Hudson Wouldn't Have Resigned According to Urban

No shock there. I loved the guy, but I think he wanted to pitch for the Braves all along.

He had no intention of signing with the a's unless they paid a premium for him. ie more than the Braves.

Didn't Urban say in his most recent AN interview that Huddy really wanted to stay???

Blez: We've seen Hudson publicly react in hurt fashion, but he also seemed pretty stoked putting on that Braves cap.  Do you think he  was really honest about wanting to stay here, or he wanted to be a Brave  all along?

MU: He REALLY wanted to stay in Oakland. Unless you're a trained actor, you can't fake the kind of emotion Tim showed when the deal went down, and there's nothing fake about Tim. He was 10 times more upset than I've ever seen him.

Got it.

:)

I suppose his emotion was from leaving a year earlier than he had planned.

That sucks. Maybe I don't want to read this book...

...are the worst owners the A's have ever had and just plain crappy people. As their regime crumbles, the nasty stuff is coming out and it's very nasty.

Also interesting is Urban's note that Hudson now admits he got in a barfight in Boston just before he pitched in that playoff game in 2003. He insists that they're not related, but it's a red flag on the guy. He is also de facto admitting he lied about the affair and in doing so trashed the integrity of journalists who wrote what turns out to have been the truth. I am intensely unimpressed with him right now.  

Yeah, the same way Hitler saved Germany.

I did in fact rag on Hudson for lying about his behavior, but my earlier point was that Hudson, whatever else he is, is no one's fool. He didn't trust Schott and Hoffman to be good stewards of the team and wanted out as long as they were in charge. I bet Mulder and Zito felt/feel the same way.

...were influenced, no doubt, by a wide variety of factors: how comfortable he is in the community here, money (duh), how he gets along with the coaches and players, and, of course, how he feels about the general direction and management of the team. If the the A's had offered him $80M and no one else offered him more than $40M, none of that other stuff would have mattered. But if the money is more or less the same, you know all that other stuff is going to be pretty serious to a player like Hudson, and his lack of confidence in A's ownership has now been replicated by a whole bunch of guys. Saying it's all about money is a nice balm, but it just ain't the whole story.

...to believe that Schott and Hoffman cared about winning. I don't think he believed that they did, and I don't think Keith Foulke believed it, and I don't think Miguel Tejada believed it, and I don't think Jason Giambi believed it, and I don't think Johnny Damon believed it. I think the problem for Hudson was precisely that he did have a clue about what Schott and Hoffman do, and didn't much like it.

I'm not blaming Schott and Hoffman for everything. For example, I don't think it's their fault that it's rained for two straight weeks. ;)

 

never bothered me, unless it does stupid, self-defeating things, bonehead things.

I for one love David beating Goliath and hope this A's version takes it to the Yanks (and others) but good.

Wolff is buying the A's to make money, ...and he will. We just have to wait to see how "this owner" will do it!

A player leaves and the campaign to crap on their name begins.

As it happens, the Yankees have more money than anyone else, so he's chosen that method -- spending to assemble a de facto All-Star team -- to win. If the A's made that much money, they'd probably do the same thing.

The Red Sox care about winning. The Cardinals care about winning. The Padres have put together a team that can win. (There's a team that's in about the same financial place as the A's, I'd guess.) The White Sox care about winning, but they're bad at it. The Cubs care about winning. The Braves care a lot about winning: they knew it would take more than the usual amount of money to keep their truly outstanding Cox/Mazzone combo in the traces, and they spent it. (By contrast, of course, we let Rick Peterson go.) The Phillies care about winning. The Mariners care about winning.

Some teams don't care about winning, or have spent years not caring about winning. I'd put the A's in that category: their primary objective, year in and year out, has been to make money for Schott and Hoffman. Spending that extra $10M or $20M to put the team over the top, the recouping after winning, has never been a factor.

Now, as it happens, they have a very smart GM, and they got very lucky with some draft picks, and they were able to acquire perhaps the best collection of very young talent ever assembled on one baseball team. Did they leverage that talent into a championship or two? No. Did they do anything to figure out how to keep that talent? No. They coasted. They said, "Hey, we can win 90-100 games a year with these guys, spend practically no money, make a big profit, and laugh all the way to the bank."

They're like a gambler who walks into a casino, opens his wallet, and while he's trying to buy a  beer, a hundred dollar bill falls out of his wallet and lands on 16 Black on the roulette table, which then comes up. They then spend the rest of the weekend congratulating themselves on what a great gambler they are.

Very thoughtful.

Jeff is too hard on the owners, in my view.  They have put an entertaining product on the field for six years for the past six years and made the playoff four times during that span.  There is something to the "crapshoot" theory of the playoffs.  That's why the Yankees are zero-for-the-century in winning the World Series, and the Angels and Marlins have rings.

But Jeff also has a point.  I think too many people here buy into the Schott/Beane rationale that it's all just luck in the playoffs.  If Beane really believes that, why the outburst after the Boston series about giving him another $50 million and he'd get out of the first round?

I'm sorry.  If you repeatedly let talented players leave to keep the payroll down, you reduce your chances of advancing in the playoffs or making them in the first place.  Period.  If the A's had Tejada OR Foulke last year, don't you think they win the division?

It's not just bad luck that has prevented the A's from advancing.  The team was very young and lacked pitching depth (Gil Heredia, Cory Lidle, the bullpen) and good bench hitting.  Those problems could have been alleviated with some additional spending, but Schott wouldn't permit that.  The ridiculous financial maneuvering Beane had to do just to get Ricardo Rincon in 2002, as outlined in Moneyball, shows how cheap the owners were.  They chose not to surround their cheap, talented corps with older, more expensive players who would have boosted the team's chance to advance furthter in the playoffs.  That was a choice, and it was made because the owners wanted to make sure they made their annual profit.  Could they have gotten lucky anyway?  Sure.  But that doesn't mean they did all they could to win.    

And so, in the end, the A's - with all their talent over the past half-decade - have won zero playoff series in the Schott era.  

Zero.