The A's B Team and Esteban Loaiza got pounded by the Diamondbacks 8-2 today with Brad Halsey making an impressive debut against his teammates. Halsey pitched three innings and only allowed two hits with no walks and one strikeout. Loaiza, on the other hand, got smacked around to the tune of 4 innings pitched, 10 hits and seven earned runs. Don't overreact to Loaiza just yet. If he's still putting up lines like this come the end of April/beginning of May, then you can overreact away.
It's prediction season and I've been doing chats all over the place. The most recent is at the fine Baseball Analysts site.
It was an enjoyable chat with Bryan Smith and Rob McMillin from the 6-4-2 site. Little known fact? I'm Rob's Blogfather, pushing him to start his site after he sent me several prolific emails that were some of the finest writing I'd seen. I basically said, "Dude, you've gotta start your own blog. People should read you regularly." And in a rare case that someone actually took my advice, he jumped all over it.
If there's a part toward the end of the chat when I seem a bit distracted, well, there's a good reason for that. My daughter took her first steps while I was chatting away this past weekend. Guess I'll have to learn how to blog while chasing her around.