As you may have noticed, there has been a great deal of discussion lately about what's wrong with how this blog is moderated. Much of that discussion took place in elcroata's post on Dec 28, and the title of my post is a direct quote from his. Although the title of his post was "Banning mikev", both in the main post and especially in this comment elcroata emphasized that what is most important here is not the dispute between Nico and Mike, but rather what system of rules we as a community want to have in place that will make Athletics Nation a fairer and better blog. Curiously, I heard a parallel sentiment from Nico, viewing the same issue from the other side. Nico has expressed concern that the health of AN has been threatened by an increase of disrespectful attitudes and meta conversation driving out actual baseball talk. In one of his first emails to the mods about the current crisis, he concluded by saying that regardless of what happens to him (Nico), the deeper problem is how to address the health of AN.

With that in mind, I'd like to continue the discussion about what sort of place we would like Athletics Nation to be and what sort of rules we could have to best serve that vision. And while there's no sense trying to hide the fact that the controversy with Nico and Mike V is what has raised most of these issues, it is my hope that we'll set aside any debate about those two specifically and what either of them has done, in order to focus on the general case for any blog administrator and any member.

(Warning: This post is very long. I tend toward verbosity anyway, and this one is long even for me. Also, in case you didn't see the warning in the title, this post invites meta discussion, so enter at your own risk.)

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[UPDATE (Dec 18): This post is out of date. I made an error with the order in the sandwich round and I'm no longer current with recent signings (eg, Rollins). I am not updating my list because a similar effort at Twinkie Town, SBN's Twins' blog, is more thorough and more accurate. For a better assessment of likely draft order, I recommend that post.]

Over in another thread, there is some discussion of where the A's draft picks will be next year. I took a shot at trying to figure it out. As long as I'm doing so, I may as well write a post about it. This serves two purposes: First, it shares my work with the rest of AN. Second, it lets you help make sure I get it right.

In fact, I'm not at all sure I've got it right. With regard to the rules, I think I have them correct, but it's possible I've missed something. With regard to the signings so far, I'm not at all sure I've got all of them, but even if I have, there will no doubt be more soon.

So please chime in with any corrections or updates in the comments. I'll try to edit the main post where I can.

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The F is for fortnightly. "Fortnight" is a fancy and old-fashioned term meaning two weeks. As intriguing as the word appears, its etymology is not particularly exciting: It's simply a shortening of the Middle English for "fourteen nights".

It's been a few days more than a fortnight since our last "D"LD, so we're overdue for a new one. At great personal sacrifice, I've pulled myself away from the extremely exciting World Series (is it over yet?) to write this one.

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A simple DLD this evening before July comes to a close. No crazy epic iglevian thematic arc this time. Just a few links that might please you. And lots of big words. And YouTubes!

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In tonight's game recap thread there was a mention of Guillermo Moscoso and Miguel Cabrera hailing from the same "town" in Venezuela. In the course of replying to that, it occurred to me that AN might be interested in a somewhat rambly and somewhat baseball-related sketch of Venezuela, so as to have a better idea of the place names there. I'm writing this stream of consciousnessly without a lot of research, so don't expect encyclopedic coherence, but hopefully it will be interesting and leave you knowing more than you did before.

Napoleon said that the key to any nation is its geography, a sentiment echoed by my favorite historian, Fernand Braudel. (What, you don't have a favorite historian?) The continent of South America is defined by its mountains, and so too is the country of Venezuela. Here is a map I found on the Web somewhere. The title of the website is "Free Printable Maps" so I assume that means it's OK for me to copy it here.

The big brownish area in the southeast is the Guiana Highlands. They are a strange sort of mountains which technically are not mountains at all. They are what geologists call a craton, an unusually stable piece of earth's crust which has survived intact while other bits all around it have merged and rifted and eroded and all those other things that the ground does over many millennia. The result is that the Guiana Highlands are an area of table-top mountains with high flat tops and lots of sudden cliffs. Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world, is somewhere in there.

Angel Falls, by the way, are not named after any heavenly being nor any baseball player wearing an ugly red uniform. They were named for Jimmie Angel, an American aviator who discovered them some time in the 1930s. A few years later he went back and tried to land at the top, but he crashed his little plane. It was a minor crash and everyone survived, but they had a very long and difficult walk back to civilization. The plane remained there until 1970 when it was removed to be reassembled in a museum in Maracay, the city where Guillermo Moscoso and Miguel Cabrera are from.

Venezuela's other mountains are in the northwest. This time it's a proper mountain range, a spur of the Andes, extending from Colombia and petering out into a range of hills along the coast. These hills, as we shall soon see, define where most of the population of Venezuela actually lives. The big green area between the two mountain areas is the Orinoco valley. The Orinoco is a big river with lots and lots of tributaries that make it into a big flat wet floodplain, sort of a miniature version of the Amazon. (But the Amazon is so ginormous that even a miniature version is still quite big.)

Venezuela south of the Orinoco is one of the wildest places in the world. Vegetatively it is rain forest, sort of the like the Amazon, but protected; topographically it has the ridiculous high cliffs we were talking about. The Orinoco Delta is a huge swampy area, more water than land. The north side of the Orinoco valley is a bit more settled, but it's still pretty sparse.

Here's another free map, this time from Wikipedia, showing the cities and states.

The big double line through the middle is indeed the Orinoco River. The other lines are not rivers; they are borders between the states. Although population is not shown, you can get an idea from the size of the states where all the people live. The big states are the empty ones, and the little ones are the densely populated ones. If you remember topographic map above, you'll notice that the population follows that hilly extension of the mountain range. This is no coincidence. Venezuela is in the tropics. Down in the flatlands it is muggy and hot. Up in the hills, it's still muggy and hot, but in a nicer way. That mountain range is actual two parallel ridges. Moving inland and westward from Caracas (the capital; that's why it's in capital letters), settlement is on both outer slopes and especially in the valley between. Moving east from Caracas, settlement mostly follows the coast.

One anomalous area of Venezuela is in the far west, where Maracaibo is. Around the large Lake Maracaibo — they call it a lake but it's really more like a big bay or lagoon — is another flat plain. (You can see this on the first map.) Although there are plenty of roads connecting it now, for most of its history the Maracaibo area was geographically separate from the rest of Venezuela, so in that sense it's sort of like the west coast of the United States. Unlike California, the Maracaibo area is not particularly fertile. It does, however, have oil reserves, which helped to catapult Maracaibo to the Venezuela's second city.

Carlos González is from Maracaibo. People from Maracaibo and its environs are called "Marabinos". (If I knew why I would tell you, but I don't.) That's how we came to call him the "Marabino patrol craft" for a bit. Some other Marabinos in baseball are Wilson Alvarez and Jhoulys and Gustavo Chacin.

Baseball

In terms of baseball, you can throw out the whole bottom 80% of Venezuela, including the four southernmost cities on the map, and just look at that band of urbanization following the hilly ridge plus Maracaibo. The eight other cities on the map do not exactly match the eight teams of the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League but they're pretty close. When you hear about someone playing "winter league" in Venezuela, they're talking about the LVBP (for the acronym, the words are rearranged Spanish-wise). The LVBP plays a 63-game season from October to December with playoffs in January. The league champion gets to play in the Caribbean Series, a four-way tournament for the top teams from Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

Baseball not only follows urban settlement, it also follows American influence. The story of baseball in Latin America — by which we really mean in the Caribbean — is the story of American commerce. That, incidentally, is the answer to why we have lots of baseball in Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, but little or none in Haiti, Jamaica or Guatemala. (It's also why what little baseball there is in Colombía is focused entirely in the cities of the north coast near Venezuela, with practically none at all in the rest of the country.) Early in the 20th century, Americans invested heavily in Venezuela, creating strong commercial links. Americans and Venezuelans who went back and forth between the countries took a seed from America's baseball tree and planted it in Venezuela's fertile soil.

The five largest cities in Venezuela, all shown on the Wikipedia map, are Caracas, Maracaibo, Valencia, Barquisimeto, and Maracay. (This link should jump back to the map, if you need another look. Then click your browser's "back" button to return here.) Each has a team in the eight-team LVBP. Of those five teams, only one team is named for the city, los Leones del Caracas ("Caracas Lions"). The Leones, the oldest team, used to be called the Cervecería Caracas, which loosely translates to the "Brewers". The new name reflects the city's full name, which is "Santiago de León de Caracas". People from Caracas are called "Caraqueños", by the way, which makes more sense than "Marabino". There are many Caraqueños in MLB, including Ramón Hernandez and Omar Vizquel.

Like the Rockies and Diamondbacks, the teams in Maracaibo, Barquisimeto and Maracay are named for their states rather than their cities. They are, respectively, los Águilas del Zulia ("Zulia Eagles"), Cardenales de Lara ("Lara Cardinals"), and Tigres de Aragua ("Aragua Tigers"). If you're still looking at the Wikipedia map (jump back), you might think that Maracay is in a very tiny state, but actually that's a flaw in the map. That little circle is in fact Lago de Valencia, a large lake with Maracay on the east and Valencia on the west. The state of Aragua on the Wiki map is actually the area to the right where the word "Maracay" appears.

To the left is the state of Carabobo, which the team in Valencia seemingly ought to be named after but isn't. They are simply los Navegantes de Magallanes ("Magellan's Navigators") with no place name at all. Another Carabobo city shown on the map, Puerto Cabello, does not have a team, but it's a city with a strong baseball tradition. Pablo Sandoval and Carlos Zambrano are from there.

A sixth team is los Tiburones de la Guaira ("La Guaira Sharks"). Caracas is about 20 miles from the coast, and La Guaira is its port city. Although it really is a separate city, it's close enough that you can think of it as a second Caracas team, sort of like the Yankees and the Mets.

The last two teams were expansion teams added in 1991, both in the east, though one wasn't originally. The Caribes de Anzoátegui play in Puerto la Cruz, which you can see on the map (jump back). They were originally called the Caribes de Oriente ("Caribs of the East"). The Caribs were an indigenous people who used to live in the area, and whom the Caribbean Sea was named after, so I supposed that's sort of like naming a team the "Indians".

The other expansion team was originally located in Cabimas, on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo; then later moved to Acarigua, a medium-sized city between Barquisimeto and Valencia; then finally went east to la Isla de Margarita, the large island you can see just north of Cumana on the Wiki map. With the latter move, the team was renamed los Bravos de Margarita, usually translated "Margarita Braves" except that there is no native American connotation in the word "bravos". In Spanish (or Italian) history, a bravo is a sort of private soldier with a reputation for daring and rough belligerence. (That's being kind. In the literature I know, the bravi are thugs, but I suppose you could say that about raiders or buccaneers, too.) Margarita Island is something of a touristy area, which nice beaches, shops, and so forth.

Speaking of islands, they don't show on the Wikipedia map, which shows Venezuela only, but on the topographic map you can see a few islands off the northwestern coast (jump back to first map). The one just right of "Venezuela" on the map is Aruba, and the one a bit further right from that is Curaçao. Both islands were Dutch colonies and are currently in some sort of semi-autonomous relation with the Netherlands. They have some baseball there, too. Sidney Ponson is from Aruba. In 2003 he was granted the Order of Orange-Nassau, which is a sort of Dutch knighthood, so I guess he's "Sir Sidney" now. Andruw Jones and Jair Jurrjens are from Curaçao. "Andruw" is not just a crazy misspelling like "Jhonny"; that's the normal way to spell Andrew in Dutch.

We see a lot of discussion on Athletics Nation about trade the A's have made. For those of us with short memories, there are plenty of helpful people always ready to remind us of trades from years past. These people are especially good at reminding us of trades where the guy we gave away went on to become a good player elsewhere.

That's understandable. Everyone knows that to get Milton Bradley in 2006 we gave up Andre Ethier. That's because any time you're watching ESPN and they mention how Ethier had a good day, you think to yourself, "Hey, didn't that guy used to be ours?" On the other hand, few people remember who we gave up to get Michael Wuertz in 2009. No one ever sees Richie Robnett's name and thinks "Hey, didn't that guy used to be ours?" because no one ever sees Richie Robnett's name at all. Unless you happen to happen to be attending a Camden River Sharks game, you're never going to hear about Robnett because he's a washed-up scrub playing in the Independent leagues.

To get a more balanced view of Billy Beane's trades, you need to see all of them at once. There are several online sources for MLB transactions, but they have varying levels of completeness, accuracy, and ease of use. None alone is entirely satisfactory. Therefore, I've done my best to scour all the sources and create a complete list of my own.

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As our beloved A’s continue their quest to be the first team in MLB history to have a 20-game winning streak and a 20-game losing streak, we hard-working analysts at AN continue to explore alternate lineups.

Yesterday some old dude posted a lineup with a bunch of guys who were great in the 1970s and 1980s. Psssh. Geezer. Get with the times, Joe. We don’t need that tired old nostalgia stuff. We need something fresh, something young, something hip. We need ... the Nineties!

Ah, the 1990s! The golden age of television networks. For decades there were only three TV channels. (Well, and PBS. Yeah, like that even counts.) But then suddenly new channels were popping up all over. Fox! UPN! the WB! And they had cool shows, too. Alas, it would not last. Nowadays, nobody even knows what a TV channel is, what with all the Netflix and Hulu and YouTube and stuff. TV is no longer TV. It’s all blurred together with movies and Internet in one big multimedia blob.

Anyway, here’s my proposed team:

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In a game thread earlier this month, someone happened to mention former Oakland Athletic Adam Piatt. In the fascinating conversation that ensued, we saw not only two limericks but also the speculation that Piatt perhaps had the least successful career of any player mentioned in the Mitchell Report, or at least the fewest games played.

When I counter-speculated that there were probably several who played fewer games, Stormtown said she'd like to see a list by WAR. I didn't have time to compile it at the time. Now I do:

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There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

To find the answer, we're running this set of polls. Vote for the player you think is most good-looking. Or if your favorite is not listed, vote "write-in" and name him in the comments. Anyone on the A's 40-man roster is eligible. All AN members are welcome to vote, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Straight guys, it's OK to judge how good-looking men are, so don't be shy. Go ahead and vote. It won't make you gay, I promise.

Daric and Andrew have made the list. Who will be #10? DeHotness? MaEl? Who will get the coveted last spot on the 10-man hottie roster?

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There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

To find the answer, we're running this set of polls. Vote for the player you think is most good-looking. Or if your favorite is not listed, vote "write-in" and name him in the comments. Anyone on the A's 40-man roster is eligible. All AN members are welcome to vote, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Straight guys, it's OK to judge how good-looking men are, so don't be shy. Go ahead and vote. It won't make you gay, I promise.

Kurt Suzuki sneaks ahead of Daric Barton in late voting to win the #7 spot. Who will be #8?

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There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

To find the answer, we're running this set of polls. Vote for the player you think is most good-looking. Or if your favorite is not listed, vote "write-in" and name him in the comments. Anyone on the A's 40-man roster is eligible. All AN members are welcome to vote, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Straight guys, it's OK to judge how good-looking men are, so don't be shy. Go ahead and vote. It won't make you gay, I promise.

Marlboro Man Josh Willingham wins the runoff poll for spot #6. For #7 we're back to the regular poll format with lots of candidates.

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There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

To find the answer, we're running this set of polls. Vote for the player you think is most good-looking. Or if your favorite is not listed, vote "write-in" and name him in the comments. Anyone on the A's 40-man roster is eligible. All AN members are welcome to vote, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Straight guys, it's OK to judge how good-looking men are, so don't be shy. Go ahead and vote. It won't make you gay, I promise.

Voting for #6 was too close to call. Andrew Bailey and Daric Barton finished in a dead heat with 13 votes each. Josh Willingham and Kurt Suzuki were right behind with 12 and 11 votes respectively.

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There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

To find the answer, we're running this set of polls. Vote for the player you think is most good-looking. Or if your favorite is not listed, vote "write-in" and name him in the comments. Anyone on the A's 40-man roster is eligible. All AN members are welcome to vote, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Straight guys, it's OK to judge how good-looking men are, so don't be shy. Go ahead and vote. It won't make you gay, I promise.

Brainz R hawt. Craig Breslow narrowly beats out Kurt Suzuki the #5 spot. Who gets your vote for #6?

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There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

To find the answer, we're running this set of polls. Vote for the player you think is most good-looking. Or if your favorite is not listed, vote "write-in" and name him in the comments. Anyone on the A's 40-man roster is eligible. All AN members are welcome to vote, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Straight guys, it's OK to judge how good-looking men are, so don't be shy. Go ahead and vote. It won't make you gay, I promise.

Soap opera star Conor Jackson wins the #4 spot. Who gets your vote for #5?

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There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

To find the answer, we're running this set of polls. Vote for the player you think is most good-looking. Or if your favorite is not listed, vote "write-in" and name him in the comments. All AN members are welcome to vote, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Straight guys, it's OK to judge how good-looking men are, so don't be shy. Go ahead and vote. It won't make you gay, I promise.

Wait, did I say "vote for #4"? Did you miss round #3? No, you didn't. It was a close contest between Ryan Sweeney and Rich Harden, but none of the others were even close, so I've declared them winners for the #2 and #3 spots. I know that's not very scientific. So sue me.

Continue reading this post »

There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

To find the answer, we're running this set of polls. Vote for the player you think is most good-looking. Or if your favorite is not listed, vote "write-in" and name him in the comments. All AN members are welcome to vote, regardless of gender or sexual preference. Straight guys, it's OK to judge how good-looking men are, so don't be shy. Go ahead and vote. It won't make you gay, I promise.

Dreamy-eyed metrosexual Gio Gonzalez won the first round in a close race, getting off to an early lead on Saturday and then holding on against late-weekend surges from past-year favorites Ryan Sweeney and Rich Harden. Who will be #2?

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There is a very important question that needs to be answered in this off-season: Now that Travis and Chavvy are gone, who is AN's favorite hottie on the team? We must research this.

Fortunately, AN already has a methodology, over on the serious side of the blog. Zonis has kindly given me permission to copy the system he uses for the AN Community Prospect Poll. The difference is that over there they are ranking the guys in the farm system based on how good we think they will be at baseball, whereas here we will rank the guys on the major-league roster based on how good-looking we think they are.

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Jack Cust is no longer an Oakland A. He signed with the Seattle Mariners.

Many A's fans think Cust was a lousy player and they are glad to see him gone. Many other A's fans think those people are stupid and/or crazy for thinking so.

Me, personally, I think Cust was a very good hitter, and I'm sorry to see him go. However, I also think Athletics Nation should be a place where every A's fan feels free to express his or her opinion, even if that opinion happens to be that Cust sucks. I've noticed that any negative opinion about Cust is unwelcome in the front-page open thread. Furthermore such opinions are now being flagged as "trolling" -- as if expressing a dissenting opinion is not only intolerable but is somehow actively taunting those who share in the majority opinion.

This FanPost, therefore, is a place for Cust haters to come and express how much they think Cust sucks and how glad they are that he is gone, without inadvertently offending others or trolling. If you wish to back up your opinions with facts or logical arguments, you are welcome to do so, but -- and I wish to make this explicitly clear -- such justification is not required here.

For those of you who do like Cust and who consider ignorant and illogical Cust hate to be insulting or offensive, I invite you to register your disdain in the poll, but otherwise I recommend you stay out of this discussion since it will only make you upset. Please do not come in here and turn this into a stats-vs-eyes argument. Just let us have our little room in which to vent our illogic and stupidity. Thanks.

OK, I don’t play the GOG and I hardly even look at them, so I’m not real sure how this is supposed to work. But Micdog and Cuppingmaster and Where’s My Burrito were crazy enough to encourage me to take this last one. I hope it’s not too impossible to score.

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Like many of my FanPosts, this one began as a comment on another thread, in this case PL78's What to do with Mark Ellis?. But it has taken me a day to formulate my thoughts, and that post has already fallen off the list — and besides that, it had some squabbling that I'm happy to leave behind — so I'll start again with a fresh post.

In case you missed it, PL78 started a conversation about whether to trade Ellis and introduced it with some thoughts of his own. Grover opined that that introduction was error-ridden and poorly thought-out. When asked for examples of errors, one thing grover cited was PL's characterization of Ellis as "he of sparkling defense". In fact, grover said, Ellis's defense has been mediocre for the past year and a half and anyone who had done his homework should have known that.

This took me by surprise because I didn't know that Ellis's defense has been mediocre. I don't follow the stats as closely as the smart guys here, and as a non-resident fan who has had real world distractions this year I've missed a lot of games, but I don't consider myself clueless either. When I read "sparkling defense" in PL's post, that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. After all, Ellis does have good defense, doesn't he?

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This was originally written as a response to Nico's front page post, the one where he says "Good teams don't play a lot of close games". But it got kind of long, so I've made a separate FanPost out of it instead.

Nico, I'm surprised that this post hasn't been challenged more. Maybe it's true that all the stat guys have left AN. Or maybe they just don't want to post in a Nico post because it always turns into an ugly food fight when they do.

But it needs to be said.

As you know, I'm not an absolutist, so I'm not going to say "the numbers prove you wrong." Still, there is strong evidence that your "great and important point" is simply traditional conventional wisdom that does not accurately describe reality. On the other hand, Beane's observations, as unsatisfying as they feel to us, do make sense.

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As promised, a fresh daily weekly link dump — they're not really daily any more, are they? — in the standard Iglevian style: a long and wordy, self-indulgent narrative with lots of oddball trivia, etymology, and veiled references along the way. This one is loosely framed by the history of a certain song that DMOAS and Leopold Bloom are fond of, but with much more digressions than main storyline. There's more music than in the last dump (including some opera, even), more YouTubery than you'd expect, little or no baseball, but lots of shout-outs to various denizens of AN.

It begins after the jump.

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Recent DLDs have been dominated by movies, video games, pop music, XKCD comics, technogeek toys, and more video games. As micdoc2001 (the primary promoter of these things) would be the first to acknowledge, this is only because nobody else is posting a DLD with anything else, and it's not his fault if he's the only one willing to step up and fill the void.

Not that I'm out to push my own eccentric tastes or anything, but just for the sake of variety, here's a DLD with some different flavors.

One thing you'll notice is that none of my links are tied to the present. Everything I link would be just as "current" last September or next May. This is no accident. I am of the belief that anything that is no longer interesting once it stops being current, probably wasn't very interesting in the first place.

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Driving through Tacoma the other day, I happened to contemplate how both the A's and the Mariners have their AAA team fairly nearby. I wondered how many other MLB teams also keep their AAA within easy driving distance.

Mostly for my own edification and amusement, I did a little research and calculated the distance for each MLB team to its affiliated AAA team. Since the work is done, I figured I may as well post it here on the off chance that anyone else is interested.

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I don’t know what the upgrade schedule is for the SB Nation tech crew, but now that they’re done with the minor facelift and the regular season is over, I figure this is a good time to exchange notes about technical fixes and feature requests. I’ve seen occasional comments in other threads over the year, but I’m sure the techs never see them. If we put them all in one place, maybe they will.

Although the two are sometimes connected, I’d rather not let this thread be about the recent update to the look of the site. Perhaps there could be another thread for that. For this one I’m more interested in functionality than appearance.

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I've managed to extract from the MLB audio archive the moment where A's radio announcer Ken Korach expresses his disgust with the A's performance. The play that triggers the response is the one last night where a high fly ball dropped between Cust and Kennedy, but listening to the whole broadcast you can tell that's just the culminating event after an evening full of poor play.

To those who don't know Korach, it won't sound very impressive. His words are far less extreme than what we hear in game threads every day. But those who listen to the radio broadcast regularly know that Ken is almost never critical of the A's — not because he's an aggressive homer, but just because he's such a mellow and good-natured guy that he never has a harsh word for anyone at all.

Leaving out Vince's comments and Ken's calling of the subsequent play, here's what Ken said:

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Beane's and Geren's friendship gets mentioned a lot on AN. It comes up frequently in game threads and game recap discussion -- especially on days when the A's lose -- but for all the mentions, there's very little real discussion. I think the topic warrants serious thought, and not just the unwarranted assumptions and snide remarks I see in the game threads.

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There were a zillion trade diaries yesterday, and yet this morning when I return to post my thoughts, it’s not obvious where they should go. I don’t want to fill up the DLD with trade talk, since that should be a haven for readers who don’t want to discuss the trade. The big trade diaries have all been pushed down from the front page. There’s a few new little trade diaries, but none are even close to getting enough recommendations to make the top list.

So for lack of any better place to add my comments, I’ll just make a new trade diary.

I was late to the party last night, so it took me all evening to get caught up on all the discussions, but I did manage to read (almost) everything. My next-day observations:

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Dear Bob Geren,

Next Tuesday, May 27, is Frank Thomas's 40th birthday. On that day, the A's are scheduled to start a series against the Toronto Blue Jays, Frank's former team. The media is bound to notice that and give it a little attention.

We, the undersigned, believe that we know the perfect way to celebrate Frank's birthday. We believe he should bat lead-off in that game. According to Baseball Reference, Frank has never started a game batting lead-off. We think he'd get a big kick out of it.

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In yesterday's game thread, Future Ed asked, "How many names are needed for a complete line up? 4?" and he proposed a lineup made up of Suzukis, Sweeneys, Ramirezes, and Sanchezes. I'm sure one could complete a lineup card with just three names, it's only a question of how deep one has to dig into the minor leagues to do it.

This suggests an amusing puzzle: What's the best team you can construct using only three last names? Go ahead and fill out the roster as far as you like, but I guarantee you'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time you reach 25. Pitching counts, too. Try to come up with enough staff to get through a playoff series.

No restrictions on where the players come from, but every player is considered in terms of his talent right now. So if you want to promote someone from the minors (or college, or Japan) or bring someone out of retirement, go ahead ... but if he's not in the big leagues right now, it's probably because he isn't that good.

Here's my best effort:

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