SB Nation User Blog: emperor nobody

why I quit AN

emperor nobody — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:16:01 -0000

I'm going to keep this very brief, partly because time is tight and partly because, well, I really don't care anymore.

I have just been informed that I have received a "strike" against me for violating the "CGV guidelines" of AN, a violation pertaining to comments I made (and which I discussed with others, themselves perhaps subjected to a similar punishment, I do not know) related to Marxism that were deemed "too political" by the committee that oversees such things, presumably in some secluded and fortified Star Chamber somewhere beneath the Coliseum. These comments can in part be found here, although others have been seemingly erased and eliminated:

http://www.athleticsnation.com/comments/2007/7/14/11257/0851/116?mode=alone;showrate=1#c116)

I wish to state for the record that it is my belief and perception that the Athletics' ethos during the Beane era has itself constituted a political act, a reaction to the ugly and profligate norms prevalent in the business side of MLB and a living proposal, if you will, of an alternative method of franchise management reflecting a more efficient and undeniably iconoclastic approach. This perception is, of course, debatable, but my right to express such a concept, and other, related concepts, in a respectful and articulate manner ought not to be. That such action has been taken against me is indicative of what I perceive to be the general trend in American society at large in both the micro and the macro views, which is to say that I find said censorship reprehensible, unjustified and fascistic. My comments were not made in haste nor in malice, and for them to be singled out and punished when I have done my best to be an articulate and reality-based contributor to AN amounts to a slap in the face at best and part of an overall trend I find deeply troubling on this site.

I wish to thank the moderators and contributors for their efforts, and regret the inexorable drift of AN towards the censorship and removal of ideas which may be somewhat distasteful and unrelated to sports on the surface, but which upon reflection reflect a valid and thoughtful point of view about how the Athletics franchise integrates into the larger socioeconomic pictures of both MLB and the greater society at large, baseball being as it can such an informative and resonant reflection of the American experiment and its ongoing status.

Thank you all for your time.

Best wishes always,

Joshua Chase
West Oakland, CA

the Milton Bradley appreciation thread

emperor nobody — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 06:50:02 -0000

OK, well, we can spend the rest of the season trying to figure out why Billy Beane DFA'd him. We can volley the theories back & forth like a badminton shuttlecock, the injuries, the trade that fell through, the up-and-comers like Buck, Snelling & Cust. The potential divisive anger that might boil over from diminished playing time in a contract year. That's all fine and I've been enjoying reading it in the main page items and their attendant comments.

This page is about voicing an appreciation for the play and passion of this marvelous athlete, who I and we really enjoyed watching and who gave us all innumerable thrills in his time here. The AN day walkoff last year, the run to the playoffs (without him it doesn't happen), the vital performance in Game 3 of the ALDS, the ALCS where he went 9-for-18 (no one else did anything) and wept when we lost.

If Milton Bradley is somehow reading this, I would want him to know that he was appreciated here, at least by the diehards like us who watch and follow every pitch in every inning in every game like we do. Whatever the reasons, him not being a part of this team takes a little of the sparkle and swagger away.

Your memories, photos & observations of MB below, if you please.

everybody, it's a Future Shock

emperor nobody — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 23:58:58 -0000

All right, I guess it's time to write down how I feel, but I warn you it isn't gonna be pretty or palatable. If you're happily imbibing snifter after snifter of the Kool-Aid currently being dispensed by the ownership of this organization, itself under the seemingly hypnotic power of a large and faceless computer corporation, then I suggest passing this one by. Enjoy your refreshments.

I am deeply hurt, simply wounded by all of this, and the Oakland aspect is but one facet of my sense of betrayal and discontent. The reality is that for me, everything this team and franchise has represented has just been cast away. The diehard, baseball-breathing Oakland fans, lacking in number but never enthusiasm, cast away. The arguably glorious history of the team in Oakland, cast away. The model efficiency and proletarian dedication to "the little things" that make us competitive against the grotesque injustices perpetrated by the big-spender teams, cast away. The Moneyball approach, essentially cast away. A sporting event free of the loathesomely intrusive consumerist aspects so prevalent at other venues and really throughout the rapidly-putrifying culture of this country, cast away. Once we were one of the top 4 teams in the game on the sheer competence of our GM and his assistants and the guile and prowess of our gutsy, working-class-hero type players. A few decent starting pitching performances and a couple of clutch hits from the big prize, from the mountaintop. So close, and getting there the right way, on our own merits and grind-it-out sense of mastery and purpose. Now we are about to be relegated to a position as the house band in some computer company Marketing Director's shopping mall fantasy, the Yankees with bytes and bandwidth substituting for TV deals. Say it ain't so.

The Oakland aspect is obvious, no need to beat it to death. I live here and treasure this most underdog of cities, forever stuck in the shadows of its glitzy neighbor to the west; a ghetto-fabulous St. Paul but with nicer weather, realer people and a better baseball team than its number-3-tourist-destination-on-Earth Minneapolis across the bridge. So ironic that the only stadium with a view of Oakland is the Giants' place, now that the Oakland team is abdicating.

One reason to love the team has been the way the ballclub has mirrored the city so well: the grit, the standing up to the big guys with all the guns (think the Black Panthers, or Barbara Lee -- D, Congressional District 9, Oakland -- the lone vote against the war appropriations on Sept. 14th, 2001, birthing the phrase "Barbara Lee speaks for me!"), the falling-down stadium facility with the Black Muslim Bakery fish sandwiches (thanks jeepers)... rarely has the unique, uncommercially unhomogenized flavor of a city come across in its team in such an unfiltered way, right down to the clever, proud-to-be-the-prepared-underdog ad campaigns we have seen in recent years. Welcome to Oakland, the most diverse urban community in the United States... more Medical Cannabis Dispensories than military recruitment centers. Never has such a great place to live gotten such a bad rap, largely due to the racism still so prevalent in outsiders' views of Oakland, which they believe is some sort of Terrordome/Mad Max movie with gangs of African-American youths marauding all over.

But there's more than enough blame to go around on the moving-to-Fremont issue, it's not just Wolff, it's so many things: Jerry Brown's idiotic fixation on building upscale-fantasy loft housing that no one will ever live in, Ron Dellums failing to make the A's a campaign issue when doing so might have helped a solution to be reached so they could stay, Robert Bobb (former City Manager and A's advocate) leaving, Al Davis returning and making the city his biz-nitch, the failure of the casual fans to come out for more than just the playoff games these last 6 years, the list goes on and on `til the proverbial break o'dawn. It was inevitable that for the team to make any money and continue to put a contending, championship-quality product on the field, they couldn't stay here as things stood. No amount of civic pride or Oakland-allegiance could stop that, and I understand. Even if it really does seem obvious that Wolff wanted to move closer to his beloved San Jose and was gonna do that even if Oakland brought him a plan and the financing to enact it on a silver platter. For the record I think a carpetbagger's a carpetbagger, and would no more approve or condone Wolff's actions (no matter how seemingly beneficent) than I would (as a left-wing person) vote for Hillary Clinton as a Senator from New York. I guess I'm a deluded purist/idealist, a throwback to a now-bygone era of integrity-as-raison d'etre.

My biggest problems with this deal, the real sense of betrayal and disgust, come from what the new facility will look like and what the game experience portends to be for the prospective fan. I guess I must be an old coot, but I loathe cell-phones being used in public places. I believe technology has its place but that baseball is a sacred analog experience, invented in the 19th century, that shouldn't be subjected to some computer firm's future-shock-inducing profit motive curve. Laptops and PDAs should not be necessary gear for a day on the green watching a baseball game, they can be optional but not necessary. I go to a game to watch the game with the eyes I was born with, not to be inundated with electronic selling opportunities every time we score a run. To make these devices a central facet of the in-game experience is to create a second-class citizenship for anyone who for whatever reason does not possess such devices. No matter how enticing and cool the technology looks as they flash it on giant presentation screens to make you want it more than you do life itself. When we hit a HR I wanna hug and hi-five the total stranger next to me, not be funneled into a personalized replay-with-ads scenario based on what CDs I bought on Amazon.com last week.

They are talking about seat-specific screens, ones that will detect from your cell phone what products you like and target-advertise you at your seat. Jesus Christ. What's that, personal mobile spyware for a new generation? You don't get enough unwanted spam e-mail at home already, now they want you to be subject to somebody's carefully-constructed marketing moment every second you're on the premises? I say fuck that. Fuck it. No way.

The 200-foot video screen outside the place sounds lovely. Gee, let's wait in traffic for hours for a vaunted, special opportunity to watch more TV. The idea seems to be to intentionally create scarcity with the tiniest seating capacity in MLB, then exploit the scarcity without having to actually sell the people you have lured actual seats. Maybe they won't watch the game at all, maybe you can just drop them down via trapdoor into The Cirkus of Cisco Systems Purchasing Playground, where they can demo every last product made by your company until their fingers fall off. And, to top it all off, they're talking about PSLs, which is really short for Perfectly Stupid Lemmings, in reference to the kind of person who will willingly pay for the right to pay for something.

What this all tastes like is the next logical step in the corporate takeover of everything on Earth, which began long ago but saw its most recent Grand Quantum Leap Forward in sports when the stadiums went from being named for the cities they were in to being named for corporations which had purchased the "naming rights". Now, we get the next wave, where the identities of the team and the sponsor are so intertwined, and the products so cross-hybridized, that there is no "team" anymore, just a meta-logo like when McDonalds' Happy Meals have Star Wars aliens on them whenever the latest Star Wars film comes out. If you look at the logo they put out at the site, "Future Home of Cisco Field" is predominant and the A's logo is at the bottom, more like an afterthought. The house band at the mall, the shrine to themselves these Cisco people are planning to build with an incidental baseball team as their beard. People were so afraid the A's would have to move to Las Vegas, but now it appears as if Cisco has brought Vegas, or at least its garish, consumption-as-all-pervading-focus-of-existence aesthetic, to Fremont.

Whatever happened to the sanctity of hallowed tradition, like baseball used to represent, can anyone tell me? Whatever happened to the concept of "ill-gotten gains," and how they were to be avoided even as they tried with all their power to entice the uncorrupted? This little project may double the A's payroll, but are they even going to be the "A's" anymore? Or some Frankenstein monster that appears to wear the Athletics' uniforms but with Cisco's brain and corporate-competitive muscle? Like the Yankees but with snazzy, bleeping computer gear instead of a TV network deal supplying the largesse needed for Empire. I don't approve of Empire, because it inevitably leads to a fatal imbalance of distributed resources and situational power, and I don't want to be one, or root for one. The very prospect scares me. Away.

Friends, I know a lot of you can't or won't agree, and I understand. All things must pass. But if this represents the future than I don't wanna go. Count me out. Especially if they are gonna add insult to injury and let the product suffer until they leave Oakland, then bulk it back up again with the addition of big-money talent to go with the big-money facility when the move finally happens. Based on what I am sensing (who's our DH now, Brandon Buckley?), I can't be entirely assured that isn't the plan right now.

I'm sorry, it tears my heart into a million pieces, but I feel like I may be done with the A's.

"There's nothing real in the world anymore," someone once said, or something like that. Say it ain't so.

Love and Gratitude: your top 10 A's moments of 2006

emperor nobody — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 03:38:52 -0000

Let the achievements of this year not be dampened by the outcome of the past week: our lads are now back where they belong, in the elite teams of MLB. Yes, it's painful. You never want to come this close and cough it up. But sometimes you just must tip your hat to the better team, and it feels pretty clear to me that these Tigers are far and away the best team in MLB right now, and I fully expect them to do what's never been done in the Wild Card era and run the table with 11 straight wins. When you're hitting walkoff, pennant winning homers, you know you've got the mojo. Leyland may be the best manager of our lifetimes. Impressive.

As for us, this was a tremendous season, in which monumental strides were made through daunting adversity. If I'd have told anyone here that we'd dominate the division and go deep into October with Richie making only 10 starts and Crosby being lost for most of the year, you'd have thought I was crazy. Not that I'm not crazy, but you'd have laughed me out of the room.

This was the best, most resilient team of the Beane era, and we finally broke through in the playoffs and terminated an ongoing series of failures that I know has eaten at all of us for years. So many magic moments, too many to recount, so many memories to last a lifetime. We have a marvelous nucleus here, built on the twin pillars of pitching and defense, and even though Z will leave I think we will be fine and ready to roll the big ball back up the hill in 2007. If I am BB I extend Bradley (another 3 hits today-- on one leg -- and inches and a stiff breeze from a huge HR) because there is no limit to his talent. I truly believe that he has found a home here and can now go on to join the ranks of the elite, game-changing players in baseball. In my opinion he's perfect for Oakland and I lock him up and keep the team built around his prodigious 5 tools and unequalable passion.

I feel sad we lost, but I also feel limitless love and gratitude for what our team gave us this year, and the same for this community, which I feel is the star around which all things Athletics revolve for the hardcore, real fans like us. I want to say "thank you" to our players and organization and all the fantastic people that make this community the best team-related site in the world, hands down. I had the time of my life this year, regardless of what happened in the last 4 games, and each of you helped make that possible. Thank you all so very much.

And now, my top ten Athletics moments of 2006... please list yours in the comments section below:

The 17-inning win vs. the Dodgers, culminating most appropriately in the bases-loaded walk.
Huston's strikeout of Barry Bonds to beat the Giants in the 9th.
Frank Thomas walking off a ridiculous blast on 3-0 into the toppermost bleachers vs. Scot Shields to crush the Angels.
Jason Kendall finally hitting a HR in an A's uniform vs. Kansas City, aided by the emotional energy of Ray Fosse.
Frank Thomas hitting 2 HRs vs. the White Sox on his return to Chicago to a 5-minute standing ovation from their fans, and then the 2 HRs to knock them from the playoff race on a weekend to remember in September.
Barry Zito making his last start before the trade deadline, leaving to a deafening chant of "ZI-TO!!! ZI-TO!!!" and then taking the only curtain call for a pitcher I have ever been in the ballpark to witness.
Milton Bradley leading the offense to a 12-3 shellacking of Seattle, coupling with an Angels loss for the AL West title on a magical night in late September.
Frank Thomas hitting a HR of inestimable value vs. Johan "Cy Young" Santana in Game 1 of the ALDS vs. Minnesota, and then sealing it with a titanic blast to give Huston the cushion in the 9th for one of the biggest wins in franchise history.
Mark Kotsay, huffing and puffing and blowing the Metrodome down on an unforgettable trip around the bases in Game 2 of the ALDS.
Magic Marco Scutaro putting the dagger in the Twins' season with an improbable 2-strike double to clear the bases and clear the path to that elusive first-round triumph in ALDS Game 3. Being in the 6th row from the field for that game is something I will treasure for the rest of my lives.

So that's all, thanks for reading this and thanks for a great ride through these last 7 months. We will be back. You know we will.

Go A's!!!!

for Lucky Charms, a Call to Arms

emperor nobody — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:56:59 -0000

OK, this is the Emperor with an important Proclamation, may I have you attention please? Thank you.

Yesterday was a tough one and I'm sure we all woke up somewhat perturbed. Some of us probably slept fitfully, or (like me) slept well but with bizarre and somewhat stressful baseball- or Coliseum-themed dreams. Although there were observable positives (smashing bullpen, good swings off Zumaya, I got to meet the thoroughly awesome Zonis from AN), last night there was too much bad mojo, too many LOB, too many Z-squeezings on close pitches, too much suspect glovework, and way too many scuffles in the seats. We all know this. Today is a day to break with that energy and, to quote the immortal Curtis Mayfield, toMove On Up.

Our boys in G&G need us to project pure support tonight, the love must flow. All of us have our internal doubts and our neuroses about this series because it's been uncharted territory for the A's for a long time (and it's the first year we even got into the postseason since AN has existed) and we are also playing a magnificent team with a ton of talent of their own. But tonight is a night to set all of that aside in your mind and to just celebrate this TEM for all that they have given us. Tonight is a night to put the spiralling negativities out of your head and be a little kid again. To be creatively naive, to let your Magic Mojo Batteries charge up good and full. To let yourself believe we can do this. Because we can.

"Why does he say this?" I hear you ask. How does this idiot know what's best for us, where does he get off telling us we should just enjoy the wild ride and for just one night quit breaking down in our minds (with statistics to back up our logic, A's fans being A's fans) exactly how, why, and when we and our boys will fall into the hole, never to be seen again?

Well, I got on the BART this morning, all bummed and nervous and performing exactly such self-defeating and self-aggrandizing operations in my head, and I sat down and stared out at the West Oakland shipyards and the Port down in the direction of the Coliseum and I thought, how are we gonna do this? How is Loaiza gonna best Verlander? How are we gonna show up as the diametric opposite team of the shoddy squad we saw last night, only 24 hours later?

And then I looked to my immediate left, and sitting right on the edge of the other seat, face up, was this

That's right, a lucky 1989 penny.

Let your mind and heart believe. Read the signs, for they are all around you. GO!!!!!!!!

TO THE TOPPERMOST!!!!!!!!

words from the speechless

emperor nobody — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 08:02:45 -0000

First, thank you all, we represented today across the country and at the ballpark. Regardless of the pathetically short shrift we get from the most of the national media... I say let them all talk until their lips fall off about how we suck and have no chance. The more the they run their mouths, full of the sychophantic worship of wealth and easy success they rely on for their ad revenues, the better our boys will be motivated to do and the more lofty the heights we scale will be.

This was really and truly a day I will remember for the rest of my life, and on Bill King's birthday, no less. I realize that we have to go one step at a time and heighten our focus to a level of relentlessness not previously imagined, but I must say that we may be seeing something so, so special taking shape, something we've only dreamed of. Something we will all -- each of us who scrutinizes every move this team makes down to the rust particles on the Big Hurt's rebar -- remember for the rest of our lives, if not for the rest of our lifetimes.

I'm starting to believe in Bill's presence, that he's watching this unfold somehow, or his residual energy from having done so much of his life's work at the Coliseum and with the A's is a part of all of this in some inexplicable way. Stranger still that Buck O'Neil died today... I was thinking that had the majors been integrated back when he was in his heyday, he might have ended up with the Athletics in KC, where he was a superstar. Just weird, a weird but vital sense of energy convergence and dispersal today. As if it wasn't painfully obvious 9 months ago, Buck should be placed into his own wing in Cooperstown tomorrow morning, if not sooner.

I can't begin to describe what it all felt like from sec 128 row 6 today, it's just too much to process and articulate. That place, I've never heard it louder, and the chanting of Marco's name at the moment of decision was from another world. I don't know if any of you were listening to the ESPN national radio feed of the game, but I heard it later and when that happened, the announcer yelled "Marco!!!! Scutaro!!!!" into the microphone just as the crowd was doing. It was beyond electric, it was a higher, purer form of energy that has yet to be invented and harnessed.

Let's just say that when Marco cleared the bases I let out a scream that was not a "your team just did something good in the game" scream... it was primal. I don't know where it came from but the energy was overwhelming today, just so deep and so resonant. I was certain that after I screamed like that security would somehow have to come take me away, it was that guttural and primordial. Maybe it was the demons escaping from the 0-9 elimination-game exorcism our boys were performing out there, but whatever it was it was serious. Something about it reminded me of the energy at a music concert, not a big stadium show where it's all diffuse and not everyone is focused on the performance at any one time but like at a smaller venue, a 3- or 5,000-seater let's say, where there's still a lot of people and they are feeding the vibrations back to the performers and something of a higher vibrational nature is created and brought into focus. That's the only analog for today's experience I can find.

Let me tell you what's more beautiful than a fool such as I could hope to describe. Beautiful is that a team with the highest payroll in the history of sports is thoroughly unable to score and could be about to be eliminated because their $27 million poster boy is to this point a postseason choke artist for the ages, and we are 8 one-game-at-a-time wins from winning the World Series and our MVP (so far anyway), who's gotten hit after hit in impossibly clutch fashion, is an unconditional waiver claim we got for n-o-t-h-i-n-g. If that isn't validation of the Moneyball ethos and proof that Beane and company are not, in terms of doing the most with the least, the greatest executives in the history of sports, then I don't know what is. To take it deeper, it's what makes me love and live and die with this franchise more than anything else: because it proves, in however fleeting a way, that the millions (billions?) of people who believe in quantitative judgement over qualitative judgement and who defer to wealth just because it's rich and they wanna be so it should always win, are wrong.

Party on this weekend, and then it's back to the wars on Tuesday. There is so much more work to do... I bought ALCS tickets for all the games today and I can't wait. I bet our boys can't wait either. I think we can do this.

Eyes on the prize. Hold on, friends, hold on.

YES WE CAN

emperor nobody — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 17:53:26 -0000

Athletics Nation, I know you're nervous. I know you're trying to stop yourself from focusing on failures past, on demons of days gone by, that the national media, eager to create drama and viewers, is only too willing to dwell upon. I know you're excited, full of that "hoperehension" as the hour of decision approaches. So settle down, take a good few deep breaths (in through the nose, out through the mouth, like the yogis teach), because it's time for your morning pre-game dose of the confidence that only attention to detail can bring.

Because this team is the most beautifully resilient, the most hungry, the most experienced, the most focused, the most underdog, the most like a family of any we have seen in this era of Athletics baseball, it's time for roll call.

YES WE CAN, because we ARE:

16-game winner Joe Blanton

Hiram Bocachica, utility masher

all aboard! Milton Bradley

Kiko Calero, Slider of Doom

the best defensive 3rd baseman in baseball, Eric Chavez

Justin Duchscherer, set-up superstar

the new all-time record holder for 2nd base fielding percentage, Mark Ellis

Chad Gaudin, who is just filthy

one of the most feared starters in MLB, Rich Harden

the devastating splitter of Danny Haren

D'Angelo Jimenez, ready to step in and get it done

Minnesota native Dan Johnson

Scowl Power, Jason Kendall

"ich bin ein reliever," Joe Kennedy

Kolossal Klown Power, Bobby Kielty

most outfield assists since 1999, Mark Kotsay

Esteban Loaiza, the clarity of cutter control

stretched and ready, Adam Melhuse

.355 lifetime on the first pitch, Jay Payton

indispensible and all-purpose, Kirk Saarloos

Mr. Clutch, Marco ("f*ckin'") Scutaro

a dead end for opposing teams, Huston Street

2nd-generation superstar-in-the-making, Nick Swisher

first ballot Hall of Famer, Frank Thomas

the best curveball in the majors, Barry Zito

25 men, one goal. 2 down, 9 to go, one game at a time.

Eyes on the prize, friends... hold on.

The WORD, Athletics Style

emperor nobody — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 01:16:32 -0000

Blez got me wondering about what it'd be like if Stephen Colbert did an A's-themed segment of his epic "The Word". It was a sloooooooow day at work with no game to go home to, so I went for it with both barrels blazing.... please be warned that it's kind of sarcastic and spares no barbs, but that it is ALL IN FUN and designed for your maximum amusement...just PLEASE don't take it too seriously!!!! "Any characters' resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental" and all that!

Enjoy!

...which brings us to tonight's Word: MAXIMIZE.

The Oakland Athletics are a most unlikely success story, a baseball team consistently able to do the most with the least available resources, often more effectively than perhaps any other professional sports franchise of modern times (The Word: 21st Century Team, 19th Century Payroll). They continuously show the ability to compete with the sport's elite, well-funded teams (The Word: BloSox, Bankees, Los Osos Angels of Arroyo Grande, each shown more times per segment on ESPN than the network logo) year after year due to their ability to MAXIMIZE their organizational skills and talent, marshalling their resources of money and brainpower towards a singular goal (The Word: To Avoid Ever Having to Move to Portland). And all this as a small-market team (The Word: Rent or Food? Pick One), playing in a blue-collar, working-class city (The Word: Terrifying, "Mad Max"-Type Street Gangs With Automatic Weapons Roaming the Night Accompanied By Packs of Rabid Dogs) constantly overshadowed by its glittering neighbor to the west, San Francisco (The Word: Ten-Dollar Latte).

The A's unusual formula for success (The Word: First-Round Playoff Exit) revolves around their General Manager, the ubiquitous Billy Beane (The Word: Sold His Soul to Lucifer for Eternal Youth and the Uncanny Ability to Draft Exceptional College Players). The Beane Approach is called "Moneyball," (The Word: How-the-Fuck-Are-We-Gonna-Win-Without-Any-Money?-Ball) a highly cerebral set of statistical theories (The Word: Math Geeks on the Loose, Hide the Slide Rules and the Abacus) centered upon the often-marginalized "On-Base Percentage" stat, which tracks how often a player reaches base between aggregate hits, bases-on-balls, and errors by the opposition (The Word: Walk So Many Damn Times That the Other Team Falls Gently Into a Deep, Catatonic Sleep and You Win the Game By Default). MAXIMIZE the bases while minimizing the outs, and you win a lot of baseball games (The Word: And Draw So Few Fans That Your Average Attendance Can Be Calculated Using the Fingers of Two Hands).

The other component of the Moneyball formula (The Word: Kind of Voodoo-esque, Probably Part of GM's Ongoing Arrangement With the Prince of Darkness) is the acquisition of undervalued role players (The Word: Guys Left On Your Doorstep In the Middle of the Night Because No Team Would Want Them, One Slump From a New Job With a Car Dealership) as opposed to expensive superstars in the prime of their careers (The Word: Broke-As-a-Joke-Land). Very often these athletes are undervalued not for their in-game performance with other teams that have released them (The Word: Hits .350 But Smears Body With Garlic and Motor Oil Before Game for Good Luck), but for their negative clubhouse reputations (The Word: Perpetual Entourage Consisting of Loudly-Chanting Hare Krishnas) or past bad behavior (The Word: Barely Cognitive, Hair-Trigger, Balls-Out Sociopaths). Past examples of this phenomenon have ranged from Jose Guillen (The Word: Broke Open Scioscia's Skull and Ate His Brains Before Orange County Police Were Summoned) to the team's current "bad boy," Milton Bradley (The Word: Responds to Taunts From Opposing Fans With Small Arms Fire From 9MM Glock Pistol Concealed in Uniform Pants).

This emphasis on under-the-radar talent, coupled with the team's incredible success at drafting and developing homegrown stars like wild-eyed southern boy Nick Swisher (The Word: Three Brain Channels--Dogs, Trucks and $1000 Vodka), boyishly young closer Huston Street (The Word: Can I Please See Some ID, Son?) and Bobby Crosby (The Word: Pictured Next to Definition of "Underachieving, Conceited Headcase" in Merriam-Webster "Dictionary of Sports Terminology") have led to yearly contention in the highly competitive American League West (The Word: So Terminally Lousy That the Combination of You, Me, and 23 Other Dudes in Somewhat-Reasonable Physical Condition Could Run Away With It). In fact, some experts (The Word: Tin Foil Hats) have gone so far as to predict that, if they MAXIMIZE what they have, this could indeed be the year when the A's "go all the way" (The Word: Team Features Unusually High Concentration of Virgins) and actually win the World Series (The Word: Equally-As-Unusually Large Supply of High-Grade Angel Dust In Press Box This Year)!

Of course, it's not all roses in Athletics-land (The Word: Next to "Children's Fairy Land," Near Lake Merritt) these days as the A's make their run at the MLB crown. The team has fallen victim to a ridiculously intense spate of injuries, prompting Head Trainer Larry Davis (The Word: Hiring a 300-Pound Man to Get and Keep Guys In Shape Is Like Hiring a Crackhead As Your 12-Step Counselor) to just about throw up his hands in despair (The Word: Or Throw Down Another 17-Course Italian Meal). Key players like ace pitcher Rich Harden (The Word: Suffers From Rare "Paper-Maiche Elbow" Syndrome Common to Canadians For Some Strange Reason), Frank Thomas (The Word: 25-Year-Old Swing, But 97-Year-Old Feet) and Esteban Loaiza (The Word: Beane Should Have Just Spent the 7 Million on Most Excessive Crystal Meth Binge World Has Ever Seen) have all spent significant time on the disabled list, as has the aforementioned Milton Bradley (The Word: Major League Baseball's Reigning "Dugout Olympics of Sunflower Seed Flicking" Champion).

Then there are the issues of declining attendance (The Word: Hard to Draw Customers When Your Team Struggles to Surpass Overall Excitement Level of Watching Galaxy Expand Over the Course of Billions of Years), the outdated stadium the team calls home (The Word: Maximum Security Concrete Prison, But With Concession Stands and More Foul Territory), and the inability of the city of Oakland (The Word: More Concerned With Building Expensive Loft Housing for Non-Existent Upper-Middle-Class People That Will Never Live There) to follow through on a plan for a new, state-of-the-art ballpark (The Word: Possible New Names for Team Include "Campbell A's of Los Gatos" and "Montreal Expos") that will grow the team's dedicated-but-undersized fan base (The Word: Currently Consists of 14 Guys With Those Beer-Holder Double-Cup Hats -- One Cup Green, One Cup Gold --- and several slammin' percussionists).

So we'll just have to wait and see what happens (The Word: Lofty, Hopeful, Idyllic Expectations Dashed By Excruciating Frustration and Mind-Numbing, Heroin-Habit-Inducing Heartbreak) with this most unusual of professional sports franchises. Who knows? Maybe this will, indeed, be the year that the Athletics and their fans (The Word: Best Sports-Related Blog of All Time, Notwithstanding Oaktoon) have waited for, and the team will find a way to MAXIMIZE their chances for a World Series ring (The Word: Greater Probability Benevolent Extra-Terrestrial Species Will Land on White House Lawn and Solve Earth's Myriad Problems, But We Can Hope, Can't We?)!!!!

And that, my friends, is The Word.

tonight's so-weird-but-so-true A's game experience

emperor nobody — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 06:40:20 -0000

Me and my roommate went to the game, $2 seats in section 244. In the third inning we moved down (a $2 Wednesday tradition)... on the way down I purchased a Pepsi because I wanted the 2006 A's schedule cup it came in. After a sip or two I dumped out the wretched excuse for a potable beverage and put the cup in the left pocket of my sweatshirt.

We settled into section 106 in the 7th row, halfway between 1st base and right field (near the visitors' bullpen) and took in the blowout of a game. In the top of the eighth Pudge Rodriguez, classically an off-field hitter, came up and hit a foul fly ball directly at us.

Now, 3 Sundays ago I severely injured my left foot ill-advisedly climbing a fence and it's healing but still damaged, so when the giant, not-so-slightly overweight guy across the aisle from us backed towards me and raised his arms to try to catch the ball, I backed up lest my foot get stepped on and reinjured. A bunch of people kind of converged and I didn't see where the ball went, but once no one seemed to have overtly caught it I had I feeling I knew where it had ended up.

That's right, a hole-in-one, right into the cup in my left sweatshirt pocket, on the fly. I never even raised my hands to get it, it just landed directly in the cup. I got a standing ovation from the sections around us and even got to tip my cap to the crowd.

37 years of going to games, my first foul ball, and in the strangest of ways... you could hit a million balls and not have it go right into the cup like that.

Sorry for the dumb diary but I wanted to share this most bizarre highlight from an otherwise lackluster A's loss. I hope Barry puts the big Z on them tomorrow.

M. Bradley, Black Athletes and Sports Media: the Miniseries

emperor nobody — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 10:30:12 -0000

or, How I Wrote Another Ill-Advised Term Paper on AN and Got My Balls In a Blender For It

I was just thinking about how intense the mass media lemmings are around hyping these players' "off-field difficulties". It's never not time for them to write endless columns about Ron Artest, Terrell Owens, Milton Bradley... not a "Sportscenter" escapes Bristol, CT without some feature or 34 about another "troubled athlete". When Latrell Sprewell fought PJ Carlesimo it was like a week's worth of "Nightline". There's probably more media stationed outside T.O.'s house then there are actively investigating the missing WMDs over in UnoCalistan, I mean Iraq.

I guess part of why this is is the classic "if it bleeds it leads, if it thinks it stinks" mode of journalism, part of the general "Society of the Spectacle" theories about how people want controversy and drama and a kind of adrenalized, risky excitement. Media outlets stress this stuff because they feel pressured to provide the most thrilling, provocative content to satisfy consumers and sponsors alike.

The fact that it seems like every one of these athletes happens to be black seems to me to be where the facade gets peeled back and we see the man behind the curtain, a primordial racism dating back to the origins of America, when people of African descent could at best only count for 3/5 of a human being because they were "savages," uncivilizable primitives of endemically lower worth. I think they are always showing in particular the violent incidents, like when Artest went into the stands (played to this day again and again on TV), or last year when our new left fielder threw the baseballs all over the place, because they are pandering to this aspect in the public that still harbors these mythological fears of (and fascination with) the "savage". If you read articles about Bradley, for instance, there's almost this tone of bemused surprise when the writers talk to him and find him to be articulate and intelligent, not resembling the carnival attraction they feel they need to sell their rags. I just listened to the inane interview Ralph Barbieri did with Bradley on KNBR yesterday (the one subsequently--and IMO rightly--characterized on the air by Billy Beane as one for which The Razor "should be ashamed"), and he asked not a single relevant baseball question... instead of asking what the outfield will be like with 3 proven CFs, or how MB's speed on the bases will fit in with the more conservative approach Moneyball takes to the stolen base, every query was essentially a variation on "So, you're like a caged animal, famous for totally uncontrollable rampages. Are you sorry?" It was the same with Albert Belle, the press would follow him around waiting for him to explode so they could go, "Look! He's exploding! Film at 11!" as if they were stalking wild beasts of prey on safari.

Maybe I will get the big flaming for writing this but there just seems to be too much of this around, where black athletes are singled out in particular under this microscope to be prodded and poked and have their outbursts or bizarre endzone celebrations and gyrations serialized ad infinitum, as if to somehow judgementally gauge or negatively portray the reactions that the "savage" has when plucked from the zoo (where he is unconsciously perceived to have come from by the public, fed on a diet from birth the spectacular mythology of an uber-predatory criminal ghetto underclass) and placed in the more "sophisticated" arena of organized pro sports.

Love to hear the thoughts of AN, itself an oasis of quality and nuanced information amid the desert of sports media, on this subject.