A's Brand Baseball: The Cruelest Month
Sunday night, the A’s finished a 3-4 road trip with a frustrating 0-1 loss to Los Los Angeles Angeles de Anaheim Anaheim. Joe Blanton pitched the first complete game of his career, giving up 6 hits and a run and making everyone who hyped him going into this season look good, but the offense didn’t bring in the two runs it would have taken to win the game.
The anemic run production—3 shutouts and an AL-worst 70 runs scored in 19 games—has caused some A’s fans to push the panic button, and frankly it doesn’t have SFist turning cartwheels or anything, but our calendar still reads April. We expect the team’s good hitters to look like it soon; at least one of them has cyber-voodoo on his side. In the meantime, we’re enoying brilliant pitching by Rich Harden (2-0, 0.44) and a strong start from Mark Kotsay, and we like what we’ve seen from newcomers like Blanton, Dan Haren, Nick Swisher and Jason Kendall.
As our baby sister turns 25 Monday night,the A’s will return to Oakland and try to put some runs on the board for Barry Zito (0-3, 6.94) who takes the hill against Jon Garland (3-0, 2.57) and the Chicago White Sox. The 15-4 Other Sox carry the young season’s best record in the major leagues into the Coliseum. The numbers in this paragraph don’t lie: it must be April.
If you’re headed to 66th and Hegenberger Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday and you’re looking for a favorite White Sock, we’ve said before that we have a soft spot for Vacaville-born former Athletic OF Jermaine Dye. In 2001, he had 59 RBI in 61 games as the A’s stormed into the playoffs, his parents attended lots of regular-season home games, and he used to do these incredbily complicated slap-and-dap routines in the dugout with Terrence Long whenever either of them (usually JD) did anything right.
As for our least favorite (which is more fun, and more important to bring with you to the ballpark), we briefly considered counterrevolutionary Cuban pitchers Orlando Hernandez and Jose Contreras, but we figure when the revolution comes it will crush us along with them. We gave serious thought to serious wacko OF Carl Everett for, among other things, not believing in dinosaurs, but booing Carl Everett seemed more important back when he was good. Finally, we settled on C A.J. Pierzynski, even though he’ll get Monday night off because his toe hurts (wimp) and he’s 0 for 12 lifetime against Zito (chump). Some of A’s have disliked since the 2002 playoffs, but his knee to Giants trainer Stan Conte’s groin (check Bruce Jenkins, breaking the story about halfway down) last year cemented his reputation as, well, the kind of guy who knees other guys in the groin for no reason.
Here’s hoping Pierzynski gets a foul ball to the cup, and that the A’s hang ‘em and bang ‘em all week long. Lilacs out of the dead land can't touch Zito's curve.