This one's for you, baseballgirl and OaktownPower!
Anyhoo, I have to keep this short to protect my ailing left arm. {Note to self: You have become Twitter. Jump off nearest bridge at earliest opportunity.}
But I will bring up, for discussion, what I would normally write about at great length. The A's are an organization that needs to squeeze every penny, play every angle, maximize every asset, in order to compete. Yet they appear to be exceptionally disinterested in preserving service clocks. Far from "playing the game" and calling up players just late enough to get another year out of them, they have aggressively promoted a pair of 21 year old pitchers, brought Daric Barton up very young, let Huston Street make the 2005 out of spring training, and so on.
What's your sense of why the A's -- as resourceful a team as there is in many ways -- are so disinclined to use service clocks to their maximum advantage? Or to their advantage at all, really?