A's Brand Baseball: Yeesh.
Dear Oakland A’s,
We get it. We understand that the team’s philosophy is very, very complicated, and involves math. It is not just about putting together a bunch of big, slow guys who walk a lot and then wait around for a three-run home run. Anyone who thinks it’s that simple, we know, is hella dumb. Now that we get it, could you please hit a few three-run home runs and maybe win some games? Surely runs scored and team wins, for all their obviousness, are not overvalued statistics.
Best wishes for a healthy and productive summer,
SFist.
Any way you slice it, the last week was ugly for the 14-20 A’s. They put together a 20-inning scoreless streak, wasted solid performances by Joe Blanton, Rich Harden and Kirk Saarloos, lost two in a row to Boston on walk-off home runs, and will stumble into the Coliseum Friday night losers of five in a row, hoping to catch a few breaks. On Friday the 13th. In their only win on the road trip, the A’s batted around against Mariano Rivera in the 10th inning without hitting the ball out of the infield—not exactly a strategy to count on. It doesn’t get any easier, either—Kid Canada (2-2, 1.94) faces the Yankees and Mike Mussina (3-2, 3.60) to open the homestand.
Their five-game win streak notwithstanding, the Yanks are struggling this year themselves, as just about anyone interested in this space (no, Mom, not you) already knows. Most baseball fans enoy a certain (read: ginormous) amount of schadenfreude over this, and use it to prove things like “money can’t buy championships,” a point whose logical extension tends to be, “my favorite team is more righteous and populist than the Yankees, George Steinbrenner’s Evil Empire which is directly responsible for everything that is wrong with baseball. They may have 26 World Series championships,” this fan goes around saying, and posting on the web, “but I can sleep at night. Also, Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius are better than Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez.”
That last part is just silly, of course, but here’s the thing: So is the first part. If Nelson Mandela bought the Dodgers tomorrow, they would still be the Dodgers and we would still boo them. Baseball fans don’t like our favorite teams because they’re (i.e. the teams) moral, politically responsible, or socialist, or something. We like them, and believe them to be on the side of all that’s good and just, because they’re our favorite. So SFist dislikes the Yankees when they beat the A’s, and the rest of the time they’re just another AL team.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have a least favorite Yankee, of course. The last few years, we’d have chosen traitorous 1B/DH Jason Giambi, with dollar signs in his eyes, growth hormone in his veins and a syringe in his ass. Big G is really more pathetic than villainous lately, though. We hereby promote, in his stead, the left side of the Yankee infield because shut up shut up shut up already.
To name SFist’s favorite 2005 Yankee, in one of this site’s least egregious misuses of the first-person plural, we’re gonna pass the mic to our boy Chocolates, a native New Yorker and lifelong Yankee fan, with whom we have attended baseball games in four U.S. states and Rhode Island. He sez:
From 1977-1990 I was the biggest Yankee fan on Earth. Then I went to college in Berkeley [Go Bears--SFist] and was too busy eating mushrooms and chasing California girls to worry much about Dave LaPoint's E.R.A., although a summer as a vendor at the Coliseum (it was 1991, the year the A's sucked) allowed me a glimpse of the future, in the guise of a bespectacled rookie named Bernie. The point is, I had become a much more casual baseball fan by August of 1996, when I returned to New York after living in Hungary for a year and went to the Yankee Stadium bleachers with two of my high school buddies. I believe the opponent was an A.L. team hailing from Milwaukee, strange as that sounds. The Yanks were in first but slumping and feeling the hot and slimy breath of the much-favored Orioles on their necks. Long story short: after 4 or 5 uninspired innings by the Gambler and some mixing and matching (Boehringer? Howe? Weathers?), the Yankees were clinging to a one-run lead. It was Mariano time.
If memory serves: Mariano came into this August game and allowed two bloop singles and hit a batter to load the bases. Then he calmly struck out the next three hitters. On nine pitches. Hell, on eight pitches. Seven. Whichever. It was clear there would be no more balls put in play, no more baserunners. Then he did the exact same thing in the eighth.
And I was hooked.
For his 1995-2001 (yes that one too) and 2003 postseasons, Mariano is a unanimous selection (by me) for most valuable player ever. I dare you to go look up his appearances one by one and disagree.
I remember looking at his postseason numbers after 2000 or so and seeing an E.R.A. of 0.84 or something and scratching my head and wondering, "What was the .84?"
I am the biggest Yankee fan on Earth again, and will be until baseball's last #42 (he's grandfathered in) decides to go be president of Panama. Or the world. Whichever.
Whatever. The Yankees suck. The game's at 7:05. Go A's.