I was an "early adopter" of Bill James and have always loved the quantitative side of the game.  I remember playing APBA baseball in the early 70's and calculating out OBP for players before drafting my teams - this was long before OBP was a reported stat.  I pay close attention to L/R splits and think that teams still don't do enough to leverage these data.  I also fully accept that "clutch" is largely chance and that over the length of a career a player's performance in clutch situations will likely match his overall stats pretty closely.  All of this is to say that I recognize that Emil Brown is not my type of player - I saw little reason for his acquisition and have felt since spring training that he should be a spot starter against lefties - period.

So I come today to praise Emil Brown.  I've decided to put aside the splits, ignore OBP, and purge "regression to the mean" and "small sample size" from my vocabulary for the time being.  Instead, I intend to simply sit back as an A's fan and appreciate what this guy has done in the first month of the season and enjoy it as long as it lasts.  Because more than being a stats guy, I'm an A's fan who wants them to win, and Brown has done nothing but help them do that.  On top of that, he seems like a really decent and humble guy - despite my love of the numbers, I also like to like they guys on my team.

Unrelated observations:  this team needs another infielder.  Crosby and Ellis need a day off and I'm not sure flipping around Murphy is enough, because you know that they're just going to pinch hit for him later in the game.  The A's had an unusually busy first month of the season and I think it's showing on those two guys.  Also, I'd lke to see Bowen get one start a week - there is no reason to grind Suzuki into the ground, and Bowen is a pretty productive backup.  Finally, I don't think this team can sustain Jack Cust in the OF for the full season.  This is why I really didn't understand the Thomas acquisition.  They pretty much have committed to have Cust "roam" the OF regularly, which scares me.