being an a's fan in 2010

being an A's fan in 2010:  Anderson is a stud.  Braden is awesome, and he's now a fun, positive national sports figure.  Suzuki is fun to watch.  Duke is an interesting/complicate guy and a great pitcher.  The A's have a half-decent shot at the division this year.  There is a lot of good young baseball players and more on the way, and so it should be a hopeful time at the coliseum.

An yet the a's are scraping the bottom of the attendance barrel.   the seats are empty, and the atmosphere is (mostly) deeply depressing.  i still go, but i think any semi-independent observer would have to say: it sorta sucks right now.  the Braden story helped a lot, but if we're honest with ourselves, the long-term trends aren't good.  

My take at getting the reasons out there.  I know this is depressing, but i think part of the problem is that a lot of these are sort of unspoken / unexplored so this is my attempt to get them out there...

1) The great divorce with oakland.  This is the biggie.  Going to a game at this point is like going to a dinner party of a couple who everyone knows are heading for divorce but are just staying together for the kids.  The food might be delicious but the house is kind of falling apart and the atmosphere is off.  Enough said.  

2) The chavez collapse. not enough has been made of this, and how much it affected the a's.  If this were boston, this would have been examined in detail over and over (see david ortiz).  however, the a's invested more (proportional to their budget) in chavez--6 yrs, $66 mil in 2004 dollars--than the sox and ortiz.  In 2008 Eric Chavez made 11 million dollars, which if we were the Red Sox wouldn't be that much. We're not.  We're Oakland--that was 23% of the whole payroll in 2008.  I did a half-hearted attempt to find another player in MLB who was close and couldn't find anyone who topped this percentage.  (For all the crap the Giants got about the ZIto contract, his salary was 19% of the total payroll and the G's have gotten more out of him.) 

This contract was a massive, massive failure.  And we have no idea why.  Has there ever been a position player who was almost totally healthy, borderline all-star third baseman from ages 19-27 and then fell off an injury/suckitude cliff right when he was supposed to be coming into his peak years? Can anyone give me a comparable position player?  What is the story there? Why hasn't anyone really got upset about this?  If this were Boston, there'd be investigative reporters talking to each doctor and long investigative reports on whatever the back/shoulder/forearm thing is going on.  

There is even the sense that A's fans should be sort of loyal to or fond of chavez.  I don't think most fans feel this way.  I remember being in the left field bleachers in 2004 (I think) for the first game of the final series with the Angels.  The A's needed to sweep and then win a play-off to win the division.  Chavez came up in a key spot late in the game, and then struck out looking on a fastball on the outside corner.  As he walked back to the dugout with no outward sign of emotion, one of the (always awesome, passionate) bleacher fans stood up and yelled "You are disappointing!".  I still feel this watching him hit now--this deep sense of disappointment.  Even just for the sanity of the fanbase, let's let chavy go and move on.  

3) Beane: is he still the smartest guy in the room?  At one point we thought Beane would lead us to the promised land through the valley of market inefficiency, but somehow it hasn't happened.  Some moves worked and others didn't; i think even the craziest beane supporters would say his record is mixed, and we've been passed by both the twins and the rays as successful small market AL teams.   As a formerly devoted moneyball-ista, i hate to say it but the moneyball-era insight was pretty short-lived.   Some of this is poor luck, i guess, but Beane has also done some questionable things: 1) crazy loyalty to Chavez, 2) hiring his best friend as coach over Ron Washington (should you really hire someone you can't fire?),  and 3) failing to understand/value the health "skill".  If the Moneyball story wasn't OBP but rather exploiting market inefficiencies, how come we never found the next inefficiency?  At one point Beane was relatively transparent about all these things, even when they didn't go well.  We've got to get back to that.  You've still got credit with us Billie, but in A's fandom, there are hints of a credit crunch or worse--a slow loss of interest.    

4) Oakland in a post-PED world.  the PED-legacy for oakland fanbase is also under-explored, at least by "writers" not named "Canseco".  There is a tricky ambiguity for A's fans here, maybe it's not as deeply tortured as the giants-bonds relationship is, but some of the same undercurrents are there.  We love ricky.  We love eck.  We love stew.  But the canseco-mcguire-giambi-giambi-tejada axis was a major part of a's baseball for over a decade.  And then there was the late-career giambi and piazza experiments.  How do we feel about the A's best hitters now?  And how does strange story of Eric Chavez fit into that?  Did any of the pitchers use PEDs?  What's Beane's take on PEDs and on how to find undervalued players in this new low-scoring world? Beane, like Sabean and everyone else in baseball circa 2000-2005, knows way more than he can talk about, but too many secrets is never a good thing in the long term. As fans do we ever get to know how things really happened?  

The cliche is that winning will heal everything, and, in this case, winning includes a real stadium plan.  I hope so.  Would love to see Braden face A-Rod in the divisional play-offs.  Would love to see the A's build a cute little stadium on the bay somewhere and build around some under-valued players.  

I'll be an A's fan in 2011, 2021, 2031.  Hopefully we'll remember this period as a small dip in the road.