A's Brand Baseball: Servin' Up Summertime
Our friends and family tried to tell us, but we had to find out for ourselves anyway: July in an ivy-covered Northeastern college town is no place for a California boy. We mention this because that's where we were four summers ago, huddling by the air conditioner in a townie bar to escape the heat that had been trying to braise us, watching the A's play Cleveland on ESPN, when we discovered the best. Promotion. Ever: Mug Root Beer Float Day at the Oakland Coliseum. Mulder was pitching, but ESPN had video of Hudson and Zito scooping vanilla ice cream into Mug root beer.
Once again this Wednesday, before the A's play Cleveland (it's a coincidence), current and former A's and "local media celebrities" (Dennis Richmond, Athletics Nation turns its lonely eyes to you) will be serving $2 root beer floats in the West Side Club. Proceeds from Root Beer Float Day benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and there's a tasteless joke (actually, a sugary joke) in there somewhere. The event runs from 11 until 2; the game starts at 12:35; if you have 15 bucks and three hours to kill in Oakland, you can buy a $2 game ticket, 6 root beer floats, and a $1 hot dog. Any reader who does so, and offers proof, wins a prize.
Even without the best promotion ever, it's a good time to be an A's fan. Since the All-Star break, the A's have won 10 (inculding their last 7 in a row) and lost 2 against Texas, Anaheim, and Cleveland. They've displayed very good hitting and scary good pitching; they seem only to be getting better, as they demonstrated by putting up 13 runs on Cleveland on Monday night.
Over at A's Brand Baseball, we sort of forgot, this late in the season, that new AL teams would still be arriving in Oakland and that we would have a responsibility to choose favorite and least favorite players. It's easy to pick P C.C. Sabathia as our favorite player on the Indians now, after our home team scored 8 runs in 2 1/3 innings off him on Monday night, but he'd have been our choice on Monday morning, too: he's from Vallejo, he wears his cap so low and to the right that it bends his right ear nearly in half, he throws really hard, and he's an AL pitcher with a 1.333 OPS in 2005. Plus, he's huuuge. When the Indians were in town to play the Giants in June, Mike Krukow joked, "I would not get in a backyard rockfight with C.C. Sabathia." We thought that was a little weird, since a competition that involved throwing things seems like the only way to level the playing field between those two, but we get the point.
As for a least favorite Cleveland Indian, we here at A's Brand Baseball would like our readers to at least pause and consider racist caricature Chief Wahoo and the horrifying cultural history he signifies. We know: he's a treasured piece of baseball history, he's a "harmless" little joke, and we pointy-headed, latte-drinking, San Francisco liberal academics need to get off our politically-correct high horses and have a sense of humor about this kind of thing because who appointed us thought police anyway. It's just that Chief Wahoo is pretty disgusting.
Indians P Arthur Rhodes is even worse, though. When he was with Seattle from 2000 to 2003, he absolutely killed the A's. When he was with the A's in 2004, he absolutely killed the A's: he blew 5 saves (in 14 opportunities) for a team that missed the playoffs by 1 game.
Some observers took Rhodes's failures as proof that it was a mistake to convert a career-long setup man into a closer: that Rhodes was so bad because he wasn't comfortable in his new role. It just went to show, they said, that stats didn't tell the whole story and that Moneyball was bad and that when they played second base for the Reds everything was better. That was all fine, too, except that when the A's acquired Octavio Dotel and made Rhodes a setup man again, he continued to suck. He blames that on knowing that the team had lost confidence in him (which, like, maybe if you'd pitched better, Art), but Arthur Rhodes was injured and overweight and had a bad attitude in 2004, and he cost the A's some wins.
Arthur Rhodes will be in the visiting bullpen this week, where he'll have a good view of the hottest team in baseball. Tonight's game is at 7:05 on KICU and KFRC: Country Joe (5-8, 4.68) vs. Jake Westbrook (7-12, 4.51). Wednesday, in case you forgot, is Root Beer Float Day: Haren (8-7, 4.26) vs. Scott Elarton (6-5, 4.66). Go A's.