Posts Tagged ‘Oakland Athletics’
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Buyers and SellersJuly 20th, 2008
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Well, it is officially that time of year. With the trade deadline just around the corner, teams are either going to start their pushes for the playoffs or prep for next season. While some teams are always in the same selling mode, there are always a few surprising teams out to buy.
This year’s the surprise buying team is the Tampa Bay Rays. They have seem to come out of nowhere and are contending. They started the second half the season one half game out of first place (behind the Boston Red Sox).
The Oakland Athletics however, look to be in a sellers market. This is a different feeling for the A’s fan. For the past few years the A’s have contended each year.
With all the injuries last year, the A’s were not contenders but they didn’t sell out their player’s mid-season either. But that changed during the off-season.
During the previous off-season, the A’s became sellers. The team was involved in four trades that affected the team this year right away. Read more
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For Jay Gibbons, Forgiveness Is a Minor League Contract AwayJune 19th, 2008
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Jay Gibbons dropped to his knees and asked for a second chance.
After being named in the Mitchell Report and being released from the Baltimore Orioles by Chief Operating Officer Andy MacPhail for reasons disclosed as performance-related, Gibbons did something he termed, “both painful and humiliating.” The designated hitter wrote a letter to all thirty Major League teams hoping that someone, anyone would give him a chance to ride the buses of the Minor Leagues.
It’s a move of passion not economics.
Because the Baltimore Orioles still owe him $11.9 million over the next two years, presumably, Gibbons could easily thrust his head into the sand, like the higher profile PED user Mark McGwire, and be comfortable in his anonymity for the rest of his life.
Gibbons even offered to donate his entire Minor League salary to his parent team’s charity. Should he make it to the Big Leagues, he writes that he would “gladly donate a significant sum to that same charity.” Read more
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Luck? No, It’s Physics.June 5th, 2008
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I bet none of those guys - Newton, Einstein, etc - knew they were talkin’ ’bout baseball when they came up with all their theories. But oh! Look how nicely it all fits:
First Law of Motion: Once something is in motion, it usually stays that way until something really messes up its course.
Baseball is a game of patterns, and streaks. Seattle knows all about streaks, since it basically is the streakiest team in baseball. But it’s true, in essence, of every team. It’s also a game of contagion. Errors or mistakes (that may not be counted officially as errors, though you KNOW your players could’ve done better on that ground ball…) often come in pairs or series. The Angels are definitely a team of contagion, where most of their runs come in packages of two or three, and if one strikes out, the next two outs tend to follow shortly.
As far as streaks go, the Angels just finally ended a 13-game streak in which they only earned four or less runs per game. It took beating a division rival team stuck 13.5 games back to snap the streak. Luckily for the Angels, they were also 9-4 in that period, so it very little affected them, thanks to the great pitching as of late. They also had a streak of about a week where nearly every game ended in a walk-off. First, it was Anderson’s walk-off walk. Talk about the most exciting ending to a baseball game… zZzZz… and then it was Rivera’s walk-off single, Junior’s walk-off single, and my personal favorite, Kendrick’s getting beaned and Maicer’s subsequent walk-off single. Really, that’s all Kendrick is good for – getting beaned. Sure, it makes for very exciting baseball – to win by a run, or to win in the bottom of the ninth with two out and the bases loaded. But after a week of the same thing every game, it starts getting to my stress levels. STOP IT ALREADY!
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Sox Head West, Offense Goes SouthMay 30th, 2008
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Superman has his Kryptonite. Spider-Man has his forever-conflicting sense of responsibility. And the oh-so-close-to-being-immortal Achilles had that pesky heel thing.
But the fatal weakness for the Red Sox thus far this season has been quite simple—with no intergalactic travel required. Because just outside the friendly nooks and crannies of Fenway Park, the mighty Boston lineup tends to morph from a run-producing powerhouse into the motley crew that made up the anemic offense of the painfully awful ‘62 Mets.
OK, a bit of an exaggeration, for sure. After all, the Sox, despite a recent run-scoring outage, still maintain the second best road OPS in the American League. But with Boston dropping 10 of their last 12 away from the Fens—and averaging only 3.5 runs in the process—the team needs to take the nearest exit ramp off this road to perdition.
After the first six contests of a ten game trip—a West Coast swing through Oakland and Seattle before heading back east to square off against Baltimore this weekend—the Sox find themselves with only a single etch in the win column. Read more
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Still A Bit Doughy, Still Proving Scouts WrongMay 20th, 2008
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He leads the Red Sox in batting average and on-base percentage. And no, his name isn’t Manny Ramirez.
He ranks first on the club in extra-base hits, total bases, and slugging. And if you guessed David Ortiz, you’d be wrong.
In fact, he not only tops the Sox in runs created but also the entire American League through Sunday’s games. And fittingly, in this modified version of Guess Who, our mystery man trails just the Texas Rangers’ Milton Bradley in RC/27 (that is, runs created expressed as a rate stat per 27 outs rather than a raw number; not a droid model from Star Wars).
But does he have any facial hair?
Ah yes, finally, a pertinent factoid. While failing to outdo Manny’s Rastafarian mop and gnarled whiskers, this chap’s bristling goatee still manages to hold its own.
Of course! Our mystery man is no man at all—but rather, a god in the eyes of some baseball brethren.
Dubbed years ago as “Euclis, The Greek God of Walks” by the Oakland Athletics’ front office due to his historical minor league on-base prowess, first baseman Kevin Youkilis is no longer a deity of a single force.
These days, he’s more like “The Greek God of A Little Bit of Everything.” No, certainly not as catchy. And no, he’s not actually Greek, either.
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Surrounded By Negativity, Orioles Succumb to ItMay 8th, 2008
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The offseason has transformed from golfing and hunting trips to a several-month period in which to sculpt the perfect athletic body. Players lift weights, perform various cardio exercises, consult nutritionists, and guzzle supplements of the legal and illegal variety.
With so much effort being placed on becoming physically durable, athletes ignore their fragile psyche.
In the first half of the 20th century, scientific studies stated that the human body could not run a mile in four minutes. In 1954, a 25-year-old Brit by the name of Roger Bannister proved them wrong as he crossed the finish line in three minutes and 59.4 seconds. Only 46 days later, another would break the four minute mile. Fifty years later over 350 different runners had run a sub-four mile.
The mind sets limits on the body’s performance and can easily push athletes into a wall of impossibility.
Recently, the Orioles torrid start has cooled and they are stumbling with the finish line still 131 games away. Could the team be second-guessing their abilities because of a constant barrage of questions from the media asking whether or not they are for real?
At the very least, they are tired of answering them.