Memo To Brett Anderson: Even Perfection Would Only Get You A Fricking Tie

I was away getting food.

nobody wants Holliday for anything close to what Beane wants in return. Why would anyone want him right now?

Giambi, Nomar, Cabrera, Crosby, and Springer deserve to be DFA’d. Of course, there would be no one to take their places, so we’ll be stuck with them the rest of the year.

The ONLY thing that makes me even think about turning a game on the TV is the young pitching. Even then, the veteran losers on this team cause me to lose interest.

I can’t hate on the A’s for this one. John Lackey was fantastic, and up and down the line the A’s were competing hard in those at-bats. They especially put some nice swings on a few two strike pitches. If you didn’t see that, you weren’t paying attention. The A’s were fighting. Lackey was great though. A lot of times this team gives up and gives in, but not today. And the defense was focused and excellent, and obviously Anderson was fantastic.

I don’t want to pile on Matt Holliday either, as I think a lot of that on AN is silly, but I can’t imagine any scout that watched today’s game reporting back that Holliday should be traded for. I don’t know if he’s just messed up mechanically or what, but his swing was long as hell and slow as hell. Lackey was just abusing him with the fastball.

said he’s now pitching to both sides of the plate and getting much better results.

Good for him at least. He is a stud.

Complaining about him not drafting hitters and that our hitting philosophy is outdated.

I think there are others that would agree with that.

Matt Holliday needs to be benched and be left there for at least a week! What an embarrassment to not be able to catch up to a 92 miles-per-hour fastball!

Yes, a “veteran” presence can add stability and perspective to a young team. If he is not productive, or the team is floundering, however, that same veteran can suck the life right out of a team.

Giambi, Cabrera, Garciaparra and Springer have been around long enough to be able to do the math. Their careers are done, most likely. Even Matt Holliday is calculating how much of the 4 year/$72 million contract he turned down has dissipated with his performance.

This is a tough thing to watch. I hope Holliday is gone at the deadline because I can’t imagine watching him whiff the rest of the season.

Not to sound like Bob Geren, but today was actually more of a sucess than a failure… it was frustrating as hell… but there was more good than bad.

Since the A’s aren’t going anywhere this year it’s better to lose 1-0 with Anderson dealing than to win 7-6. The key to this year is deleloping the young pitchers. Hopeuflly, Cahill, Mazzero and Gonzalez will improve. If all of the young starters finish the season with decent numbers… ERA around 4.00, I would feel good about next year.

 Holliday, Giambi and Cabrera have been a disaster but they won’t be here next season. Beane and Co will have some money to spend in the offseason. Hopefully, they’ll strike gold like they did with John Jaha and Frank Thomas. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t.

What the eff happened!?

I would dlike to see Rajai play more. What are the chances that could happen in the second half?

There was plenty of offense to go around from the mid 90’s to early 2000’s.

Your post definitely had one thing right: the team is just lifeless. In part, that’s because that’s what losing does. But it’s also because the team is rudderless.

I don’t care much if they hang onto him for the year, but Geren has got to go. The A’s have to get someone in here to provide some fire. You know, just the kind of guy many of us have mocked as old-school bullshit. Well, we need that kind of guy. Exhume the corpse of Billy Martin and prop him up in the dugout. Bring in some other tightly wound martinet. Just get someone in who will kick people’s ass.

Another point: I get all the ripping on the vets. They’ve been collectively execrable. As have Cust, Ellis, Crosby, and more. But could we lay off Cabrera. If we were actually any good right now, we’d be saying it was a brilliant pick up as his average continued to climb. Today aside, the guy has been hitting for a while now.

As for Giambi, Garciapara, and Holliday, I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t stand watching their at bats any longer.

Final point: No more Jack Cust. He sadly represents everything that has become wrong with us offensively. I love the Cust story, but I can’t watch another of his torturously predictable and uninteresting at bats.

Let’s look at his performance by month – (avg/obp/slg/ops)
April – 240/288/360/648 <——Blame Big Mac
May – 291/416/456/872
June – 280/374/440/814
July – 313/407/458/865

He went back to his original batting stance on 4/30, and has been the player we expected since. If you thought he wouldn’t see a drop off in raw numbers moving from Coors to the Coliseum, then you shouldn’t talk about baseball anymore.

If you had told me prior to the season that Holliday would post an 850 OPS as an A, I’d be okay with that.

If you prefer wOBA (which you should) he is currently posting a 360 including his terrible April numbers, which I think should be excluded based upon the fact that his process (batting stance) was totally different.

He had a horrible year for the A’s, then went on to several good ones for Boston and New York. Like I said before, sometimes the A’s are lucky and sometimes they aren’t.
The media haled Beane as a genius when he made the Damon trade. It looked great on paper. Maybe JD didn’t like the west coast?

I fualt BB for a few things but not Holliday. That trade gave us hope for a decent year. I like a GM who thinks short term and long term at the same time. He saved a little money by trading Haren, Blanton, Harde and Swisher and decided to spend it on good middle of the order hitter. I hope he does something similar next year.

I mean, I get that the A’s teach patience and that it’s good to work the count. Make the starter throw lots of pitches so we can get into the pen. Wait on your pitch and then nail it, etc. etc.

The problem is, out hitters get their pitch and promptly foul it back to the screen. Can it be that the fundamental problem with A’s hitters is that “selectivity” has become the goal rather than a means to an end?

Do we actually have a hitting philosophy within the organization?

All I have is questions. And rage. Lots of rage.

Whom shall we blame for this morass? Can we string them up?

Is anyone else as pissed off as I am that Cabrera didn’t dive to save a perfect game? I mean I know that it would have been a difficult play to make, but the kid is trying for a perfect game, as a teammate you are suppose to do all you can to preserve that, not to mention its a 0-0 game in the 7th inning.

and wins the game with another homer in the 12th.

Now Minny get their tired asses to Oakland. But I am sure they will be ready to go tomorrow.

Good to see Texas win. Pity they are 3 behind the slegnA but I hope they continue to beat the slegnA when they play them. Anything negative that happens to the slegnA is a positive in my book

and these assholes would have scored no runs for him. SO he does not get a perfect game.

In hindsight, it is just as well Abreu got that hit off him.

Imagine how pissed we would be for the guy to get all 27 outs and have a no decision.

There would however be a few rival GM’s calling Billy and saying something like, “How the hell does a kid get all 27 outs and your team not get one run”

Of course those same GM’s would already know the answer to that question.

There is no direction for them here on July 19 – they are playing to the market (they’re definitely not playing to their strenghts), and they are sellers.

Cabrera, Giambi, and Nomar have absolutely no business playing for this team in 13 days (they simply don’t have any value to the A’s at that point, whereas their roster spots do), but I’m worried a couple of them will manage to stick around: Beane is fond of Giambi, Geren has decided he hates young people after what the Killer B’s did to him last year, and then there’s Billy’s tacit agreement with short term FAs: that they will have the chance to leave the A’s in a better position than they arrived.

And I also worry that two months is not enough time to evaluate young talent. In their first two months with the A’s Blanton and Swisher were complete failures, while Dan Johnson looked like Pujols.

I would like for a few of the A’s youngsters to be better known quantities heading into 2010. I wouldn’t want to make too many inferences on what type of player Buck is due to his inconsistent playing time. Cunningham, likewise, looked awful at first, but was starting to look a lot more comfortable a few days before getting nailed in the head. And I’d say that it behooves the A’s to know what they have in Everidge – he’s nearing his peak and he’s already responded well to one promotion, so I don’t think giving him a shot in a loosing season presents an overreaction to a small sample size. What I’m interested in with Everidge is whether he can provide the A’s with an adequate 1b/3b until better options arrive: could he be platooned at 1st with Barton or Branyan? Could Everidge and Figgins be an acceptable 1b/3b duo against LHP?

I also wouldn’t mind seeing Sweeney demoted to make room for someone else in August – he’s had a bunch of chances, he’s probably not going to be worth a whole lot this offseason, and he’s 24, meaning the A’s may as well give him some time to develop. If he takes August off it makes room for one of Buck/Cunningham and it allows the A’s to defer action on the Davis question (for depth reasons). If Beane has kept Sweeney around due to his much over-hyped potential, its worth noting that in this scenario Sweeney would still have the chance to prove his detractors wrong by next year’s deadline – the next time he could conceivably have significant trade value.

This was my last game this year. I just can’t watch this team anymore and hope for better next year. Actually, I’m thinking by 2011 this team might be playing well again. Anyhow. I thought this was one of the better games I went to this year. Defense was solid. Pitching by Anderson was fantastic. Some impressions.

1) Even on the third time around, the Angels were getting fooled, thinking Anderson’s breaking pitch was a fastball. He looked phenomenal out there.
2) The ump was calling a very, very big strike zone all game which both pitchers took advantage of. One of the reasons the A’s couldn’t hit a thing was that some of those calls for strikes were on unhittable pitches.
3) That said, there is no life on the team. Holliday looks like he desperately wants to be somewhere else. Giambi is trying, but he missed on pitches he would have hit back in the day, and was late on his long fly ball to center; he’s done and someone needs to rip the uniform off his back and call it a career.
4) The A’s need hitting. They need chemistry. Those two are related to my mind. I’m hoping they get both next year.