I know, I know, people hate it when there is premature speculation (isn't there a pill for that these days?).  But I'm wondering if the A's might've made a mistake in picking up Frank Thomas.  The reason?  I'm thinking that Mike Sweeney is just a better hitter right now and Thomas' presence has put Sweeney on the bench.  Not only that, but perhaps Barry Bonds would've been the better fit because he can probably still play left field whereas Frank Thomas has no business being anywhere close to a glove.

Now before you all lash out at me, I understand that Bonds would've cost a lot more money and if all the media reports about Bonds are to be believed, he wouldn't have added much positive energy to the clubhouse.  Bonds also would've created a similar situation that the A's have now with Cust, Sweeney, Barton and Thomas.  They essentially have four designated hitters and two of them need to be in the field every night and one of them rides the pine.

If you look at their stats, Sweeney has been the better hitter this year.  I think one of the major reasons Beane picked up Thomas was his plucky young A's weren't getting pop from anywhere and if Thomas has proven anything throughout his career, it's that the guy knows how to slug with the best in baseball.  The problem is that he hasn't been slugging at all for the A's.  He only has four extra base hits in 60 ABs and none of them have left the park.  The chances are that this is probably a small sample size, but I'm wondering if Thomas is a better hitter overall at this stage in his career.  Both Sweeney and Thomas are .300 hitters for their careers.  Yet Thomas is going to be 40 on May 27th.  Sweeney turns 35 in July. 

Thomas may be a statistical aberration and not be declining as he hits his big 4-0 a la Bonds, but for how good he was with Toronto last season, he wasn't anywhere near as good as 2006 with Oakland.

Don't get me wrong.  I don't blame Beane and company for taking a chance on a hitter with the credentials of Bonds.  Hell, I even advocated for Thomas when he was sitting out there.  But I just can't help but think that Mike Sweeney should be in the lineup every night unless he's injured (which might not take long given his past history).  The other option would be to possibly send Daric Barton down and let Sweeney play first every day.  The problem with that is that you're asking for an injury to Sweeney by taking that approach.  I also think that Barton's growth could be getting stunted by not having him out there every night.

Beane has told me several times that you can never have too many good players, but the truth is that I don't think the A's are getting the best out of what they have because they have too many players who probably should be a DH.  And you just know that Thomas is rarely, if ever, going to wind up sitting out because of the way he exited Toronto. 

Although the issue will arise this upcoming weekend when the A's head into Atlanta.  They're going to lose Thomas' bat all weekend without the DH.

Course this all goes away and I look like a fool if Thomas just starts hitting homers and doubles with regularity.  And quite frankly, I'm hoping he makes me look like a fool.

The A's win against the O's tonight 2-1 in the bottom of the 10th inning on Emil Brown's RBI single to center field.  The game went to the 10th inning on a blown save from Huston Street after a brilliantly pitched game by A's starter Dana Eveland.

So on a night when two MLB Davids faced off against one another, it was the guy that many A's fans didn't even want on the team in the first place who was the star of the game offensively.  Emil Brown scored the run to give the A's the lead and more importantly, wound up with the big single to plate Daric Barton to win the game for the A's.

This game was amazing in many ways and it's sad that so few people are showing up to watch this team play baseball.  They say baseball can be a game of inches, well consider all that happened this evening and dare to argue otherwise:

• Early in the game, both Mike Sweeney and Frank Thomas both looked like they hit home runs but the heavy Oakland night air knocked both balls down.
• Jack Cust got four strikes in an at-bat on a mistake by home plate umpire Ed Hickox, who also had one of those wild, completely unpredictable strike zones that led to Mark Ellis nearly being thrown out for arguing a called third strike (Bob Geren jumped in and saved Ellis from being tossed by a millisecond).
• In the seventh inning, Emil Brown just barely avoided getting doubled off second base on a Crosby fly out to center field.  He wound up scoring the only run for the A's in the first nine innings on two infield hits by Jack Hannahan and Rajai Davis.
• The top of the eighth the Orioles came so close to tying the game but an excellent play by Ryan Sweeney calling off Mark Ellis on a pop up that would've scored Adam Jones from third had Ellis caught it while moving back into the outfield.  Nick Markakis then grounded to Crosby to end the Orioles threat.  The infield hit by Payton that inning was questionable as to whether Payton was safe or not.  But as I said, this was a game of inches.
  
• Ramon Hernandez wound up tying the game for the Orioles in the top of the ninth with a ball to Bobby Crosby that could've possibly gone home had Kurt Suzuki stepped out from behind the plate and given Croz that option.  For some reason, Kurt seemed to concede that run. 
  
• In the bottom of the ninth, Brown nearly had another A's infield hit to lead off the inning when a ball rolled up the third base line and rolled foul by less than an inch and stopped.  Brown still walked, but the A's couldn't get him home.

You could not ask for better pitching from Dana Eveland than the A's got tonight.  The guy pitched brilliantly, rebounding from his tough outing against the Angels.  He was great in pounding the zone and working the home plate umpire's wild zone.  It's too bad that it was all for nothing.

The A's pen was once again great tonight, outside of Street and like I said in the comments, I thought Huston had a couple of bogus calls against him in the Melvin Mora AB, which turned into the tying run.  Street looked like he hit the outside corner on Mora twice but didn't get the call and that's when you could tell that both him and Suzuki were trying to figure out what to throw.  Street isn't the overpowering guy that some closers are and he needs that outside corner in order to be effective.

But Eveland, Devine, Embree and Brown were all good enough tonight to get the A's the win thanks to a little help from Clutchy McClutch (Emil).

By the way, I've got to admit that I got a few goosebumps in watching Chad Bradford strike out Daric Barton with that frisbee slider of his.  It reminded me of good times in the green and gold and he was always one of my very favorite A's pitchers back in the day.  It's one of the few moments that I've ever smiled when an A's player struck out.

The A's super duper funkalicious all-righty lineup wasn't nearly as interesting as I had hoped as Garrett Olson kept them pretty much off balance all night.  He kind of reminded me of hybrid of Greg Smith and Young Barry Zito (not the abomination that pitches for the Giants now).  He's a tough good young pitcher.  But I'm not sure how effective this all righty lineup is.  They don't seem to be fairing all that well against lefties.  Or at least as good as I'd like.

Ultimately, in a matchup of two Davids, it was fitting that Emil Brown, ManGod, was the one who chucked the heaviest stone.

The send-Jack-Cust-packing Club on AN has simmered down a bit recently and that's because Spartacust has been back to his 2007 ways recently.  So much so that it earned him the AL Player of the Week honors .

What I find fascinating about this is that Cust claims in the above linked article that his issues at the beginning of the season were because he had the wrong bat:

The slugger has a more concrete theory, literally. Cust attributed the harder wood of his "Old Hickory" bats as the reason he has been able to appear "relaxed" at the plate.

The designated hitter received a new shipment of bats during the team's last road series against the Angels, and went 6-for-10 with a home run. His game on Thursday was particularly impressive, as Cust was 4-for-4 with two walks and three runs.

"The bats I had in Spring Training were really bad," Cust said. "They were soft. The guy told me they made a mistake with the kind of wood."

I've always found that interesting.  Especially that players blame something like the quality of a bat's wood as to why they aren't hitting.  I mean, there is much more psychological effect to something like this than you'd think.  Cust thinks it's the bats, therefore it must be, right?

I have limited experience with these kinds of things given that I've never come anywhere close to playing professional sports, but I've played my share of hockey back in the day and if I got a new stick that felt really good, I would often feel like I got more on my slap shots than I did before.  Whether it was real or just a mental boost, I'm still not sure.  I do think that something like that can have a big-time psychological impact on a player and whether or not there's truth to it, I'm not sure.  What might be more likely is that Cust is just a slow starter for some reason.

Here are the splits for 2007 Jack Cust and 2008 Jack Cust .  You'll see that Cust only hit .222 last May and he hit only .188 this April.  Regardless of that, Cust is still good at getting on base.  There's obviously one huge difference between the two months and the two years.  Cust hit only one home run in April 2008, but he hit eight home runs in May 2007.  That's where his softer bat theory may hold weight because he was roughly walking and striking out the same number of times both months.

I'm skeptical and think that it more likely had to do with a mechanical adjustment made.  Cust conceded later in the article that he had made an adjustment with his swing and doesn't elaborate as to what it is.

I'm just curious AN.  Where do you fall on the tools versus the user debate?