generic, so predictable, so antiseptic, if my mind is functioning well enough to use that word properly.  Coaches gameplan 18 hours a day 365 days a year to basically achieve a stalemate.  Even the most exciting athletes in the league (Reggie Bush, Vick, Vince Young, Steve Smith) aren't that exciting to watch because the context in which they perform is so fucking...contrived.  What we're really watching is a bunch of coordinators with laminated playsheets covering their mouths shouting the same shit into Motorola headsets, which has been dissected to death by their opponents in the week prior to he game...I'm sorry, but the NFL has nothing to offer me anymore.  It doesn't excite me.  I've seen it all.  

Back to the real national pastime.  Is it just me, or does the "collective consciousness" of AN gain ground on Billy Beane with each passing interview?  I feel as though this may be the one where we have actually surpassed him in our astuteness and savvy.  Derspite his acknowledged ability to adapt to an ever-changing market, he's still clinging to philosophies that really serve as crutches: it's only my job to get us to the playoffs, I can only exert so much control, the manager can only exert so much control, etc.  He was a visionary at a time, but his time may have passed.  Now, he's stuck in a mindset that may render him average in a couple years' time, maybe more if GM's continue to exhibit the glaring idiocy that they have to this point.  Basically, he's not willing to re-evaulate and further refine/perfect his stances on the minute aspects of the game that he could exert further control over...like in a short series.  He might need to cede some control, because he's obviously not going to make that change willingly.  Has he never seen a fucking WinExp graph?  He certainly can handle the long term, but the short term...he acts as if there's NO way to affect the outcome from a managerial standpoint.  That pisses me off, and strikes me as ignorance.

Poll

Who's the best choice for the Super Bowl Halftime Show

52%

Prince

13 votes

8%

"the greatest rock and roll band of all time"

2 votes

12%

Paul McCartney

3 votes

28%

Janet Jackson without a five second delay

7 votes

25 votes | Poll has closed

I am currently writing in the intro copy.  Why it is referred to as such, I have no idea.  I would like some clarification.  Anyway.  Someone just IM'ed me with an Erstad-related link, and the comment "the A's are due for a 75-90 type season".  Here's why this person should go fuck himself.  First off, no major league team plays 165 games.  Tiebreakers are not best of three series; that's the only way you're getting 165.  And 75-90...the Yankees would have to go 152-10, and the Tigers 151-11, to have the A's be in contention at 73-89 or 74-88.  

Second, all my non-A's-fans friends (which is to say, everyone), is anxiously awaiting a slip-up by the near-perfect squad I (and you) root for.  Geographically, I'm in Yankees/Red Sox/rare miscellaneous AL East team fan territory, so as you can imagine, frustration is abounding.  Meanwhile, the one thing I can count on in my life, above everything else, is the A's being in contention, no matter what names comprise the 25-man/40-man/bottom-5-caliber-non-40-man rosters.  I can see where jealousy may arise.  But these people should know better than to try to pounce on a certain signing that even 95% of us faithful diehards are questioning.  As I pointed out last thread, the most plausible explanation, for me, is that Kotsay will now be shopped, perhaps to the White Sox for Danks (that was a completely unfounded guess).  

Ok, finally, here's what I think.  I think, as currenlty constructed, the A's are not a 75-win team, but perhaps a .500 team.  We need more to compete this year.  The Angels, for all their managerial ineptitude, are probably ten games better than us right now.  The Rangers are about equal, and the Mariners are one good move away from being able to say the same.  Let's face reailty here.  We need to gamble to compete this year.  To me, that means starting Gaudin, trading a starting pitcher + Kotsay for hitting, and reshuffling a bit.  Although last diary I somberly called for an end to Mets' trade rumours, I feel like seeing a bunch of reasonable but completely groundless rumours in this diary.  I'll start: Kotsay, Kiko, Kennedy, Kurt (Suzuki) for Johnny Damon.  Gamble on Gaudin, and let the rotation sort itself out by the end of May.      

I had about a paragraph of criticism for "The Scarlet Letter" prepared, until a pop-up arose and demolished it.  I have no ability nor the will to reconstruct it, so I will leave it at this: Nathaniel Hawthorne is the most overrated and overread American author of fiction this side of Papa.  Maybe Hemingway included, even.  That book for which he is known...yeah, it should not be on high school reading lists across this Every Child Left Behind nation...no one understands the historical significance of that classic, and I would dare say it's not worth the effort to understand.  For high schoolers anyway.  Alright, I re-created some semblance of a paragrapgh of criticism of the aformentioned one-hit wonder of fiction, which I did not even intend to do.  the first version was better, but this was decent given the frustration of losing solid prose to a fucking random pop-up.  

I am currently listening to the song "Dogs" by Pink Floyd, off their Animals album.  Sorry Nico, no "Ponies", only Dogs, Pigs (three kinds), and Sheep.  Phenomenal album, best Floyd in my opinion.  "Dogs" is 17 minutes, so beware those with ADHD.  Recommended to everyone else.  Kind of elaborates on the Orwell "Animal Farm" allegory, or at least relates to it...which, as a work of fiction that may appear on high school reading lists, is about ten times as worthy as "The Scarlet Letter."  Puritans no longer exist, if the Mennonites are ignored, while totalitarians, or derivations thereof, do, so...Animal Farm and 1984 live on.  Hawthorne, you can try to resurrect your collectivist utopia all you want, but I will in Orwellian Democratic Socialist spirit repudiate you.

Ok, to the A's.  Erstad bewilders me.  I've put some thought into this, and I really am perplexed.  I want to see how this plays out.  I really think there's a likelihood that he starts in the OF and DJ sits...and also a likelihood that Kotsay is traded, which no one has mentioned.  I think Beane may very well see Erstad as a "Kotsay-replacement-player" for 1/7 the cost, or so, and then will shop his shell of his former self for prospects.  If he does that, and lets Erstad replicate Kotsay's production for a fraction of the cost, it's ingenius.  No two ways about it, if he does that, then Beane's done a phenomenal job.  But if anything else is driving this signing, pure depth included, then I am not a fan.  

So I've gone out drinking 6 of the past 9 nights.  Am I an alcoholic...maybe we'll poll this.

Ok, next topic, as Max Kellerman once said on Around the Horn.  Mets' trade rumours (British spelling because it's so sweet)...let's let them die down, until there's reason to let them be resurrected.  Beane and Minaya, though at opposite ends of the spectrum for GMing ability, are both among the few most active GM's in the league, transaction-wise, so naturally these rumours will surface.  But let's not feed the NYC media machine.  There's just as good of a chance that Beane makes a trade with the Indians as there is that he trades with the Mets, in my opinion.  Definitely don't see Lastings starting 2007 as a teammate of Barton's in Sac, giving the Oakland offense a run for their money.

Beckham to LA...awesome.  I will see him in Columbus as soon as the schedule is released.

I am going to write a book, of the science fiction genre.  I am also about to help launch a massive Internet endeavor that my friend and fellow visionary dreamt up.  Keep an eye out for further details.  Sobriety tends to aid the delivery of such details.  For now, all I will say is that my book's underlying premise is quite depressing.  Hester Prynne symapthists may, irnoically enough, be drawn to it, heh.

Go Oakland.  Listen to Animals by Floyd.  Way better than Dark Side or even The Wall.

Poll

who's the best front page writer?

4%

louismg

3 votes

22%

monkeyball (though he has yet to submit a front page entry)

14 votes

15%

Blez

10 votes

14%

Cutthemullet, should he be promoted

9 votes

20%

Nico

13 votes

3%

other, explain below

2 votes

9%

BBG

6 votes

9%

too controversial.

6 votes

63 votes | Poll has closed

Writing about actual dreams, as opposed to inspirational visions of the MLK variety, is not the most masculine activity to undertake, but I'm going to fearlessly proceed.

Rarely do I remember a dream after waking up.  If I consumed any significant amount of the, um, "drugs" I consume on a semi-regular/regular basis (caffeine, nicotine, alcohol; with my tolerance level, basically a milligram of any of those is significant...6 foot 1 and a buck fifty, I guess you can call me a lightweight), then there's a much greater chance that I'll remember a dream.  If I don't indulge in any sleep-altering substances soon before sleep, though, the chances of remembering a dream are slim to none.  And if I have one, it's probably going to involve people that I'm close to, or wish I was close to, heh.

But today, December 12th 2006, I had a dream about the Oakland A's.  This has never happened before.  I don't claim to be any expert in the area of the subconscious, but still, I'm wondering why, of all times, I dreamt about the A's now.  Sure, I was on AN last night, made a few posts, but that's kind of a regular occurrence.  I did sleep excessively (over 12 hours...I don't have responsibilities), so that's more REM sleep, more potential dreams...

Anyway.  All I really wanted to do was share the absurd nature of the dream (more absurd than having the dream itself).  What I first remember is seeing Swisher drive in a couple runs, adding to a huge A's lead.  As always as an NRAF, i was watching Memorex-style, not live.  I don't know who the opponents were; it's a dream, so we'll say that it was the both the Angels and the Yankees, combining forces to try to keep their mutual pesky, low-payroll nemesis out of the playoffs.  Yes, it was definitely a cross between those two teams.  And it was the 163rd game of the year, playoff berth on the line...  

Ok, so the circumstances weren't clear, but I only got a brief glimpse of the game action anyway.  Then I was transported to a large, seemingly living box score (this should be listed as a side effect of reading the book "The Game of Numbers" by Alan Schwarz, which I'm in the process of doing right now), which had the familiar (for me) Yahoo format.  I saw the score was A's Lots, Opponents Few, and I was happy.  I excitedly scrolled down the box score, which apparently by now had been deprived of its life and shrunk to its conventional size on my computer monitor, to see who had done the damage during the part of the game I missed.  First, I checked the heart of the order, only to be surprised that there was no production there...nothing out of Chavez and Crosby (yes, the latter was in the heart of the order in my dream).  Wow, lots of runs scored for there to have been hitless games by the key guys.  Then I saw a couple names who had ridiculous numbers in the RBI column, I think like 7 for the first guy: Scott Spiezio and Bobby Kielty.  Even subconsciously I knew this was strange: Spiezio?!  He's on the 2007 A's?  Beane must have been desperate to fill out the roster.  Kielty had a huge game, finally?  Fuck yeah.  Basically the box score was overflowing with crooked numbers around the abyss of Chavez and Crosby; the 7 other guys had had huge games.  I didn't find out who most of the names were; but that's only right, isn't it?  There's a lot of time before the season starts, and the status quo never lasts long in Oakland.    

Poll

Horacio Ramirez

100%

Sucks (lifted from LL)

11 votes

11 votes | Poll has closed

The time has come, the song is over, thought I'd somthing more to say...

I am going to try to create the most non-sensical diary every written here.  With members like Mychael Urban to our credit, that may be too difficult a feat for me to accomplish but I'm still going to make an attempt.

The A's are going to win the World Series this year.  The probably now defunct Blue Ribbon Panel is going to interrupt the World Series in the middle of Game 3 and award the honor to the A's, out of respect for their overcoming financial advrsity.

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FUCK THE ORIOLES

Title translated into comprehensible unabbreivated form, for those who need it (probably no one needs it more than me, who just feels the need to begin this way): Off Topic: Opinions on Terrell Owens.  Not to be confused with what the Old Testament would have to say about Terrell Owens ("thou shalt not bear false witness..." (against thy neighbor?  think so.  anyway...)).  Or people's opinions on bringing time-outs into baseball or something.  The title needed to be presented that way though, because "OT" is prevalent Internet parlance; "TO" is a nickname deemed acceptable by even the most conservative of pundits; and, last but certainly not least, it makes for something of a half-palindrome.

Ok, so at around 12:30 PM EST I got home from an especially long 3-hour day of sleeping/listening to The Killers in classes (one of my few CD's that I don't have the urge to listen to at full volume; thus I can listen to it and a lecture simultaneously if I feel like it...or fall asleep to it in this case).  I unwrapped my chicken fajita, bought from the Buffalo-area chain that's sure to conquer the country as Buffalo wings did years earlier, Mighty Taco, and turned on the computer.  I planned on heading to AN to make some celebratory posts about the A's clinching that I hadn't gotten around to making last night after the final out was recorded (pretty much passed out right after that 54th out...but I wouldn't have been able to sleep without knowing FOR SURE that Gaudin had not allowed O'Flaherty, Adam Jones, and all the other late-inning M's substitutions to make an 11-run rally in the bottom of the 9th), but I decided to make a pit stop at Yahoo(!) to check on my the four fantasy football teams that I obsess over (they have lost, cumulatively, only 2 of 12 games so far...do those numbers look familiar?).  On Monday and Tuesday I tend to spend an indisputably geek-level amount of time analyzing those 4 teams and those of my opponents, making posts on the league message boards calling out my friends' teams and/or bragging about mine, staring proudly at Eli Manning's 3 garbage-time TD's that saved two of my teams this past week, etc.  Fantasy football gets me through the early week in the fall...which is why the early week in the winter/spring really sucks.  Snowfall doesn't really quite fill the void for me.

Anyway, no matter how focused I am on fantasy football, I can never make my way beyond the Yahoo homepage without at least glancing at the headlines (one can see the pattern developing here...getting sidetracked countless times until I've been online 4 hours and haven't visited the site I intended to visit when I logged on.  It's a microcosm of life, really.)  There are certain days when I can proceed unobstructed to my Yahoo destination, usually when the headlines are dominated by foreign affairs that I've sadly become somewhat desensitized to.  Alas, today was most definitely not one of those days...not only was the lead headline sports-related, but it...at the same time wasn't sports-related: a professional athlete had reportedly attempted to commit suicide.  And when I saw just which particular professional athlete it was, I knew right away this story was going to dominate most of my day.

I will now interrupt myself to cite the infamous Stalin quote: "The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic."

How is it that thousands upon thousands of people die, nationally and in other nations, every day from preventable diseases ranging from malnutrition to warfare (yes, I consider war both "preventable" and a "disease", a social one of course, but no less of a disease than malaria or AIDS...) and it fails to leave much of an impression on me, yet a multimillionaire athlete and celebrity who sports an ego even larger than his paycheck can capture my attention and sympathy so easily?  I feel guilty that I don't feel guilty more often, or at the wrong times.  

Back to TO.  As I sit there on my couch during a beautiful afternoon watching ESPN trot out a seemingly endless procession of football analysts posing as amateur psychologists for the day, I was overwhelmed by a single thought: would it ever dawn on anyone associated with the Worldwide Leader in Sports that if these reports had the slightest bit of truth to them, where TO hadn't in fact ingested an extra "two or three" painkillers but rather an extra thirty-five, or twenty-five, or whatever amount would have compelled his publicist to try to pry pills out of his mouth, then they might bear some responsibility?    

Everyone needs a new paragraph after that long of a sentence.  If its intent was lost amidst all the commas and clauses, well, it was a complex sentence designed to boil down to a single word: Irony.  That the media focus helped create the TO version 2006 we have with us today, and that the only question it wouldn't ponder during all the time spent making half-assed speculations and assumptions is, what part in all this did we (the media) play?  If TO did try to kill himself, and if he had, god forbid, succeeded, how much did we contribute to his demise?  What kind of damage does constant glorification of a tortured psyche that craves attention like a junkie craves a fix ultimately inflict?  What kind of responsibility is borne by the collective members of a group that recognize a man's need for help and whose actions drive the man to need help even more, yet they continue on the same path?

Add the answers to those questions to the list of things we don't know about this incident, Bob Ley.  They're a bit more important than whether or not the Dallas police is automatically dispatched with the paramedics.  I can live without knowing procedural minutiae; what I want is some reflection.

Go A's.  Win the World Series, beat the odds.

Go TO.  Win peace of mind, beat the odds.

Now that it's been brought to my attention that oaktoon has officially asked for his leave from AN, I feel as though I can, and should, step up my diary output to offset his absence.  Problem is, oaktoon managed to (apparently) stay sober into the wee hours of the night, whereas I typically do not.  So, apologies if this is becoming trite (say that out loud after "wee hours of the night"...yeah, there's my poetic interlude, right there), but here's essentially Drunk Diarying Pt. II....

Let's start with Esteban Loaiza.  No longer is he Estebanned...ha, ha.  In an intoxicated state, one recognizes the similarities his last name has to "azalea".  What that means in the grand scheme of things, I can only wonder.  But what is apparent is that his flower is blooming, 2004-style (or was it 2003?), at just the right time for this team.  Harden or no Harden, if Loaiza continues this sort of domination (basically, if he remembers how to throw a baseball 92 MPH as opposed to 85), this is a playoff team, and a legitimate contender at that.  My no show in Toronto notwithstanding, I say that with confidence, and I salute him with a shot of Cuervo...from the backseat of a Yellow Cab Company car.  My used Ferrari has yet to arrive; apparently autofinder.com is much more reliable for lime green hatchbacks than exotic sports cars.

Next on the agenda of praise is Mark Ellis, or whatever initials you choose to identify him by.  Unsure as I was about Loaiza's year of dominance, I know for a fact that Ellis' career year was but one year ago, and he's finally resembling the player that carried us in '05.  If he can produce at a ~.850 OPS clip, I don't care if we play Crosby, Scutaro, Perez, or one of our many unsigned 2006 draft picks at SS, this team will score runs, despite Gerald Perry's best efforts to create 9 clones of himself.  To this point, at least Frank Thomas has resisted the brainwashing of mediocrity, and if Ellis follows his lead, it will be as though John Mabry was brought in to provide a temporary jolt as a hitting instructor.  Or something similarly motivating.

Then there's Kirk Saarloos, the guy who John Rheinecker wishes he could be.  That is to say, the guy whose WHIP is higher than his ERA, consistently.  The guy's penchant for inducing double plays is uncanny, probably leaves Forst, Zaidi and company scratching their heads, or breaking computer hard drives out of pure elation.  He's the pitching equivalent of Scutaro, or even Byrnes, the one the front office will always force to prove himself over others, and rightfully so, but the one who will indeed perform better than his raw ability would suggest.

Then the unsung hero of the 25-man roster: JFK, Joe Fucking Kennedy.  Has he given up a run since he got healthy?  This guy could LOOGY us right past Giambi and vault us right into the Series...ok, let's not get ahead of ourselves.  Let's take care of Teixeira and Blalock first, this weekend, and try not to let Texas dismantle us again.  14 is a perfectly acceptable score to give up in 7-on-7 football, not the rubber match of a baseball series.  (Speaking of "rubber match", try this on for size...heh...see how many people you know are acquainted with this expression.  Just recently, I was playing pool, and the people I was with wanted to leave.  When I protested it was the "rubber match", no one knew what I was talking about...they thought a box full of Durexes was at stake...I will do my best to ensure this expression does not become archaic.  Normally I am anti-cliche, but in this case, well, plastics can only make so many things possible.)

That's it for now, more to come later, if I feel like it.  

Poll

?

23%

.

13 votes

57%

!

32 votes

19%

?

11 votes

56 votes | Poll has closed

caution: the title indicates what you shall find here.  Most likely, many typos, much unrealted nonsensical rambling, and something loosely related to the Oakland Athletics of...Oakland, at the moment.

First off, that title looks way too much like drunk dairying.  As if I've been out milking cows in an inebriated state.  I must say, I have engaged in no such activities.  I live in a relatively rural area, but the most common signs of wildlife around here are deer, not cows.  That's about 7-8 miles further down the road, away from Buffalo, towards the notorious Attica state prison.

Yeah, so, I should go to the Toronto game tomorrow, seeing as I have nothing on my schedule besides repeating what I did today (sleep till 4, lie around till 9, go out till 1), but due to my panic disorder, driving on the fucking QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way, Ontario's major expressway...remember, Canada was a British commonwealth till, uh, last year) is not advisable.  It's practically the Audubon; of all the times I've been on it, I've never seen a single Provincial cop enforce the ~100 km/hr limit (the burden of conversion to our backwards system is on you, purists...heh).  Hard to do so when you're on a horse anyway, I don't care if it's a rehabilitated, uh, whatever that horse's name was that won the Derby this year...I know it begins with an "S", but my mind is blank after Secretatriat.  I hate any sports that incorporate animals.  Not because I'm a hardcore PETA member, but because they bore the hell out of me.  Political correctness be damned, women's sports bore me most of the time as well, I must concede.  Revoke Title IX! (joking...wouldn't go that far...there are some hot softball players...and any woman who can dunk a basketball causes me to feel a temporary sense of castration.)

Anyway, I could get a friend to go, and consequently drive, but it's a Wednesday, and they all work, unlike this degenerate gambler/alcoholic/pesudo-intellectual.  Why isn't hitchhiking a viable option anymore?  I think I'm going to hitchhike to Toronto, and turn back the clock about thirty years, or roughly when the Blue Jays were a mere expansion team.  Hopefully, they will play as such tomorrow, letting the A's take the crucial 3rd game as the Red Sox continue their free fall against our divisional rivals that insist on making the last series of the year meaningful.  Chacin...when's the last time he pitched, April?  The A's shall beat him like a pinata, or a Pineiro, whichever you prefer.  E-Lo will continue to lo-er that ERA and all the peripherals, and then promptly drag race on the aforementioned QEW...believe me, 130 MPH is no good there.  Former world class sprinter Donovan Bailey did a lot higher than that like 5 years back (160?  170?), and even when I make the like 30 km trek to Niagara Falls, I always witness some moron going triple digits while I set the pace at around 80 MPH.  

Jason Kendall...is not the man.  Frank Thomas is the man.  Best. Investment. Ever.  Maybe one-year incentive-laden deals don't qualify as "investments", but I will count him as such.  Where the hell would our offense be without the Hurt?  Compy75, this is where you provide the answer to that rhetorical question, the FT specialist that you are.  Jason Kendall, while being a very respectable human being and hard-nosed baseball player, is not worth 22 Frank Thomases.  Ha.  

So for anyone who's at the Rogers Centre tomorrow, Athletics Fan and Runner, bigelephant, the dude from Buffalo who went to Bonaventure, I hope to join you.  If not, well, I'll probably repeat what I did today and be a repeat drunk diarying offender...haul me off to San Quentin, fine, but arrange a Metallica concert first.        

Poll

Is Drunk Diarying a hazard to others on a blog?

25%

yes

16 votes

75%

no

48 votes

64 votes | Poll has closed

It seems as though the Mariners' pitching must have seen Romney on deck quite a bit tonight...10 walks!  But the 9 Romneys we frequently send out on offense (ok, to be fair, usually more like 5 Romneys, I'll exclude Thomas, Bradley, Swish, and a healthy Chavez) brought tears to the eyes of the [Athletics] Nation today, by also collecting 15 hits and driving in 11 runs.  What a feel-good story for the major league franchise that best resembles the Make A Wish foundation.  Witasick and Sauerbeck showed what a dominant one-two punch they can be if you spot them an 8-run lead, keep them sober, and give them shoes that fit.  Saarloos' DP/IP ratio must be near the league lead, at least for the last 2 seasons combined...next time Calero comes into the ninth with a 9 RUN lead, put the third deck tarp on the field.  I'm sure many more Mariners will be petitioning to get on the bereavement list after this embarassment.  There may be no 20-game streak this year, but I sure do smell 18 against a certain opponent.  The Seattle owners should send free Nintendo Game Cubes for every A after this season out of respect/humiliation...and then the A's could return them to sender, with a note that they're about 5 stops behind fellow Seattlers (?) Microsoft and fellow Japanese Sony (yes, they are simultaneously both fellow Seattlers, if that's a word, and fellow Japanese...citizenship & location of team) as far video game systems go.  Maybe they could also include some Atari systems for the Mariners and include a message that they should look into rebuilding around guys who can only afford those, seeing as the Sony PSP and XBox360-level salaries have been a disaster.

Yeah, this team rocks.  I am feeling the gelling of a championship contender, finally.  Go A's!

Poll

which video game system best resembles the A's?

0%

XBox360

0 votes

16%

Nintendo Wiiiiii (I don't know, the tendency to add iii's to this name makes me think LAAAAAA, but whatever)

3 votes

55%

are you seriously asking this question?

10 votes

27%

old-school PlayStation

5 votes

18 votes | Poll has closed

I was going to post this under "Cliches I" aka "Light-hitting Marco Scutaro" by Reg, but, well, I haven't posted a diary in a while.  

first, I think it's kind of weird/prophetic that Nobody Girl posted "flirted with a no-hitter" this afternoon in Reg's diary, about 6 hours before Carlos Zambrano took a no-hitter into the 8th inning against the Astros, who may be forced to call up both Clemenses at the rate they're going right now.  Point is, guys don't flirt with no-hitters all that often.  Maybe it's the Venezuelan connection between Scutaro and Zambrano, I don't know...also, Zambrano hit a HR today, so, like Bronson Arroyo, he's a pitcher you can't call "light-hitting."  But you can say he "supported his own cause" by hitting that HR, which is a cliche I hate.  Basically, you could say any guy in the lineup supports their own cause when they get a hit because it takes some pressure off them when they're in the field, not to mention the fact that it helps them keep their job/spot in the everyday lineup, but the cliche is only used in reference to the pitcher, making it that much more annoying.

Others:

"it's a long season" (no shit; at least twice as long as any other American professional season in fact)

"it's anybody's ballgame" (no, actually, it's only for the two teams competing on the field.  No one in the audience can bring home a major league win to go home with his souvenir batting helmet; neither can any of the other 28 major league teams not participating in this particular game.  So really, it's far from anybody's ballgame.)

"he's 'sitting' on pitch X"...I challenge any major leaguer to try and take this cliche literally in a fastball count against anyone other than Esteban Loaiza, Tim Wakefield, or Jamie Moyer.  Kendall may be the only volunteer.
"he has the green light" (whether for a hitter on a 3-0 count or a baserunner.  Being an A's fan really makes me dislike this one, because we all know it's only going to be said about the opposition.  No A is swinging at a 3-0 pitch or considered enough of a threat to steal to warrant an announcer's wasting this cliche on them.  Anyway, I think the only condition for the continued use of this cliche would be if MLB mandated the installation to neon green lights at angles convenient for hitters/basrunners to see.  Seeing as I am currently an unemployed debtor, I nominate myself to be the paid operator of the forthcoming green light at McAfee.

"hitting 'behind' the runner" (like, man on second, less than 2 outs, guy hits to right side of the infield).  Call me crazy, but if a guy's on second and you hit it to the second baseman, I'm pretty sure you're hitting it to the baserunner's side rather than behind him.  Instead of wasting our time with boring groundouts to second base that are mislabeled with a cliche, how about just hitting a liner to center that will drive the in while also being technically behind him as he faces the plate?  Like the green light, the dislike of this cliche is also exacerbated by being an A's fan, because the A's are not about situational hitting.  

"swinging for the fences" (ok, so sometimes guys do indeed take vicious swings and hit weak pop-ups or miss entirely, but the opposite is at least as prevalent, where a guy is most definitely not taking an abnormally hard swing and winds up hitting a HR anyway...where's the cliche for that situation.  Double standards are so unfair.)

"double standard"

"lazy fly ball" (I do not like calling into question the work ethic of inanimate objects such as baseballs, even if they have been distinguished by their use in major league games as opposed to any Little League game not being played in Williamsport, PA.)

"the 'A's/Mariners/Rangers/team x' faithful" (if you're sick of saying, uh, "fans", I could come up with several alternatives preferable to "faithful".  Followers.  Supporters.  Loyalists.  Rooters.  I would say Boosters, but I don't like that term either.  Always brings to mind collegiate athletes accepting "gifts" of, you know, cars and houses, the kind of shit you might normally buy an receive in your annual Secret Santa gift exchange.  Sucks for the guys who have to settle for athletic apparel.  Anyway, I think the preceding list could get most announcers through nine innings quite easily, except in the rare instances when the fans have to go on ego trips and steal the spotlight by doing things like getting hit by chairs thrown by opposing relievers.

"spotlight"

I could continue, but I see that I just surpassed one page worth of material on Word with 10-point font; I can hear the paperclip screaming at me to wrap it up.  Props to Reg for starting us off.

Poll

Cliches are...

5%

not worthy of a diary

1 votes

42%

not worthy of 2 diaries

8 votes

5%

useful

1 votes

31%

put the appropriate accent over the "e", then we'll talk

6 votes

10%

annoying

2 votes

5%

fun

1 votes

19 votes | Poll has closed

Wow, ex-A's hitting coach Dave Hudgens sure has wasted no time in his efforts to rival Tom Emanski in the lucrative instructional baseball DVD market:

www.hitting.com (no, not www.davehudgenshitting.com, www.hitting.com, who immediately hooked this guy up with such a prestigious URL)

Looks like some A's players are in need of a reminder that we're not selling DVD's here.  In the meantime, Chavez has accepted the role of Fred McGriff for Hudgens; someone needs to find him before Spring Training and give him the official instuctional DVD uniform of generic blue mesh hat and ugly, tight-fitting, Little League-style blue jersey, preferably with a sponsor's name on the front (my old MailBoxes Etc jersey would be perfect if it wasn't fit for a skinny 10-year-old).  

Hudgens has also appealed to the foolshgame22 market with the inclusion of an Eric Byrnes testimonial; what Byrnes should have said was "Dave Hudgens' hitting techniques are so effective that I still can't hit the pitches that gave me trouble in my rookie year.  So, if you want to improve your game to the point where your team's general manager can finally convince another team to take you off his hands, buy my companion DVD, featuring the testimonials of several international soccer stars, "How to Dive Successfully."  

The only way this venture could possibly improve would be if Ken Macha were to get involved...the instructional possibilities are endless there.  Macha could cover everything from karate to poker faces to gum-chewing to challenging authority...all of a sudden, erstwhile 2005 A's coaches are giving you a helping hand through all aspects of life.  I'm placing my order now.

Poll

What results should Dave Hudgens promise potential customers?

16%

late 2005 Mark Ellis

5 votes

51%

end of 2005 Dave Hudgens

16 votes

32%

early 2005 Jason Kendall

10 votes

31 votes | Poll has closed

Beane and Macha probably have too good of a friendship for Beane to do this, but I don't think there's any better action to take than to immediately enter 2006 mode.  Treat Wednesday's game as if it is Opening Day for a season where the expectations, for the organization and the fans, will be higher than they were for this one.  Shut down Harden.  Shut down Crosby.  Shut down Chavez.  Shut down Kotsay.  Show Hatteberg where his office is located.  Let Kendall play out the string a) because he hasn't earned the right to be shut down, b) because he wouldn't want to be shut down, and c) so he can hopefully create some positive momentum to take into the winter, when he'd better be training more rigorously than he ever has.  

But most importantly, we've reached the perfect time to carry out the official directive of Athletics Nation: FIRE MACHA NOW.  Let the now-2006 A's acclimate to their 2006 manager, Bob Geren.  Immediately dispel any distracting managerial rumors involving high-profile names like Piniella.  Tell Wash he's going to remain the best infield coach in major league baseball, assuming the Marlins, Orioles, Devil Rays, perhaps the Dodgers, or any other team with a managerial vacancy to fill this winter doesn't make him an offer.  Let Macha retreat to his beloved Pittsburgh early, so he can get a head-start on managing the 2006 Pirates.  Let him be re-united with Mark Redman, and may they have many happy 70-92ish seasons together.  

See, this entire season, I got the impression that BB's office furniture was safe, regardless of whether or not the league record for double plays was in jeopardy (seriously, is there a more frustrating play to watch in baseball than a GIDP?  MAYBE an infielder booting a ground ball, but the A's didn't have too much of that...).  Sure, re-loading, not rebuilding, try to win every year, "hell yeah!  I think we'll win the division" from Huckaby...I think it's safe to say the front office was more optimistic about 2005 than Eric Chavez was.  But it seemed like a low-key year, unusually so given the personality of the GM.  This was the year for Billy to sit back, watch the kids play, and figure out where he stood (which he usually tries to accomplish within the first third of the season).  Contention was expected, a World Series was not.  

But 2006 should, and almost undoubtedly will, be different.  Which, as a fan, excites me a little bit more.  Even if Zito is traded over the winter, Beane will by no means be content to be passive during the upcoming year.  The long-term plan, to which he seems to adhere maybe to a fault, calls for the next step to be taken in 2006, and the pressure to execute the plan should manifest itself in more aggressive management by Beane, more involvement...in everything, and I anticipate a trickle-down effect all the way to the field.  Rather than having to, say, coax a slow-starting rookie with a steady diet of reassurances, BB can challenge a certain underachieving now-second-year corner outfielder, if the need arises.  He can supplement the core without having to worry about the core itself.  And he can continue to dictate the strategy onfield via a "middle manager" who probably won't get in the way as much as this one has.  So, FIRE MACHA NOW, and let's usher in 2006 at this very moment.

Message from a Starbucks coffee purchased not more than 10 minutes ago (as soon as I read it, I sped across campus to the library to report it to the people who'd appreciate my horror):

"The Way I See It #63" (you mean, they only went through 62 other messages before they had to resort to this...?)

"Our lives are inspired by the dreams we have from the earliest stages of our youth.  When you combine passion and hard work, then success is always possible.  While no road is ever straight, dedication and persistence will always lead you to your dreams."

--Arte Moreno [NO...WHAT THE F*CK]
(caption beneath to explain why Arte's relevant the metrosexual regulars who somehow may have avoided ESPN Arte Moreno exposure during last season:) "In 2003, he became the first Hispanic owner of a major league baseball team."

Yeah, Arte, we all grow up with dreams to monopolize the American billboard, err, "outdoor advertising", industry, don't we.  I'm sure the "earliest stages of your youth" were filled with grandiose visions of yourself littering the landscape nationwide with Marlboro ads AND thetruth.com-style anti-smoking ads...let the youth smoking debate rage, it made Arte a billionaire.  So why is Starbuck's, a Seattle company, endorsing an AL West rival?  Your guess is as good as mine.

I'm sick of all these 2006 diaries.  I haven't even read most of them, but their mere presence on the right side of my monitor implies a loss of hope for '05.  Well, rightfully so, I say.  The A's are going to get shut out for every game for the next ten years.  Since we have to accept the upcoming decade of futility, let's look ahead to ever-so-slightly greener pastures, the 2015 OakVegas A's:

--The huge dead money contracts of Matt Watson and Charles Thomas are off the books, freeing up a whopping $40 million to throw at at least one free agent over the 2014-2015 offseason.

--Rickey Henderson, inspired by the example set by Octavio Dotel nine years back, is looking to play for free...he doesn't have any free space left in his pad to use for hanging up checks, anyway.

--The team will play exactly half its home games in Oakland (by now, the teams play a 200-game schedule, thus eliminating the inconvenience of making the A's play 40.5 games in each home city).  Of these, no more than 2 games will be played at the same venue, to the amusement of Al Davis, who for the past 8 years has used his 50% stake in the team to make life as miserable as possible for the A's during their court-upheld mandatory Oakland existence.  So they wander from city park to city park, each in varying states of disrepair, playing the Mariners in front of 55 fans in lawn chairs one night, then the Los Angeles Angels of a Huge Yacht off the Pacific Coast in front of maybe 25 bleacher bums the next.  A's players yearn for the days of Mt. Davis and the minefield-quality turf of September baseball in the Coliseum.

As has been custom since 2010, however, the other half of the home games will be played in a penthouse diamond on the 72nd (in honor of year of the beginning of the threepeat) floor of Steve Wynn's latest contribution to the apocalypse movement, The Elephant, which dwarfs all his previous creations along the Las Vegas Strip, including his recently constructed (as in, recent for 2005, not in 2015) eponymous hotel.  While in Vegas, the rights to the team are controlled by the Maloof brothers, who have the A's play alongside the now-SacVegas Kings on the rooftop of the Elephant for several games in April and May annually.  The only drawback to this extravagant sports multiplex had been that when a home run was hit, the neighboring skyline of New York, NY was often not expansive enough to prevent the ball from dropping on passers-by below.  If a penny dropped off the top of the Empire State Building is potentially deadly, you can imagine the gruesome spectacle that resulted whenever Adam Dunn, Daric Barton, Miguel Cabrera, and the rest of the legendary 2011 Yankees came to town.  But by 2015 this minor glitch had been corrected: not by architectural means; the last thing Steve Wynn wanted awestruck tourists to do was gawk at hideous netting on top of the hottest property in Sin City, so he fixed it with the early third millennium-era A's in mind: he petitioned Commissioner Epstein with the signatures of everyone with ties to organized crime in Vegas (including Mayor Oscar Goodman, who'd been elected to a lifetime term in 2010) to have Billy Beane reinstated to MLB (Beane had been banned in 2007 for allegedly demolishing the Metrodome with a single chair-throw, although cynics suspect that Twins' GM Terry Ryan had set Beane up out of envy for having more small-market success).  Beane, comfortably surrounded by championship trophies in his office as GM of the Orix Blue Wave, refuses, but recommends assistant Scott Hatteberg for the job.  Rather than blowing the $40 million on Delmon Young, the Draft Pickin' Machine scatters his allotted $40 million windfall on an assortment of undervalued pitchers and Torii Hunter-type home run stealers, thus resulting in a dramatic drop in deaths for the drug dealers and deadbeat dads below.  The A's do not make the playoffs in 2015, but they are once again loaded for a run in 2016.

Poll

Do you look forward to the days of the 2015 OakVegas A's?

43%

Definitely, splash home runs will be so unexciting compared to all this

13 votes

20%

We'll cross that bridge when we get there

6 votes

36%

Nah, call me a purist, but I can't even entertain these thoughts

11 votes

30 votes | Poll has closed

I just walked in to the house, involuntarily reached for the remote to get my nightly fix of the Bottom Line, and what's the first thing I see?  "Red Sox designate 2B Mark Bellhorn for assignment."  If there was ever one player over the few years who I felt was destined to become an Oakland A (even if he had already been an A), it was Bellhorn.  Here's our chance to make that happen.

Let's start off by acknowledging the obvious drawback of acquiring the guy who just lost his job to Tony Graffanino (as if that isn't enough of a drawback in and of itself): if Kevin Youkilis is the Greek God of Walks, then soon to be former, eh, organizationmate (Youkilis is still toiling in AAA for the most part) Mark Bellhorn is the leading candidate to earn the designation of Greek God of Strikeouts.  Not exactly consistent with the 2005 Oakland Put the Ball in Plays that we've been witnessing to this point in the season.  Add the A's surplus of second basemen, one of whom happens to be our hittest hitter of late, to the gaudy strikeout totals, and Bellhorn may not seem to make a whole lot of sense.

But I'm going to argue exactly the opposite.  First off, anything to change the status quo in which Keith Ginter has a stranglehold on the third-string second baseman's job.  Time for him to go fight for playing time in AAA, if not American Legion.  Second, it may violate the laws of baseball divinity if Bellhorn were to occupy the titles of Greek God Strikeouts and the already claimed Greek God of Walks simultaneously, but he's at least High Priest of Walks-level selective.  He's also the Steve Trachsel of hitters, minus the season-ending injury; if his Pitches per Plate appearance isn't at the top of the league, it has to be near it.  He can hit for some power, too, as he proved to Red Sox Fanbase (sorry, Nation is taken) during the playoffs last year.  Yeah, so, that's not the most compelling argument in the world, but I say we take a flier on Bellhorn and continue to load up on underappreciated Red Sox castoffs.  Hell, maybe the pipeline will even yield Youkilis at some point.  But I'll settle for Mark Bellhorn any day.

Poll

Does Mark Bellhorn make sense for the A's?

20%

Yes

27 votes

43%

No, not at this time

56 votes

35%

No, I don't ever want to see Bellhorn in an A's uniform

46 votes

129 votes | Poll has closed

I was going to post this in one of the existing Dunn diaries, but then I realized that my premise was a notion at least as radical as one that says that the Reds will win the World Series in 2009.  Since resident A's organizational depth chart expert Zonis aka Die Eier Von Satan (ok, so it's some other long title that includes Satan, but since you can't consult other people's signatures while restricted to the solitary confinement of a diary, I hope you won't mind my substituting of the title of a Tool song in which a brownie recipe is recited in German...note to readers: skip over all future parentheticals unless you relish completely random run-on references...anyways) called for a diary of such epic proportions as the logical follow-up to his exhaustive analysis (check the bookshelves of your local library for the latest edition of his trading post), I figured I'd step outside the narrow-minded realm of ill-conceived Gammons plots to restore the Red Sox to AL supremacy and post my ideas in a new diary.  I say 86 years of A's pennants before that happens again, by which time he'll be comfortably seated next to Ted Williams in a cryogenics lab.

I must say 2 things here:

1. With all that buildup, I better come through with some actual ideas, eh?
   
2. For anyone who ever doubted the existence of the so-called runner's high, I think I'm experiencing it at an unprecedented level right now.  At least that's my best attempt to account for what's already been written.

So, as the July 31st Non-Waiver Trade Deadline (let's not forget that the Larry Walkers and Randy Myers of the world, to refer to the prized/unwanted claims of past years, will still be available until August 31st) approaches, I think the A's should take this opportunity to once again shock the people of Bristol University and all other institutions that specialize in the cloning of John Kruk by doing, against all odds, the truly rational thing: being a seller in a seller's market.

<Break to prevent overwhelming of ANers accustomed to reading minimum character-level diaries>

Let me start by offering the three main sources of inspiration for my idea.  

1. BB's enlightening comment that the A's plan on being both buyers and sellers at the deadline.
   
2. Ken Williams having gotten lucky over the offseason and assembled a team that appears to be a World Series contender (more on this later)
   
3. The Evil Empires are vulnerable, a sub-.500 team could win a division, something like 22 of 30 teams are within something like 5 games out of a playoff spot...all these are different ways of saying the samw thing: it seems to be wide open this year.

Granted, I don't think BB foresaw the A's being at 54-45 when he took the middle road, or more accurately, both roads, when describing the A's approach to the deadline a month or more beforehand.  But, knowing that his principles remain uncannily similar whether or not the A's win every game or lose every game, the origin of my idea would be described as follows: #1 planted the seed, #3 provided the necessary context, and #2..should make any A's fan who plans on being alive in 2006 salivate.  In other words, there are many potential prey, but thanks to the improbable circumstances that have conspired to leave the White Sox with the best record in the majors at this time, we know who our real target is.  For an unknown length of time now, my mind has been fixated on three recurring thoughts:

1. Ray Durham for John Adkins.  
   
2. Royce Ring over Nick Swisher.
   
3. Chadford.

The White Shoes must always triumph over the White Sox, Major League Baseball Darwinism at its finest.

Then, occasioanlly, a fourth thought enters my mind, a little less vividly then the other two:

Carlos Lee for Scott Podsednik.  

Even Milwaukee can triumph over the White Sox when the conditions are favorable, like in the 2004-2005 offseason, when Ken Williams, on a whim, decided that he was "sick of second place."  Apparently the prospect of fighting it out for third or fourth was more appealing.  But then unforeseeable things happened.  John Garland apparently decided in Ken Williams-esque fashion that he was sick of being a 12-12 pitcher.  The Twins' offense regressed.  The Indians' offense, with the exception of Travis Hafner, regressed.  Magglio went down.  Only the Royals being absolutely horrible went according to plan in the AL Central.  Almost 40 games of beating down on divisional opponents later, only figuratively this season, much to Royals' 1B coach Tom Gamboa's relief, the White Sox think they're poised to give their reformed pacifist fan base something to celebrate.  

This is where the A's come in.  We're here to capitalize on these delusions of a Colored Sock dynasty held by the man who has delusions of being a general manager in the major leagues.  It's time to pull a reverse Fucking A trade, this time one that makes the John Sickels of the world say Fucking A, as opposed to the PTI wannabes.  

Here's what, I think, the White Sox are after:

1. Starting Pitching (They've been mentioned as a possible suitor for Burnett; it appears as though the Jose Contreras Era (say that out loud) may be over, Ozzie Guillen's assessment of him as having the best stuff on the pitching staff notwithstanding)
   
2. Relief Pitching (BBTN thought Wagner to the White Sox could make sense; Mr. Zero couldn't even keep his job longer than Hideo Nomo this year)
   
3. starter for the left side of the infield
   
4. depth

I'm going to save the Chavez for Crede rumors for Chicago sports talk radio.  But I will say this: if there was ever a time to turn Ricardo Rincon and Joe Kennedy into Brandon McCarthy, this is it.  On the surface, this trade makes a lot of sense.  The A's are well aware that the Sox have shown a tendency to gravitate towards relievers with the initials RR in the past, and Kennedy for McCarthy is little more than an exchange of currently anonynomous pitchers burdened by the negative karma of their respective Irish American political namesakes.  

All that time and energy consumed and I arrive at one half-assed trade proposal.  But the specifics is not what matters; I don't know enough about the White Sox prospects to get into the particulars of how we could fleece them.  What matters is that we can fleece them for the future by pulling off a reverse Fucking A trade that could make us even more dominant down the road, and still dominant enough to get by them with ease in the ALDS this year.  

This could have gone under Oaktoon's diary, as it is a response, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use that title.  

Message to Schizophrenic Oaktoon: If W thought John Kerry was a flip-flopper, I can't imagine what he'd say to you.  You went from one extreme to the other in the course of a few weeks, if that.  I remember your very in-depth, position-by-position Baseball Prospectus-style preseason projections of win shares and the like (which I liked) that, on several occasions, had us in the neighborhood of 91-93 wins for this season.  Seeing as my much less developed stance on the team preseason was almost as optimistic, I didn't find any fault with that, but you were probably the single most staunchly optimistic person on this site.  The post-Moneyball A's have always been (for all of three years or whatever) and always will be the darlings of statheads, which is a label I used to think applied to you.  Now, I don't know what label should be used to describe your reincarnation; any ideas?  Ray Ratto?  Joe Morgan, as suggested by Blez?  The seemingly almost forgotten jrbh?  In fact, you can fess up, is this a jrbh plot, have you two conspired to bring ruin to the A's via demoralization of the fan base?  

You have the whole travel day to explain why someone who previously came across as rational could opt for the 180 degree shift on your thoughts of the whole state of the organization as opposed to a moderate adjustment in expectations for this year that most of us are making at this time, 34 games in.  The prayers of the owners of the A's radio station are with you.        

Poll

Should I have thought of a relevant poll question?

35%

Yes

7 votes

65%

No

13 votes

20 votes | Poll has closed

There's a little more than usual at stake with Zito's less than stellar start, in case we forgot the Zito ESPN2 interview played during the A's-Orioles series finale.  Curse of the Charity?  Well, maybe, but only if he was secretly donating based on performance during 2004 as well, one would think. Anyway, inspired the following list of ideas for potential A's charities that would be similarly underfunded:

Erubiel Durazo's Stolen Bases for Troops
Marco Scutaro's Home Runs for Troops
Kirk Saarloos' Strikeouts for Troops
Bobby Kielty's At Bats for Troops
Bobby Crosby's Games Played for Troops

now the reaches; need a gifted/creative statistician to determine the totals of some of these:

Scott Hatteberg's First Pitch Swings for Troops
Eric Chavez's Overt Displays of Intensity for Troops
Eric Byrnes' Taking the Correct Path in the Outfield for Troops
Octavio Dotel's 1-2-3 Innings For Troops
Keiichi Yabu's Meaningful Appearances for Troops
Keith Ginter's Web Gems for Troops

keep 'em coming

I was just browsing through the current 2005 MLB odds at the site I sometimes bet on, and couldn't believe what I saw for the AL West:

Anaheim: 2-5
Texas: 5-1
Seattle: 5-1
Oakland: 7-1

Seattle: 5-1
Oakland: 7-1

Can you believe this?  I know the sportsbook is based in Great Britain, but this lack of baseball knowledge is inexcusable.  Seattle a better bet to win the division than Oakland?  Anaheim THAT MUCH of a favorite?  Unbelieveable.  This site should be banned by the MLB, Pete Rose style.