Dallas Braden not only fights for his mound, but his fans too.

By now, most of you have either read, or heard about the article that was published in Thursday’s edition of USA Today about the A’s.  I don’t really like getting into the “small market” team nonsense, however there are some things that really stood out to me in the article that I should address.

Personally, I am tired of hearing about the A’s attendance records.  I was tired of it three, four, five years ago, and I don’t need the constant reminder from every fan of every team that the A’s don’t draw well or another article pointing it out. WE KNOW!  Those of us who actually attend games are well aware of the fact that the stadium is 3/4 empty most of the time.  Ever heard of the term “beating a dead horse”?  We’re way past that now.

Most teams that consider themselves to be “small-market” carry a significantly higher turnover rate than other teams in the league.  Some of you know I follow the Padres as well as the A’s, and their clubhouse is just as much as a revolving door as the A’s.  It never gets easier watching your favorite player being traded away or signing with another team when they hit free agency.  My point being, it happens in other cities outside of Oakland.

So when does it stop?  When we get a new ballpark is what we have been told.  So about that new ballpark…

» Continue reading “Oakland A’s: The Never Ending Waiting Game”

I thought I would try something different, I want to talk about the top low-lights of the A’s season, there’s a lot of them, but I narrowed them down to six:

(Warning: Please remember this is joke.  I am not being negative, it’s supposed to be fun and to be taken light heartedly.  Throughout the week I will be taking a look at the brighter spots of the season in 2011 so PLEASE don’t take this too seriously)

6. Kevin Kouzmanoff: Remember him?  He was our starting 3rd baseman on opening day.  His line looked a little something like this .221/.353/.398.  He played in 46 games with the A’s last season, he had 4 home runs and 17 RBI oh and he committed 9 errors (yikes).  He was finally demoted to Sacramento in June to “work on some things” and was never to be seen from again.  (not really, he was eventually traded to Colorado for some cash or a PTBNL or something)

5. The Rich Harden Trade:  I love the trade deadline!  There’s always that one trade that gets squeezed in at the very last minute, kind of like when we sent Rich Harden to Boston for Lars Anderson. Oh wait… never mind.  After the deal was announced as “done” the Red Sox decided to take a look at Harden’s medical records and decided to pull out of it.  Doesn’t take a genius to figure out Harden is injury prone, but hey I’m no doctor.  The Red Sox eventually traded for Eric Bedard (I am still scratching my head about that one) and we got to keep a healthy Harden for the rest of the season.

4. Starting pitching problems:  Our starting day rotation looked something like this: Trevor Cahill, Brett Anderson, Gio Gonzalez, Dallas Braden, Brandon McCarthy.  Dallas Braden was done for the season by May, Anderson in was done in June and McCarthy had a brief stint on the DL in May.  Our replacement for Dallas Braden, Tyson Ross, went down the same day McCarthy did, which brought up Josh Outman and Guillermo Moscosco to start.  There was Graham Godfrey at one point and Rich Harden was eventually healthy enough to pitch again and…phew… I think that’s it.

3. Bob Geren Drama: A’s fans can agree on one thing, and one thing only: Bob Geren was a terrible manager.  He made his managerial debut in 2007 and the best record we ever saw from him was 81-81 in 2010.  Our fans were pretty vocal about our distaste for the manager, but it seemed to take on a new height in 2011.  There were signs, there were chants, there were petitions and facebook groups and then there was Brian Fuentes,  the first player to ever publicly denounce Geren.  We all know how the story ends, but I will save that for a later post.

2. Daric Barton: There are three players A’s fans love to hate, CJ Wilson, John Lackey and Daric Barton.  in 2010 Barton showed promise, he started to finally starting to live up to his potential. He lead the league in walks, having hit .273/.393/.405 turning himself into a 4.2 WAR player.  He had a .993 FLD% and a ridiculous 12.1 UZR.  He redeemed himself, he was turning into a player we loved and wanted to lock in to a long term deal.  So why did he end up in Triple-A last season?  Barton hit .212/.325/.267 in the majors last season.  He had zero home runs, 47 strikeouts, 8 errors and 21 RBI in 67 games.  He was getting booed every time he came up to bat and didn’t do anything which eventually lead to him saying something along the lines of him “being tired of our fans being idiots all the time.” Daric Barton was demoted to Sacramento in June.

1. Attendance: It’s no secret, our attendance, for a lack of a better term, sucks.  There’s a reason why your typical Giants fan uses our attendance records as an insult, we averaged 18,232 people per game last season.  Dead last in ALL of baseball.  In total we had 1,476, 792 people show up to the Coliseum, and again, we ranked 30 out of 30 teams.  The top attendees, Philadelphia, more than doubled our season totals.