It looks like the Warriors are going to be more entertaining than the A’s this year; maybe I should change my TV-watching habits? Starting the season 0-6 was not so great, but getting back to a .500 record a mere 8 games later was quite impressive, and they’re now 11-8 after a very good comeback in tonight’s game.
My brain would seem to be rooting for the Rockies now. Which surprises me, given that I lived in Boston for nine years; I guess this is what happens when the Red Sox have recently won a World Series, have too much money, beat the Indians, and are up against a team that’s been an entertaining surprise.
I had not realized until listening to the radio today that the Diamondbacks’ best hitter is, in fact a pitcher. Only 60 ABs, but still: a .333 average, .683 slugging, 1.032 OPS isn’t shabby at all. The announcers were saying that he’d gone 4-4 twice this season, once with 2 HRs and the other time with 3 doubles.
An interesting analysis of the beneficial effects of Bonds’ armor on his swing. Sounds plausible to me, if not 75-100 home runs plausible; I’d be curious to read further studies on the topic.
And, if it’s true, what’s the proper way to deal with the situation? I guess I’d lean towards allowing body armor for everybody, with some amount of mechanical/weight restrictions.
I see we managed to foist Jason Kendall off on the Cubs. About time: not only is he blocking an actual prospect (Kurt Suzuki), his OPS is currently the worst in the majors by a full 40 points. He may have hit twice as many home runs this year as the last two years combined, but when that brings his total of Oakland home runs to 3, it’s not saying much.
I applauded the trade where we acquired him. I was wrong.
A couple of months into the season, I was not expecting the Harden-less A’s to have the 1st, 3rd, 11th, and 18th slots in AL starting pitcher ERA.
I am not, however, surprised that, despite that pitching performance, the only reason they’re four games over .500 is that they’ve won their last five…
The Indians are suffering from no such unbalance, fortunately.
Results here not so good, alas.
I am pleased with the first round of the playoffs this year.
For better or for worse, I’m not planning to get ALCS tickets, but if the A’s win, it would be nice to see a World Series game…
I haven’t been all that excited about the upcoming baseball season so far, but here it is. Kicking off with an Indians / White Sox game; I can support that.
I picked up the new Baseball Prospectus yesterday. Some nice tweaks to PECOTA (their player forecasting system), and the articles on the Indians and A’s were both interesting and cause for hope.
And then, for Jordan’s sake, I read the article on the O’s. A couple of quotes:
The 1978 Oakland A’s. One of the most disorganized teams of all time, worse even than the 2005 Orioles. Winners of three straight World Series just four years earlier, owner Charley Finley was unable and unwilling to adjust to the free agent revolution. He dumped everybody in an effort to save money, including his entire front office, eventually running the team himself with the help of a teenage kid who would latter become MC Hammer.
In case you’re curious, this is in the context of teams who were 14 games over .500 at some point in the season and later fell to 14 games under .500. (As the O’s did last year, while last year’s A’s and Astros managed the reverse.) Another “interesting” bit:
The best aggregate DH performance by a Baltimore team this millennium is the weak .250/.329/.398 posted by the 2001 squad. Since then, they’ve actually declined every year.
Ouch. Last year, in case you’re curious, their DH’s produced a BA/OBP/SLG line of .210/.277/.362.
Esteban Freaking Loaiza? A 33-year-old pitcher for three years at more than 7 million dollars a year? Was he as good as any member of the A’s starting rotation last year? Sigh…
Bill King, the radio voice of the A’s for the last 25 years, died two days ago. I loved listening to him; he was an excellent play-by-play announcer, and he pulled in a delightful wealth of external referents. It will not be the same listening to A’s games next year.
(At least those of us in the Bay Area get a little more Jon Miller than the rest of the country; that will help somewhat.)
The A’s were eliminated from the playoffs last night. Unfortunate, though a third (or a half?) of the way through the season most people would have considered it a miracle that they’d come this close. A bit of a let-down after the amazing tear that they went on, though.
All things considered, I’m quite happy with the season. Their preseason nominee for Rookie of the Year turned in a credible but not stunning rookie season (no surprise; I didn’t think he had RoY material myself); what I was not expecting was for him to be the fourth best rookie on the team. I’d never heard of Dan Johnson before; I had heard of Joe Blanton and Huston Street, but I was not expecting them to be quite possibly the two best rookies in the league. (Hmm; hometown bias showing. According to Baseball Prospectus, though, Blanton leads the majors in VORP among rookies (edging out Joe Mauer; does he really qualify as a rookie?). Street is third in rookie pitcher VORP (behind Blanton and Toronto’s Gustavo Chacin), and among all rookies, he’s also behind Tampa Bay’s Jonny Gomes and Detroit’s Chris Shelton. Personally, I’d give him several bonus points for being a closer, though: that gives him fewer opportunities to accumulate VORP, and he was one of the best relievers in the league, rookie or not. I don’t care that he didn’t pitch as many innings as a starting pitcher: a rookie closer with a 1.63 ERA is stunning.) (Hmm: judging from that list, it looks like a bad year for NL rookies…)
And Bobby Crosby and Rich Harden both had excellent sophomore seasons; I was expecting that from Harden (though he surpassed my expectations somewhat), but I was not expecting that from Crosby. Also, Mark Ellis came out of nowhere and had a great season, and the Mark Mulder trade already looks like a steal (Danny Haren pitched just as well as Mulder this year, is younger and has more upside, and apparently one of the position prospects we got in the deal is really good). I’m still not thrilled with the Hudson trade, but he didn’t pitch as well as I was expecting this year (all the more surprising because he was in Atlanta), and Zito put in quite a nice season. The relief corps is in much better shape than last year (Justin Duchscherer was also excellent, with a 2.26 ERA). I have a hard time imagining a more solid starting rotation (Kirk Saarloos, our fifth starter both conceptually and statistically, had a 4.10 ERA), but it actually could get better: all five are young, all five will be around next year, and we have at least one more prospect waiting in the wings. And the Jay Payton deal turned out nicely.
Downsides: Eric Chavez continues to obstinately refuse to step up his hitting to the next level, and in fact rather regressed. I thought the Jason Kendall deal was a good one, but he sucked. (He hasn’t hit a home run in his last 800 at-bats.) More key injuries than I was happy with. Our outfield can’t hit. Too bad that Durazo was out all season, but that made an opening for Mark Johnson to come up, so I won’t complain about that too much. And, as good as they were in the second half of the season, they were awful awful awful for a while there.
So I’m looking forward to next year, and for years to come after that. I’m worried about the hitting; I’m worried that some of the pitchers won’t be able to match their numbers this year. But with so much young talent, with a well-stocked minor league system, and with Billy Beane, they’ll be contending for the indefinite future.
We saw a game at Oakland for the first time this season. Liesl’s company has season tickets to the Giants, so we’ve been there, but not Oakland. The game featured Felix Hernandez, whom Baseball Prospectus ranked as their top pitching prospect coming into the season, against Joe Blanton, whose star had dimmed coming into this year but who has managed a 3.51 ERA over 28 starts, an excellent rookie year. (My vote is still for Huston Street, though.)
I hadn’t realized that Hernandez had already been up for almost two months. And he seems to be living up to his billing: seven starts is enough for a 1.59 ERA to mean something, and nothing about his performance yesterday made me think he’d been getting lucky. Admittedly, it’s hard to tell against the A’s: their offense these days seems to either score double digits of runs or none at all.
The Mariners had another recent call-up who put on a bit of a show: the strikingly-named Yuniesky Betancourt did quite nicely both offensively and defensively. Looking at the stats, though, the former at least seems like a bit of a fluke.
Random stat of the day: in three years of high school baseball, Ichiro Suzuki struck out a grand total of 10 times. And every single one of those strikeouts was on a called third strike.
I was kind of bummed when Erubiel Durazo got hurt, and Scott Hatteberg’s performance has certainly been nothing to write home about this season. (I still have no idea why he’s gotten the contracts he has from Billy Beane.) But Dan Johnson’s performance has been a pleasant surprise: I’d literally never heard of him, but after 174 plate appearances he’s slugging .500. Who knows how long he’ll keep that up, but I guess he isn’t a complete flash in the pan: looking at his entry in the 2005 Baseball Prospectus, I see “Johnson is ready to step in and take Hatteberg’s job”, and they certainly got that right.
We’re watching the shanghai crab episode of Iron Chef right now. I’m used to seeing live seafood there (driving nails through the heads of pike eels thrashing around on the cutting board), though seeing the poor crabs put live into a hot wok was a bit much. A first for me, though, was a crab with its shell off, in the process of being disemboweled, and you could still see its heart beating…
Despite what I said a week and a half ago, maybe the A’s are going to make the playoffs; they’re tied for the lead (and about to take the lead) in the wild card, after all. Even the AL West title seems not out of reach right now. They will, of course, cool off eventually, but they’ve shown over the last few years that they’re more than capable of ridiculous second-half performance. (Is that luck, or is that a skill that some teams or players have? Any studies one way or another?)
Too bad that the Indians are going in the opposite direction, and are so much further behind their division leader…
It was very pleasant reading the International Herald Tribune every day (except Sundays) over our vacation, and watching the A’s get closer and closer to .500, and finally reach it. (It would have been nice if they’d given baseball a bit more space in their sports section, though; ah well.)
And then we got home, and the annoying all-star break hit. Sigh. But that’s over now, and wow, what a game for Rich Harden. I’m not surprised to see him throw a shutout, but a two-hitter where he was perfect through seven innings is great, and an 81-pitch complete game is stunning.
I still don’t think they’re going to make the playoffs, but I’m a lot less confident of that than I was. (Ditto for the Indians.)
The A’s are continuing to do pleasantly well: they haven’t gone on a huge win streak or anything, but they’re winning almost every series these days. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Bobby Crosby’s return; call me a pessimist, but even though he was rookie of the year last year, he only batted .239 last year, and sophomore slumps are far from rare, so I wasn’t expecting much from him this year. But his line this season is .313/.370/.507, which is great.
I’m still not thrilled about the Tim Hudson trade, but the Mark Mulder trade is turning out nicely so far: Mulder has an ERA of 4.27 (in the NL), while Danny Haren has settled down after an iffy start with an ERA of 3.98. Keeping Barry Zito still doesn’t look too good, but the younger arms seem to be living up to their billing. I have a hard time imagining we’ll make the playoffs this year, but as rebuilding years go, not too bad.
And Julio Franco, not content to rest on his laurels, followed up his two-steal game with a two-homer game. Doubtless inspired by his example, the Indians are doing great; I doubt they’ll catch the White Sox, but a wildcard berth isn’t completely out of the question.
The computer’s memory problems seem to have settled down: I’m not convinced that everything is right, but it’s stopped crashing now that I’m only using one DIMM. (And 256 MB seems to be right on the borderline of where swapping starts happening, so I’ve ordered a 512 MB DIMM.) But now I’m having networking problems, which I’m not sure are my fault. Sometimes my internet connection temporarily disappears, which might be the fault of the computer, the ethernet cable, the cable modem, or something else, and I have no clue as to which of those it is. “Something else” isn’t completely crazy: I got assigned IP addresses a couple of times last week that makes me think that one of my neighbors is running a misconfigured DHCP server. If the problems continue, maybe I’ll bring in a laptop and ethernet cable from work to try to eliminate some of the variables.
Incidentally, one more thing about Nausicaa: in the comic books, the big bugs are called “Ohmu”, while in the movie their name is pronounced “Om”. Is “ohmu” how Om (as in Om mani padme hum) gets transliterated into Japanese? I would believe that. Also, is there any significant difference between the new edition of the comic books and the older, four-volume edition? Nothing leaps out to me (other than the color of the ink), but I haven’t compared them carefully.
Yesterday was a good day for Indians of my youth. Julio Franco, 46 years old, an age normally reserved for knuckleballers and the occasional freak lefty reliever, went two for five with two steals. And the comparatively spritely Omar Vizquel, a 38-year-old babe in arms, went five for six, with a double and a triple, and is batting .302 for the season.
As I lamented about a month ago, the A’s offense has been subpar this year. What I didn’t expect was that it was actually going to get worse after that post: I had largely chalked it down to small sample size, and how long can that continue? But from May 1 to May 29, they won 5 games and lost 20. It’s not easy to have two 8-game losing streaks in a single month, but they managed it.
Fortunately, this week has been a complete change of pace: a four-game winning streak, followed by a loss, followed by two more wins. With quite nice hitting, both volume-wise and clitch-wise. Yesterday, after they gave up two runs in the first two innings, I was nervous, but they stopped the bleeding there, and in the sixth inning Eric Byrnes made a great defensive play and then hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the inning, and the A’s tacked on a few more later to win. Yay. Hopefully this is a little closer to their true offensive performance, and once Rich Harden gets back, maybe they’ll go on a bit of a tear.
Mind you, I’m still not optimistic about their making the playoffs this year. But a rebuilding year wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Nice to see that the O’s are still playing reasonably well, if not quite as well as they were in April.
The baseball season is a month old, yet I don’t seem to have commented on it yet. I guess I’ve been thinking about other stuff, or maybe it’s because of all the Food Network stuff that we have on the DVR. Admittedly, being able to pause games is nice, except that it’s really depressing to watch the rest of the game after dinner because the A’s can’t hit worth crap.
I’m sorry, am I shouting? For the first few weeks, I just kept on saying to myself “small sample size”, “small sample size”. And then the A’s managed to get back over .500. And then, well, they dropped a couple of series, and got shut out for a couple of games in a row. They’ve already gotten shut out more times this year than all of last year, and they were certainly no offensive powerhouse last year.
I was cautiously optimistic going into the season. Their bullpen was really depressing last year, and they seemed to have done a lot of work to improve there. I thought the offense would probably get a slight boost; signing Jason Kendall sounded like a nice move. I wasn’t thrilled about their starting pitching after the trades, but if Baseball Prospectus claimed that the trades wouldn’t hurt their starting pitching, who was I to quibble?
And, indeed, the pitching has been respectable; some of the starters have been pretty iffy, but Joe Blanton and, especially, Rich Harden have been awesome. And their relief pitching has been quite respectable. But the offense has finally slipped past Kansas City to the very bottom of the AL. (With my other favorite team, the Native Americans, keeping them company.) What is going on here? Each year, I think that this is the year where Eric Chavez will turn from one of the better third basemen in the league into a real star; each year, I am wrong. And it’s not just him: nobody, nobody is hitting on the A’s: the team leader in OPS is Mark Kotsay; while .753 is decent for a center fielder, it’s abysmal for your best player. (Fun stat: Mike Hampton is third on the Braves in OPS, at .900.)
Ah well; let me repeat again: small sample size. Plus, the Yankees suck, too. Speaking of which, one article on the Yankees (at a time when they were 11-18) mentioned that, in 2001, the A’s started off 11-18; the rest of the season, they won more than two-thirds of their games, including 20 in a row. Let’s hope the A’s pick it up like that again this year…