Mistakes:

• Firing Macha – seemed like it had to do a lot with Beane’s personal relationship with Macha and the politics of Kendall/Kotsay “having Beane’s ear.”

• Scutaro – he’s simply better than Crosby, as well as cheaper, and is exactly the kind of undervalued player the A’s should be keeping, not dumping.

Non-Mistakes:

• Bradley – c’mon. The A’s needed to keep a guy who can’t stay on the field and had worn out his welcome and then some?

• Haren – the A’s got a king’s ransom for Haren. Anderson alone may make that trade worth it, and he’s far from the only key piece the A’s got (Carter, Gonzalez, Cunningham).

• Swisher – Swisher really isn’t that good and the chance to get De Los Santos and Gio Gonzalez was too good to pass up.

But I must reiterate that for me 2006 seems more and more like an anomaly, generated by a confluence of new ownership wanting the team as competitive as possible so the Fremont deal would look as attractive as possible to the people and gov’t/commercial forces down there, plus the factors of (against all statistical likelihood) vexing the Mariners to an unlikely tune of 17-2 and of course the big fella with the rebar Hurting the AL in general so mashingly that summer.

Once Fremont was out, and the Cisco thing died as the economic situation worsened locally/nationally/globally, it changed and fell into the General Disarray we see before us. Macha (who ever thought he’d look so attractive, yet in hindsight he was marvelous in 2005 “grinding it out” and 2006 controlling somewhat-crazy players like Bradley and taking us to the Final Four) out, My Best Friend’s Wedding Crashers in. The downward spiral of Chavez, and the refusal of a GM who maybe identifies with players a bit too much for his own good because he still has issues with his own failed career as a player refusing to acknowledge it or do something to make sure the team would have some sort of 3B. So much water under the bridge, so many catastrophic injuries, so many mystery ailments, weird trades borne of a strange kind of desperation where once a savvy unseen before in the sport prevailed. A shambles.

Now ownership seems withdrawn, almost a bunker mentality has taken over as any potential San Jose deal has become more and more distant and obfuscated and the whole product, taken as a totality of a vision set forth by management, has suffered to the point where now we are in pain here, 3000 people at the games, no one knows what to do and the patient might die if something doesn’t happen soon.

Billy Beane hit a jackpot in Frank Thomas that year, but he wasn’t that lucky with the other veteran players he signed, such as Mike Piazza, Mike Sweeney, Emil Brown, etc. etc. Beaned signed Thomas again in 2008, but it didn’t work out that time.

And of course there were the Mariners, the favorite punchbags of the 2006 A`s. The A`s had a losing record against both Texas and Angels, but won the division partly because they beat the Mariners 15 straight times. Mariners finished last in the division, exactly 15 games back. I found it both ironic and hilarious.

The 2006 team was a team of gamers (I remember Chavez saying that it was the least talented team he had been on). They played good fundamental baseball and won games with pitching and defense. The hard work of third-base coach Ron Washington had a lot to do with it, and Macha always had his team well prepared for the games.

Beane sealed the doom of the A`s when he chased away Macha and Washington, and promoted his friend Geren as the manager. How can any organization thrive when it promotes favoritism over merit? Washington hinted at it when he talked about Macha’s firing, “I don’t think it’s his track record. There is a lot going on behind the scenes,” Now both Macha and Washington are managing teams that are leading their division. Good for them.

namely Kendall, Chavez, and Kotsay, were indirectly responsible for the A’s organizational collapse. The A’s paid these guys a lot of money because they hadn’t produced better alternatives on their own. You could tie Kendall to the Rhodes/Redman contracts, but the fact is the A’s were locked into Kendall for at least a year longer than they would have been Rhodes/Redman, and they could have dealt with either of those two’s contracts separately at a later time – its not like Redman’s contract was totally unreasonable.

In any case, these were the olds the A’s brought in to sustain their contending streak, and from ‘05-’07 Chavez, Kotsay and Kendall were combining to cost the A’s over $25 million per year, so that by 2007 the A’s were fielding an $80 million team of suck.

In hindsight, the ‘06 team looks even more like a running contender in its last gasp – an organization willfully sacrificing its future for one last hurrah. I’d say a better question might be whether the A’s should have attempted to rebuild in earnest around 2004, because they might have been able to rebuild at a quicker pace had they made the Hudson/Mulder (and possibly Zito) trades and not made the Teahen/Cruz/Ethier trades. But I think the answer is no – I prefer for the A’s to compete whenever they have the chance.

I agree about Macha though. With the exception of 2004, I thought he was pretty good.

Ethier turned out to be a monster, didn’t he? sigh