What's A Contender's Outfield?

is no guarantee at all that his price is going to go up.

a “meh” for “meh” trade.

I can get not liking Hairston, but I’m still not seeing what made Gallagher so great and valuable.

to my laughing episodes when you mention Coco Crisp. :-)

Once Hairston was off the market, Holliday became an even more valuable hostage. I don’t have a problem with the Hairston/Galllagher trade per se in what the end game was….just at the time I was skeptical as to how the A’s went sour on the lad in such a short time.

But, that has been discussed to death already. Go A’s!

because a fair number of fly balls are high enough, and not hit deep enough, that the CF or the LF/RF could get them (or, in the A’s’ case, they could each assume the other will get it, or they could run into each other and let it drop…). With Cust in RF, I think Davis is going to catch every one of those hit to right-center. With Sweeney out there, he probably won’t make a point of never letting the RF try to put his glove on the ball.

unless they sign a Free agent….

Teams now only carry 4 bench players where in the past you could carry 6-7 because you had a 4 man rotation and 5-6 man bullpen.

and it reads just as well!

I’ve said it for years: the plan has always been (since the Fremont thing imploded) to denigrate the value and performance of the team so that they don’t get more than the usual 17 people a night in the stands…. in this way, thier goal had been to manufacture consent to remove the team to what, for them, are greener pa$ture$.

This has been undertaken with the full cooperation and encouragement of the Commissioner of Baseball, himself a borderline criminal personality who allowed players to destroy both their bodies and the integrity of this game for a full decade or more whilst doing a whole lot of nothing. I can picture his denials on TV in future years, when the Bonds’s and the Giambis and the Tejadas and the Clemens’s are all, uh, dying horrible & painful deaths from the poison time bomb they introduced into their bodies on Selig’s “watch”.

What’s needed is a round of lawsuits alleging the collusion to steal the team out of Oakland between the ownership of the A’s and the Commissioner’s office; maybe that’s just my anger and resentment talking and no such above-ground link between the two old frat brothers can stand up in court, but at least it’d slow down the fuck-up-the-team-so-no-one-comes-and-we-can-steal-away program a little bit.

I think what someone alluded to earlier is true, that we essentially have 4 fourth outfielders, an aging 2B guy playing way out of position to the point where it costs us runs and games, a barely-AAAA shortstop (and a backup that used to be the SS that has sucked total donkey testes for as long as any of us cares to recall), and a gaggle of pitchers, however promising, that would have to stop me on the way into 7-11 to buy their underage asses a beer because of just such a subtle program of denigrate-and-evacuate-to-SJ.

I also think that this whole scenario is exactly what the Big Bad Wolff has had in mind all along, or at least since 2006, despite the fact that in my heart I wish none of this were true and we were on course as an organization to emerge from the awful malaise that has enveloped us.

Alright, rant over, sorry for the long gasbag post, my bad.

the relationship has to be mutual. I don’t hear or see Oakland officials now or in the past doing anything to help keep the A’s in Oakland. The name I keep hearing is Mayor, Chuck Reid, and his actions are speaking loudly. Dellums nor his predecessor, Guv Moonbeam, wanted nothing to do with the A’s and a new stadium in Oakland. I believe Lew when he said: they have exhausted all possiblities with Oakland, ie; dealing with Oakland’s lame ass, do nothing govt officials.

This team needs a major facelift and PR makeover…

Buck:

2007 – 82
 
2008 – 38

2009 – 31

Johnson

2005 – 109

2006 – 91

2007 – 117

Johnson had the opportunity to play enough games with the big club to give a much more conclusive result on the type of player he was. Buck, on the other hand, after 2007 played not even half of his 2007 total. Buck also had his swing messed with, which Johnson never did, and Johnson wasn’t ever in a position where if he had one bad game, he had to worry about being sent down.

I grant you, the pattern at the beginning looks similar, however after that, the two are night and day.

Hairston’s career minor league OPS: .968
Buck’s career minor league OPS: .860

And they were in the minors during similar ages.

Using MLEs (which I haven’t looked up, but I’m familar with the concept), and the minor league OPS you provided, Buck is probably a true-talent .725 OPS guy for the A’s. And he’s definitely not a plus plus defender.

He basically has skills that are superfluous amongst corner outfielders in many organizations. I think our AN obsession with him is a bit irrational. It comes from his good looks and that terrific small sample performance of ‘07. He’s nothing before or since that ’07 performance to suggest that ’07 is his true talent level.

Buck historically hasn’t had a noteworthy L/R split, Sweeney has, but neither “mashes LHP” in any way.

There seems to be the impression that great outfielders are a dime a dozen, and that the A’s can simply snap their collective fingers and a great outfielder will suddenly appear. I understand having the outfield we have right now isn’t all that promising power wise, but we’ve got the guys who look like they can do that at the Major League Level. The A’s simply just aren’t in the position to be able to just sign whomever they want, regardless of cost, and for the most part, that’s what you need to sign the type of outfielders people seem to want on the A’s. Unfortunately, the alternative is to organically develop the prospects who have these talents, or have the potential to do so, and that obviously requires time. Plus, Cunningham and Buck both should be guys with at least decent power.

If really what you desire is a HR guy in right, the A’s have basically tried to make that happen every time they let Cust put a glove on, and that hasn’t exactly proven wise.