As the season winds down it seems like a good time to take survey of AN and see how people feel about our manager Bob Geren.  There were a lot of calls for his head earlier this season but as the play of the team has improved this seems to have calmed down.  Should be interesting to see how the community feels about him after almost three years at the helm.

I'll start the discussion by going out on a limb and say I still think he is a pretty good manager and is worth keeping around.  I like the way he has handled the youg starters this year and think he has done a good job with a bullpen full of largely new faces this year.  The line-up has left me with some questions but I tend to feel that he really hasn't had a lot to work with and if given some good quality players he would do a good job.  He was touted for being good at communicating with his players if not with the media and it seems like the team hasn't tuned him out or turned on him yet which has always been my number one qualification in a manager.   After three losing seasons maybe he doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt but I still think he could get the job done.  Of course maybe I am just terrible at judging manager performance so lets turn it over to the community for discussion.

Okay, I will apologize in advance because this is going to be longer than it probably should be and likely poorly formatted but I wanted to try and express an alternate opinion on Bob Geren.

As a disappointing season drags on, the tide of public opinion here on AN has turned overwhelmingly negative in regards to manager Bob Geren.  So being a natural contrarian I decided to take a shot at trying to defend the work he has put in this year.  First I would like to establish my natural bias when evaluating managers.  I tend to believe that the effect the manager has on the outcome of a baseball game is relatively small and so long as the players haven’t appeared to openly mutiny against the manager I don’t tend to concern myself all that much with what he is doing on a day to day basis.  But this doesn’t mean we can’t judge the moves we see the manager make, it is our right as fans to be critical.

In my opinion the two aspects of a manager’s job that most influence the game is filling out the line-up card and managing the bullpen/rotation.  In this fan post I am not ready to take on the task of fully evaluating Geren’s performance so I am going to focus entirely on the issue of bullpen usage.  This topic seems to be popping up a lot recently as proof positive that Geren is a terrible manager so I decided to take a little closer look.

I have been of the wildly unpopular opinion that Geren has actually done a good job managing the bullpen and thought that it was one of his redeeming factors.  He has been put in a very difficult situation as 4 of the A’s starters are rookies and the 5th is a second year guy who spent his first year in the majors moving between the rotation and the bullpen.  Inconsistency and inexperience have limited the innings that the starters have been able to throw and threatened to put a serious strain on the relievers.  The biggest bright spot this season has been the potential shown by our young starters so I would consider protecting their arms to be very important to the future of this team.  That generally means that the bullpen has to take one for the team.

When looking at the usage pattern of the relievers I will focus on six guys; Santiago Casilla, Russ Springer, Craig Breslow, Brad Ziegler, Mike Wuertz, and Andrew Bailey.  These guys have thrown the bulk of the innings from the bullpen as the 7th spot has largely been in flux this season.  As an overview lets look at how many innings these guys have thrown so far this year as well as their ERA:

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Well it finally happened, the A's brought back Frank Thomas and it breaks AN, thanks alot Billy Beane.

Thomas Returns to Oakland

Thomas signed for a pro-rated league minimum contract which checks in at about $337,000.  Even though I am a little concerned about the log-jam at DH, for that price you really can't complain about the signing, it would be stupid not to make it.

To make room Buck has been put on the 15-day DL, and Chavy has been moved to the 60-Day DL.  No one has been let go yet, but more moves will have to come in the future I'm sure.

So, let the celebrations begin and lets see what this server can do!

Still not too much to go on, but with about a week and a half untill the plane takes off for Tokyo I think it's a good time to start making predictions for one of the bigger battles going on right now in Spring Training.  With Rich Harden at least looking like he will start the season, Chad Gaudin ahead of schedule and likely to be ready when the A's first need a 5th starter, and Duke looking good so far it looks like there will be only one spot available in the rotation when the season starts.  With only a few more games to go no one has really jumped out and grabbed the spot, or you could say all the candidates have pitched well enough to still be in consideration.

So it comes down to:

Dana Eveland, Lenny DiNardo, Dallas Braden, Kirk Sarloos, Greg Smith, and Gio Gonzalez

I would put Eveland as the favorite right now, and he has pitched adequately so far but not as good as some of the other contenders.  Gio has impressed me the most in his Cactus league appearances but with no AAA experience he would have to absolutely blow the other contenders out of the water to leap frog to the top and he hasn't done that yet.  I think Braden and DiNardo slot in behind Evelend in the running and have both pitched well, but Braden's poor numbers with the big club last summer and DiNardo's limited "stuff" mean they have to show a little better to take the lead.  Saarloos is pretty much dead in the water in my mind, with 4 righties in the rotation I think the team would rather have a lefty win the last spot and Captain Kirk hasn't out-performed anybody and doesn't have the "up-side" of any of the other contenders.  As for Smith, I don't really know what to think about him other than I think he is destined for Sacramento.

So what do the great minds of AN think?

Just thought I'd put out a diary for those of us who follow the minor league portion of our beloved A's to consolidate info on the newest additions.

So far 13 of the 50 or so draft picks have signed.  The most notable being our 6th round pick Scott Hodsdon, a right handed pitcher from Azusa Pacific, the same school as Jimmy Shull and (I think) Jason Ray.

With short season ball in Vancouver starting up on Tuesday, we should start to see some of these guys playing fairly quickly.  Hodsdon is apparently allready on his way.

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Well, for anyone who is interested in this kind of stuff, most minor league seasons started today.

The A's are off to a promising start as Kane County had the earliest game and managed a 6-3 win.  None of the high-schoolers threw but Trey Shields had a quality start giving up 3 runs over 6 innings.  The lesser known high school draftee from last year Jutin Sellars did play and managed to go 2-4.

The A's double A team in Midland is in action right now and is up 2-1 with Jason Windsor taking on the first leg of Texas' famed DVD trio.  I'm hoping Windsor can do well this year.

AAA Sacramento and A Stockton play later tonite, so if anybody is interested in minor league action we could keep updates going in this thread.