Todd Linden released

Seeing that OBP for Barton makes me even more angry. Someones gotta lite a fire under his ass.

but he’s unusually terrible at what should be easy fielding tasks like picking up the ball.

against the AN wall.

The A’s signed him after failing to reach an agreement with Shannon Stewart. Brown may not be as good at reading and catching balls as Stewart, but he has a better arm and isn’t limited to playing left field. Also, he has more pop in his bat. Stewart was once a much better player than Brown. But I suspect (assuming Stewart would be performing similarly for the A’s this year as he is for Toronto) the A’s have gotten more out of Brown this season than they would have with Stewart.

...rationale in my irrationality. I hate him for no good reason—but at least I recognize that.

But he’s not a starter/#5 hitter on a good team. And he’s starting, and until recently was hitting 5th. I’d be fine if he were a LHP platoon guy/5th OF. I just don’t like him getting so much playing time.

As for his defense: Again, he’s so similar to Jay Payton. He’s actually pretty good out there, but at the one moment you figure he’s got the play made he falls down, the ball hits him and bounces somewhere, and 19 runs score on one play.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have an anti-Emil bias, but it’s patently obvious to the naked eye that Emil has trouble “closing the deal” in the late stages of tracking fly balls and ground balls in the outfield. His routes aren’t bad, he has decent (albeit unremarkable) speed, his initial reads and jumps seem to be OK—but when the ball gets within about 20-50 feet of him, he seems to either lose sight of it, or to find himself consistently about 5-10 feet short of where the ball is headed.

Sure, maybe, as a professional who takes pride in his performance, he puts in lots of extra hours of practice we don’t hear about. But, media coverage being what it is, I think it’s a safe assumption that if Emil was doing that, we’d have heard about it from the Slussers of the A’s-o-sphere (as in, quotes from coaches/teammates about how modest, RBI-machine Emil also works his hiney off to be the best defender he can be, etc.).

To assume that, both absent positive evidence/testimony that he does practice his defense and in the face of his obvious defensive deficiencies, he does in fact practice really hard is to go on faith, not positivism.

That said, I think the likeliest answer is that he simply has a vision deficiency and has actual physical challenges in tracking the ball as it nears him.

I just didn’t want him on the team to start with. Billy prepared me all off-season to expect a year of rookies and growing pains, so I was confused and a little miffed at the signing of Brown and the AB’s he was going to take away from the young guys.

Sure, the A’s probably wouldn’t have won nearly as much in the short term… actually, I’m not even going to qualify that—they definitely would not have won as much—but I would have preferred an OF with Sweeney and Buck at the corners and Denorfia in center, Cust at DH.

would hit for power if his batting stance was different: Sweeney needs his feet closer together, according to FT (SF Chron is the source of that info).