I HATE BEING AN A'S FAN!  It's too intellectual and, oddly, too heart wrenching.  I almost envy those crappy Giant fans who get to watch their players forget them as Alzheimer's sets in.  Or those Yankees fans who at least get to watch a team of other teams' best players suck.  And who doesn't wish they could be like the Tiger fans who have suffered for so long they'll take ANY winning season?

I mean, we're a so-called small market team that has lost enough talent over the last seven years to field an All-Star team and we just keep winning, which makes losing players almost seem justifiably okay:

Replace MVP Jason Giambi with Scott Hatteberg and win 20 straight (on a Hatteberg HR no less!)

Replace MVP Miguel Tejada with Bobby Crosby, finish one game out of first and have Crosby win the ROY.

Replace the closer for the 2004 World Series Champions, Keith Foulke, with Huston Street and have the team go from worst to first, finishing second with Street winning ROY honors.

Replace Tim Hudson AND Mark Mulder with Danny Haren and Esteban Loaiza and advance to the ALCS for the first time since `92

Let Barry Zito butt f@ck the Giants out of $126M and; well, we've lost two MVPs, a CY Young winner, three 20-game winners and a World Series MVP (Dye, '05)...so we should probably win the Series this year!

And I'm going to hate being an A's fan even more so now because baseball is getting so far out of hand that us small market cheapskates are never going to keep any of our talent when guys like Barry "I was the three in the Big Three" Zito are making $18M a year for a team that won't be respectable for at least another three to five years (when their roster is finally too old to physically take the field).

Note to Harden and Haren:  Don't get too healthy and don't get to far over that .500 mark or we won't be able to keep you guys.  Swisher, go ahead and keep swinging for the fences because a 40HR guy who hits 240 we've got a better shot at keeping than a .300/40/100 guy.  

But hey, what can I do?  I'm invested in this team name and the handful of players who've been here more than a year or two.  It's a vicious cycle and one I can't escape.  So I guess I'll remember I really wasn't that big of a Zito fan anyways and go personalize my Daric Barton jersey - at least it'll be good for a few more years barring a Carlos Pena/Jose Ortiz let down.