I've been paying close attention to trades for a few years now. And I have to say, rarely if ever have I seen a better match than the Rays and the A's right now. Each team has areas of significant strength and significant weakness. With the exception of outfielders, each team's strength happens to BE the other team's weakness. And both have a number of tradable assets unencumbered by bloated salaries or impending free agency. They really need to get together and make a deal, and I'm here to tell you have.

Warning: This is really long. I tend toward the verbose at the best of times, and the rambling at the worst. If you want the quick and dirty, skip down to the two bolded trade proposals at the bottom of the post.

Continue reading this post »

It's been a while.

You might be thinking, "Paul Thomas? Didn't he swear off the site?" Well, actually, no, not as such. My extended absence has relatively little to do with personal taste and everything to do with the fact that, for the last two-plus months, I've been suffering from a severe case of writer's block. I had this romantic notion that I wouldn't start commenting again until I had published something of at least SOME kind of merit, and so I've been a no-show since late March. In retrospect, that might not have been the best idea, since there's never anything so detrimental to creativity as the knowledge that one MUST be creative in order to get somewhere... frankly, it's started to feel like a bit of an albatross around my neck lately. But I digress.

I just about had a fanpost lined up for when my 30-day "time-out" ended... and then I didn't get it done, and it started to look pointless, and I was starting from scratch again. So I did, and got about halfway through another piece before succumbing to a combination of poor writing, annoyance at my own lack of spreadsheet savvy, and general fatigue. This is my third try. I still have the bits and pieces of the other work. Hopefully they'll come together at some point in the next two months or so.

Instead, I thought I'd leap into the fray with something that I'm pretty confident I know something about-- dollahs. Beaucoup bucks. Etc etc etc. I'm taking the A's' budgets for the next 3 years and taking a stab at turning the ship of state around. Maybe it'll look great and maybe it'll look hopeless-- no way to tell until we start.

This is the last I'll be saying with respect to myself, although ifyou have any burning personal questions, hagiographic odes, and/or suggestions that I perform anatomically unlikely self-abuses, I suppose I'll be hanging around the comments section.

Continue reading this post »

Ed's note: I was too distraught to write up a recap yesterday, and PaulThomas said almost everything I was going to say in the following post.  Monty agrees with Paul and me; here's a quote from the CoCo Times:

"They shoot 70 percent in the second half and we shoot 27 (percent). I think that's the tale of the game. It's no more complex than that."

Cal now needs to win AT LEAST one more regular season game, and Thursday night's game against USC seems like the time to do it.  Hopefully we will not look back on a season sweep to 7th place OSU as the reason we were kept out of the tournament.  - CBKWit

People do still use that for sunburns, right?

I couldn't help but look at the stats from today's game, because I didn't feel like the Bears had played all that badly. And, turns out, they didn't.

Let's toss out the two ridiculous Randle heaves at the end of the game (although he's capable of hitting those). Other than those two shots, Cal took 50 shots in the game and made 17 of them. On the season, Cal's shooting percentage is very near 50%-- but let's call it 48% for ease of handling. That means Cal should have made 24 shots.

On the season the team's 3 point percentage is (now-- it dropped 1.7% just from this game alone) 44.1%. The Bears took 18 3s. Basically, they should have made 8 of them; in fact, they made 3.

Add up those missing points and on a normal shooting day, Cal wins this one easily, 73-65. I suppose you could dock Cal a few points for making more free throws than average, but Oregon State got a bundle of easy points off end-of-game FTs too.

Now, I know you can't just get up and say bad shooting = bad luck. But come on. You'd have a hard time arguing that the quality of looks the Bears got today was worse than average. Oregon State's defense was porous at best and Cal was regularly getting wide-open 3s. I'm not even going near the officiating, Oregon State's own shooting (highlighted by four second-half plays which would put any baller 80% of the way to winning a HORSE game) or anything else the team couldn't control. If Cal does what it normally does, HORSE shots or no, Oregon State goes down.

I hope Montgomery's message to his team was that sometimes these things just happen. The worst thing that could happen is for the Bears to overthink things. This isn't a game they need to explain away (unlike the first one). It just-- happened. One presumes Ben Howland is busy telling his team the same thing-- sometimes Taylor Rochestie scores 33 points. Accept it and move on.

This isn't going to be one of my really long rambles, just a quick look at some information which you may not have seen. Minorleaguesplits.com, which you should check out if you are at all interested in the A's minor league system, now includes a "defense" button for position players! This takes you to a page where defensive stats are calculated-- in runs-- using a primitive but reasonably effective method called TotalZone, developed by Sean Smith (of CHONE projection fame) to measure defense for players who played before modern fielding metrics. Turns out it also applies to minor leaguers.

Take this with a grain of salt, not for the gospel-- TotalZone isn't super accurate and I wouldn't get too caught up in the exact run measurements. It's more useful as a concept tool.

So what does it tell us about the A's prospects?

Continue reading this post »

as long as someone else hasn't done it first, of course. Well, depending on who you are, it might be worth it to trade up to get him!

Skelton is the most attractive position player Rule 5 candidate I've seen in some time. Let me explain why.

Continue reading this post »