SB Nation User Blog: baseballgirl

Bombs From Cust and Giambi Provide Run Support For Dallas Braden in Series Win

baseballgirl — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:13:27 -0000

The win for Pepe!

Dallas Braden, who has pitched much, much better than his record will show, was rewarded for an excellent start today with an actual win, as the A’s take the series from the Tigers with the final score of 5-1.

Braden was simply fantastic in his seven innings of work, allowing five hits (most of them doubles), one walk, and three strikeouts. His ERA has dropped to 3.13, one of the better numbers in the league, and although he was dodging doubles all outing, he managed to allow only the single run. It would be more than enough for the A’s offense.

Down 1-0 to a tough Justin Verlander in the fourth, Ryan Sweeney would single with two outs, bringing up the slumping Jack Cust. Unlike the past few weeks, Cust had nothing to worry about in today’s game except his bat; with the return of Travis Buck to the lineup, he was the designated hitter. He would end the day with just the one hit, but it was a huge one; he homered to left to give the A’s a 2-1 lead that they would never relinquish.

They would add on in the sixth inning, as Holliday beat out an infield single and moved to second on a balk. Giambi fired the closing shot on Verlander’s day by hitting a homerun of his own to give the A’s the 4-1 lead. Suzuki would double Crosby in for the fifth run later in the game.

Braden was relieved by Brad Ziegler in the eighth, who gave up a leadoff single, but would recover nicely with a strikeout and a double-play. Ziegler looks like the 2008 version, and a quality set-up man. Andrew Bailey--seldom seen lately--pitched the ninth in the non-save situation, and struck out the side, bringing his ERA down to 2.09, and continuing to make his case for the A’s representative to the All-Star team.

All in all, it was a solid win top to bottom, and it’s certainly a big series win for a team so far under .500. The Tigers are leading the central division. More importantly, it gave the A’s a good series under their belt before they embark on the road trip leading up to the All-Star break; they play in Cleveland this weekend, and Boston and Tampa Bay next week. First pitch 4:05 on Friday night; see you there!

Open Thread: Game 77 - A's vs. Tigers (cont)

baseballgirl — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:55:03 -0000

Braden is through 6; leading Verlander 2-1, on the back of a 2-run shot by JACK CUST!

Open Thread: Game 77 - A's vs. Tigers

baseballgirl — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:02:41 -0000

More photos » by Jim Bryant - AP

I didn't know who she was! I swear!!!!

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Amazingly, the A's have a chance for a series win this afternoon, in what promises to be a pitchers' duel between the A's Dallas Braden and the Tigers' Justin Verlander. Braden has pitched very well this season, and has little to show for it, thanks to the lack of run support. However, I don't think the A's offense is limited to just failing for Braden.

Even Urban has picked up on the mystery of Travis Buck, writing on MLB today:

The A's appeared to rush Travis Buck back to the big leagues, but they certainly haven't been in a rush to get him on the field.

Recalled from Triple-A Sacramento on Monday, Buck was told to catch a 5:30 p.m. flight out of Las Vegas -- where the River Cats were playing -- to Oakland. He didn't get to town in time to start in the opener of a three-game series against the visiting Tigers, but after the game A's manager Bob Geren suggested that Buck would start in the outfield on Tuesday.

That didn't happen either, but it's expected to happen in Wednesday's series finale.

Buck is a left-handed hitter, he'd been swinging a hot bat (.350) for Sacramento, and he hasn't made an error in his past 141 games in the big leagues. But Geren started Jack Cust in right field Tuesday against Detroit right-hander Armando Galarraga.

The story goes on to talk about how Cust told Geren that he sees the ball well against yesterday's starter, and some other quotes, but maybe Mychael is trying to tell us something:

"If we get ahead," Geren said before the game, "I can always improve our defense [with a substitution] late in the game, as I usually do."

So Buck plays when we're ahead, for defense, not offense, despite his numbers . Got it. I won't mention that if Cust makes some of those plays, the A's might not be behind....oh, nevermind. Travis Buck is in the lineup today; Cust will be the DH.

And it was guessed in the game thread, but here you are:

In a tribute of sorts to fellow starter Josh Outman, who underwent season-ending left elbow surgery on Tuesday, Vin Mazzaro, Brett Anderson and Trevor Cahill went with the stirrups-and-sanitary-socks look favored by Outman, who adopted the look in tribute to former A's pitcher Barry Zito

...and AN ladies everywhere swoon.

Lineup

Detroit Tigers @ Oakland Athletics

07/01/09 12:35 PM PDT

Detroit Tigers	Oakland Athletics
Curtis Granderson - CF	Adam Kennedy - 3B
Placido Polanco - 2B	Orlando Cabrera - SS
Miguel Cabrera - 1B	Matt Holliday - LF
Marcus Thames - DH	Jason Giambi - 1B
Ryan Raburn - LF	Kurt Suzuki - C
Magglio Ordonez - RF	Ryan Sweeney - CF
Gerald Laird - C	Jack Cust - DH
Don Kelly - 3B	Travis Buck - RF
Adam Everett - SS	Mark Ellis - 2B

A’s Sudden Offensive Surge Makes A Winner Out of Brett Anderson

baseballgirl — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:00:27 -0000

More photos » by Ben Margot - AP

I. AM. UNICORN.

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For the first three innings, it looked like more of the same for the A’s tonight as they tried to stop their five-game skid. The A’s were getting men on base, but they were finding interesting ways to get out on the basepaths; most notably Suzuki falling for the Little League "man on first and third; fake a throw to second, catch the runner at third" play.

Meanwhile, Brett Anderson danced with trouble through the early innings, allowing two runners to reach base in just about every inning, but he was able to escape every jam, holding the Tigers scoreless through five innings. Anderson started the sixth, and put the customary two batters on, but he was pulled for Wuertz, who allowed the Tigers’ only run to score. Anderson’s line would read 5+ innings, with four walks and seven strikeouts. Wuertz struck out four batters of his own (just about everyone he faced); Ziegler replaced him in the eighth for a nifty 1, 2, 3 inning, adding two strikeouts, and Springer pitched the ninth, striking out one to bring the total to fourteen strikeouts for Anderson and the bullpen, who was fantastic from top to bottom. And this was on top of the thirteen strikeouts last night.

The A’s broke through against Porchello in the fourth on a single by Holliday, a walk by Giambi, an RBI double by Suzuki, and an infield single by Sweeney (who would go 3-4 in the game). Even though the 2-0 lead would be enough for Anderson, the A’s added on in the next three innings on a two-run homerun by none other than Mark Ellis, a groundout by Holliday, a solo homerun by Sweeney, and a Tigers’ error.

When all was said and done, the A’s took this one easily 7-1, and looked great from the third inning on. This was the team we were promised; some power, fundamentals, great pitching, and a solid bullpen. The A’s break their 5-game losing streak, and win a game. It’s all we can ask for right now.

In other, long-term news, Josh Outman will have elbow surgery tomorrow. No one is calling the surgery anything other than some "elbow" work, but his likely recovery time will be 18 months, so you do the math.

The A’s play the Tigers again tomorrow night; we’ll see you here!

Open Thread: Game 75 - A's vs. Tigers (cont)

baseballgirl — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:08:53 -0000

After two homeruns by the A's (yes, not kidding), and some nifty work by Anderson and Wuertz, the A's have a 6-1 lead going to the bottom of the seventh!

Open Thread: Game 75 - A's vs. Tigers (cont)

baseballgirl — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:21:14 -0000

Against all odds, the A's have managed to scrape together two runs, and Anderson has danced out of trouble all night, most recently getting the much-needed shut-down inning. We go to the bottom of the fifth; 2-0 A's!

Open Thread: Game 75 - A's vs. Tigers (cont)

baseballgirl — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:48:49 -0000

Well Brett Anderson has danced out of trouble so far in the first three innings, and has racked up 5 K's and a lot of pitches. But he must be frustrated with the A's will be A's baserunning; the A's have two runners in two innings caught doing unusual little league moves on the bases; the last one thrown out on a catcher fake to second, throw to third. We go to the bottom of the third, no score.

Open Thread: Game 75 - A's vs. Tigers

baseballgirl — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:38:58 -0000

More photos » by Ben Margot - AP

Why isn't anyone talking about my numbers and my age?

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After a ~~terrible miserable awful little league~~ forgetable week at home, where the A's won exactly one game, the homestand will close with a three-game series against the Detroit Tigers (who swept the last time they faced the A's) starting tonight. Brett Anderson, fresh off an extended break, will be matched up against a great rookie pitcher in Rick Porcello, who has already collected a win against the A's so far this season. Porcello has an 8-4 record with a 3.55 ERA in 2009, and he's only twenty.

Interleague play is over, so the A's are now back on the all-AL, all-the-time schedule, and if they have any hope left on the 2009 season, things had better start to turn around for the green and gold. Tonight's match-up seems like an unlikely way to start a winning streak, but that's what we're hoping for.

Lineup

Detroit Tigers @ Oakland Athletics

06/29/09 7:05 PM PDT

Detroit Tigers	Oakland Athletics
Curtis Granderson - CF	Adam Kennedy - 3B
Placido Polanco - 2B	Orlando Cabrera - SS
Miguel Cabrera - 1B	Matt Holliday - LF
Marcus Thames - DH	Jason Giambi - 1B
Ryan Raburn - LF	Kurt Suzuki - C
Brandon Inge - 3B	Ryan Sweeney - CF
Magglio Ordonez - RF	Jack Cust - RF
Gerald Laird - C	Landon Powell - DH
Adam Everett - SS	Mark Ellis - 2B

This is probably the best lineup we have, so let's see if it can produce a win for the boys.

LET'S GO OAK-LAND!

What Happened to 1989?

baseballgirl — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:18:03 -0000

1989 was such an amazing year for the A’s and for many of us, it is our only living memory of the A’s winning it all. It certainly is disappointing that only 20 years later, we realize that not only do people associate October 1989 with terrible non-baseball memories, but that after all that has happened in baseball, even the baseball fans who should have been happiest with 1989 have tainted memories as well. A natural disaster took the joy from celebrating a World Championship then, but it is truly a shame that scandal and drama inside the game may have taken any joy we may have had looking back on it.

I wanted to comment on the recent exchange of words between Jose Canseco and Carney Lansford regarding the 1989 reunion this week. As we all know, the A's have taken quite a bit of heat for the lackluster turnout and small market style of the 20-year reunion; understandable with the controversy that surrounds the players of that era; maybe a 1970's reunion would have been a better idea?

It's hard to lose a baseball hero in life. Jose Canseco went from being my absolute favorite player when I was a teenager (I cried for days when he was traded), to being someone who I can no longer defend. I think he's a self-serving bad guy, and lives up to the charges of being out for himself, instead of part of a team. That being said, the A's are shady in reporting even the most banal of news; when they said that they invited all of the 1989 players back for the reunion (coming directly from the A's VP), that raised a red flag. Apparently, it did with Carney Lansford as well, who said that if Canseco was coming, no one else would show up.

Of course, Canseco denies that he was even invited, and why wouldn't you believe him? There's no way MLB and the Oakland A's want anything to do with him, and the allure of the reaction and the spotlight just may just have tempted him to show up. So why did the A's PR department not spin something in the "We're trying to minimize distractions" vein? Why create a he said/she said situation and give Canseco a forum to speak out against the A's?

[Update 2:34pm: (thanks micdog2001): The A's have said again that they invited Canseco:

CANSECO INVITED: Ken Pries, the A’s vice president of broadcasting, said that contrary to Jose Canseco’s claims to CSN Bay Area, the team sent him an invitation to Tuesday’s 1989 team reunion. “We absolutely 100 percent sent an invitation, I personally put it in the mail,” Pries said. The invite went out in March, and the A’s believe their address for Canseco to be accurate.

But both The Examiner and the Press Democrat point to a late-planned event:

The flawed ceremony, apparently was due in part to planning by the A’s front office, which only cobbled together the promotion weeks ago. Invitations were sent just a month and a half ago, according to some reports.]

For whatever reason, Carney Lansford (who was not named in Canseco's book), took it upon himself to fire the shot on behalf of the team:

Lansford was quoted in Monday's Chronicle, saying if Canseco were coming to the reunion, "I don't believe there's a guy on the '89 team who'd show up. Not after his book and all the lives he ruined. It's selfishness, basically. I hate to say that, really. I played with him and thought he was a nice guy, but I don't know how you can do that to people."

I adore Carney Lansford, but I think he's dead wrong here. Canseco may have been a bad guy--the worst of guys--but he didn't ruin anyone's life. Ruining someone's life implies a villain/victim situation, and Canseco broke the clubhouse code, ratted out many key MLB players, shed light on MLB's dirty little secret, and sold everyone down the river with him, but Canseco did not force anyone to take steroids. He simply outed the players who did.

From Canseco:

"First of all, the only life that was ruined was mine. I paid the ultimate price. I was completely severed from Major League Baseball at 35, 36 years old, 38 home runs short of 500, and basically lost all my income and completely broke right now. All the other players that were mentioned in my book, or have come out, tested positive for steroids, have gotten multi-year contracts, are millionaires, and still in the game of baseball. So obviously Carney Lansford is one of the most ignorant individuals I’ve ever met to say that I’ve ruined other people’s lives.

My life was completely ruined by Major League Baseball. I paid the ultimate price. All these other athletes got a slap on their hands or fines, or basically can’t play for 30 or 40 days. But they’re still playing, they’re still making millions. For example, the first baseman at the time for the Yankees…Jason Giambi said I used steroids, I’m sorry, got a multi-year deal. I was the only individual in Major League Baseball who paid the ultimate price with my career. No one else did that so Carney Lansford is one ignorant S.O.B. to be even saying those things."

Is there anyone who feels sorry for Canseco? Probably not. But it's hard to not feel the same way about the other players who cheated along side of him. Had Canseco had been a police informant and ratted out his partners in crime, would we feel bad for everyone that was caught? I think spending a lifetime in jail would actually qualify as someone "ruining your life"; yet who can you really blame for your jail time; the person who sold you out, or yourself for committing the crime? And he's right. No one is in jail for steroids; very few of the accused are even out of baseball, and most have signed contracts that will take care of them for life. You want to know who I feel sorry for; it's the clean players on the very cusp of AAA/MLB who made the league minimum season after season who didn't make it to The Show because they lost their spot to someone who chose to take steroids.

Canseco deserves every bit of his raw deal; he has absolutely no one to blame but himself, and he distanced himself from the game of baseball with his actions. But is it fair (if anything is "fair" in all of this) to minimize the effects of the scandal by laying the blame on certain individuals; i.e Barry Bonds and Jose Canseco? Sure; they're easy targets, but they are only responsible for two of the many, many cases of steroid use in MLB, and it's about time that other players started taking responsibility for their own actions. Lansford sympathizing with Jose's "victims" rubs me the wrong way. It's easy to blame Canseco for writing the book. It's not so easy to blame the players who gave him the plot.

I still have my 1989 World Series banner. I still have the empty spaces where I thought a 2000-2003 pennant might go. I'm thinking about trading them all for the 1970's, and I wish the 2009 A's were better. We were cheated out of 1989; we didn't really get to enjoy it then, or now.

A's Offense is (Almost) Silent Again; Not Surprisingly, A's Also Lose Game

baseballgirl — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:41:59 -0000

More photos » by Ben Margot - AP

So if I get out of this inning, you guys will score some runs for me, right? Right?

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Despite a ninth-inning mini-rally that was the very definition of "too little, too late", there isn't a lot to say about tonight's game, except that the A's seem to like Nico's birthday every bit as much as they like mine.

Let's start with the BA/OBP/SLG for the starting lineup tonight:

Adam Kennedy    .300    .373    .470
Kurt Suzuki    .275    .322    .386
Jack Cust     .228    .314    .424
Matt Holliday     .270    .368    .422
Jason Giambi     .206    .346    .391
Orlando Cabrera    .244    .289    .314
Bobby Crosby    .192    .292    .313
Rajai Davis    .240    .302    .320
Jack Hannahan    .191    .272    .310

The A's had three hits (a single, a double, and a triple) in four batters to start the game (from the only hitters within the zip code of decent MLB numbers) and they managed to score only a single run. Randy Johnson struck out the side in between the hits, setting the tone for the rest of the game.

That would be the entire offensive story of the night save for a token homerun by Suzuki in the eighth and a pinch-hit double by Nomar in the ninth, scoring Rajai Davis, who walked with two outs.

Based on the run support, and the usual A's non-supportive defense, it didn't really matter what Gio Gonzalez did tonight unless he tossed a shutout, but in case you were wondering, he was actually pulled in the fourth after allowing ten hits and four earned runs, walking two, and striking out six.

Amnesiac summed it up for A's fans tonight:

Sticking around tonight reminds me...

...of an office christmas party. You know the kind where the DJ is playing and almost everyone has left and the only people still around are the bosses, a few who are trying to sober up, and the ones making out in the corner.

I'm sure the non-Giants fans at the Coliseum tonight felt the exact same way. Another game, another loss, another series loss, and the next games the A's will play will be against the hottest team in Major League Baseball, the Rockies, starting Friday night.

Maybe the off-day will be magical.