A's Brand Baseball: The A's . . . Lose?
The A's have lost four games in a row, to the Minnesota Twins and the Baltimore Orioles. They were defeated by A's Brand Baseball's two favorite Orioles, (in order) SS Miguel Tejada and LF Eric Byrnes, and by our least favorite, overrated, lying, cheating, limp-dicked 1B/DH Rafael Palmeiro. They suffered a bad inning from Barry Zito, who sustained his first loss since June 17, on Monday, a horrible call by first-base umpire Chris Guccione and a 9th-inning rally that wasn't on Tuesday, and a bad outing by Danny Haren on Wednesday. They scored nine runs in four games.
The mood at the Coliseum, on the BART ride home, and here at A's Brand Baseball HQ, has changed: from euphoric trash-talking and counting playoff chickens based on 120 games worth of eggs, to trying to remember what to call it when the ninth inning ends and the other team has more runs than the A's do, to hesitatingly accepting that the team might not play .800 ball the rest of the way, and finally to cautious optimism. In itself, that's a testament to the progress the team has made this season--in April and May, when the team was collecting four-game losing streaks like they were Homies, it would have brought out the Chickens Little (they know who they are), wringing their hands and asking: What's wrong with Zito? Should Billy Beane hold a primetime press conference to apologize to Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver? Should he fire Ken Macha? Does this mean the A's are moving to San Jose? To Las Vegas?
If you'd posed all these questions to the crowd at Wednesday's game, though, you'd have heard 32,290 people respond, together, in 32,290-part harmony: Meh. The Royals are coming to town Friday.
The A's can keep their eyes on the prize, we think, because the Kansas City ballclub, losers of 18 straight, has the law of averages and very little else going for it right now. Of course, we have mistakenly assumed once this season that a bad team on the A's schedule can right the ship. We know there's a reason why they play the games: so we have something to do with our summers, right? Or so we can decide which grown man we've never met, and to whom we would probably have very little to say, is our favorite and least favorite to wear a particular jersey and cap from April to October? We have always liked Royals OF Matt Stairs, for his solid bat and for his role on the A's in the 90s, and we like P Jose Lima for being absolutely nucking futs. This time, though, we'll go with OF David DeJesus, because nobody f*cks with DeJesus, man.
We are fed up with Royals 1B Mike Sweeney, because every season for the last however many years, we have paid attention to countless Mike Sweeney trade rumors--including this one, in Thursday's Chron--and no Mike Sweeney trade has ever materialized. Upon closer analysis, though, it becomes difficult to argue that Mike Sweeney is to blame for that. Instead, we urge A's fans to reserve their disdain for Royals GM Allard Baird, who is responsible for both the rumors and the anticlimactic inaction. Baird has presided over the last five years of the once-proud franchise's fall from middle-of-the-pack occasional contender to truly, madly, deeply sorry-a$$ squad. Baird has traded away Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye and Carlos Beltran, and the Royals seem to have received practically nothing in return. He is either, as he told ESPN's Rob Neyer (registration and $ required) in the fifth year of a bad five-year rebuilding plan, or in the first year of a new one that looks bleak. Whichever it is, we don't wanna hear about small markets or free agency or anything else. The Royals suck, they're disgracing a pretty cool history of baseball in KC, and it's this guy's fault. We hope the team is bad enough this year to get him fired and turn its fortunes around.
Friday night's game is at 7:05, on KICU and KFRC; Kid Canada (9-5, 2.78) takes on Jose Lima (4-11, 6.44). Saturday night's game is at 6, on FSN and KFRC, and already wildly overpromoted, but it is also unofficial A's Brand Baseball night at the Coliseum: Zito, natch (11-9, 3.65) against Mike Wood (3-4, 4.25). Go A's.