Ah, the drudgery of those final weeks leading up to that glorious day on which our pitchers and catchers report. Our minds are filled with the trifles and minutia of the off-season and, if we're lucky, tantalized with a few blockbuster trades and free agent signings, or maybe even some fragile hopes about the new heights the home team will reach in the coming season.  In a way, this is one of the happiest times of hardball's annual round: our pitchers will never be healthier (sorry Outman, you don't count just yet), and our Athletics are tied for first place and undefeated.

Nevertheless, I thought this would be a great time to play a little game with numbers. Now I know that we've gotten up to these kind of shenanigans in the past, but I also realize that it has been at least a whole week since we delved into the glorious and inglorious A's rosters of years past and made some laconic stabs at figuring Oakland's all-time team. If this bores any of you, feel free to cast it upon the figurative ice floe of internet irrelevance, sing it a somber dirge, and kick it into the arctic waters to die alone and cold.

The rules are a little bit challenging. While going through the process I found myself forced to ignore many player's best seasons and to leave yet a few more off the roster entirely. It frustrated me to no end having to leave  Rickey out altogether and include *sigh* Billy Taylor anywhere. In any case, here are the ground rules in short:

• The goal is to select a 25 man roster from the last 25 seasons (1985-2009).
• Only one player from each season can be selected and (obviously) each player can only appear once.
• You must have a starter at all 8 positions plus DH. The DH must actually be a DH, not a player who spent the majority of the season that he represents playing another position.
• You must have 5 starting pitcher. This one is pretty easy for the A's.
• You must have a full bullpen and a closer. Again, no Herculean task for the A's.
  
• You must have a back-up catcher.
  
• Other than that, fill out the roster as you see fit.
  
• No hard rules on minimum IP/AB, but be sensible. Zito in 2000?  Huddy in 1999? Buck in 2007? It's up to you ultimately.
  

I'll include mine below. Keep in mind that it represents my own biases regarding my favorite players and "eras". I'm sure there are some ways to get Rickey in there but I already wasted a couple of hours on the project. It's a useful exercise for figuring out who our MVP was in certain years, and in which years we really had little talent to speak of. That having been said, I managed to keep Glenn Hubbard off the roster.

I actually took it a little further than simply creating the roster and did some rudimentary calculations to come up with a working Pythagorean W-L record, (for this I of course had to pro-rate the bench player's run scored). While not absolutely accurate for various reasons, the roster below gave me a .579 winning percentage, good for a 94-68 record. Now we're talking baseball!

Starting Lineup

C-Terry Steinbach (1995)

1B-Mark McGwire (1996)

2B-Mark Ellis (2005)

3B- Eric Chavez (2002)

SS-Miguel Tejada (2000)

LF-Jason Giambi (1997)

CF-Dave Henderson (1991)

RF-Jermaine Dye (2001)

DH-John Jaha (1999)

Bench

C-Mickey Tettleton (1986)

1B-Bruce Bochte (1985)

IF-Walt Weiss (1992)

IF-Brent Gates (1993)

OF-Jose Canseco (1988)

Starting Pitchers

Dave Stewart (1987)

Mike Moore (1989)

Tim Hudson (2003)

Dan Haren (2006)

Kenny Rogers (1998)

Relievers

Dennis Eckersley (1990)

Billy Taylor (1994)

Octavio Dotel (2004)

Brad Ziegler (2008)

Andrew Bailey (2009)

Huston Street (2007)

So what can you folks come up with to put this roster to shame?