Hope everyone had a great turkey weekend (even if turkey wasn’t your dead animal of choice). Today I’m going to cover two more of the pitchers we sent to the Arizona Fall League.

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As you all know, Major League Baseball runs a fall league in Arizona for upper-level minor-league players, appropriately named the Arizona Fall League. The big news this year is that, for the first time, MLB installed PitchFX cameras. This is huge—it’s the first PitchFX look we’ve ever gotten from minor-leaguers. I’m going to crunch the numbers and take a look at the results, hopefully churning out some useful scouting reports in the process. I’ll start with our 2007 first-round draft pick out of UC Riverside, James Simmons (RHP).

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This is a Fanpost aimed at those of us who may not be as stat-literate as others, but want to know what the Fangraphs game graph is all about. I’ll start from the very beginning, hopefully passing along useful knowledge about run expectancy and win probability, among other things. And if you already have a good handle on the principles, hey, it’s good review. Or something.

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We all know about the size of our payroll. We all know that it makes us trade away, buy low, and otherwise obtain undervalued players. It's been seven years since the 2002 Moneyball draft, and our payroll hasn't gotten any bigger relative to the league. In part 2 of my apparent Jack an Idea From Another Website and Use It to Make a Cool Chart series, I found out how much we truly overachieved.

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I don’t know how familiar the AN population is with the specifics of the wonderful Pitchf/x system, so I’ll start from the beginning. For those that do…I’m sorry. Skip ahead if you’d like.

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This isn’t a fun post to read. It’s not even a fun post to write. That’s right, folks, it’s the latest installment of doom and gloom.

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Yeah, I know, a lot of the AN faithful already know a majority of what I’m trying to say, especially the justification of 2007-2008 Cust. But for those who don’t, and especially for newcomers to the AN scene, I’m going to lay out my case: Jack Cust is not only an above-average hitter, but a very welcome and valuable addition to the Oakland Athletics.

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It's nice to look back at brighter days. Although it probably wasn't the best team of the 2000's (that would either be 2001 or 2002, they both won 100+), it was the only team that got past the ALDS. After the jump is a visual diagram of the 2006 Oakland A's, showing when they came and left Oakland. Hint: Just three years later, we don't even have a fifth of this roster still with us.

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