A's Brand Baseball: We Got Game Like Parker Brothers

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After an unproductive week at the MLB winter meetings, the A's heated up the winter stove again: they traded minor league OF Andre Ethier to the Dodgers for major league OF Milton "Insert Game-Based Nickname Here" Bradley and major league IF Antonio Perez. That is: they traded a bird in the bush for two in the hand. Ethier was the AA Texas League player of the year--Bradley, the prize for the A's in this deal is 27 years old, and he hit .290/.350/.484 for the Dodgers last season. As is often the case when the A's acquire a player, Billy Beane is rumored to have coveted him for quite some time.

Bradley is worth coveting: he's an excellent defensive outfielder (he'll play right field, Nick Swisher will play first, and Dan Johnson will DH ), and a switch-hitter who should add right-handed power to a lineup that's been sorely lacking in that area. He Almost exactly one year after the A's traded away half their pitching staff for prospects, they've moved a prospect for a major-league talent. And Antonio Perez.

Bradley, of course, arrives in Oakland with what he calls "baggage" and what we might less delicately call "a reputation for being a colossal dick." See Susan Slusser's article for an exhaustive list of his run-ins with teammates, fans, managers, umpires and the 5-0; we're satisfied to recall his being traded from the Indians to LA for what seemed like insubordination during spring training in 2004, his throwing a water bottle at a Dodger Stadium and then taking off his jersey and storming off the field later that season, and his accusation last year that then-teammate Jeff Kent didn't understand African Americans, and draw the general conclusion that Milton Bradley is an out-of-control a$$hole. He's our out-of-control a$$hole now, though. Plus, Bay Area baseball has had good experiences with outfielders who don't get along with Jeff Kent, and it's not like we've never thrown anything at a Dodger fan. Dodger fans are annoying.

The encouraging trend this suggests, after the jump . . .

This offseason, when Dodgers GM (and former Beane assistant) Paul DePodesta and Red Sox GM Theo Epstein lost their jobs, we suspected it was the start of a revolt against a certain book that Joe Morgan hasn't read: the baseball establishment was throwing out the nerds and geeks and the statheads oh my; making decisions based on what they saw, not what they could quantify; signing ballplayers, not computer printouts; blah blah blah. When the Dodgers replaced DePodesta with Ned Colletti, who was praised for being a good baseball man who hadn't gone to Harvard, we were convinced--and so was Toronto GM (and former Beane assistant) JP Ricciardi, who has lost his mind up there. This was initially upsetting, because it's stupid and because it's another instance of anti-intellectual backlash in an American institution, but there's something to like about it: GMs like Colletti will trade a supertalented player like Bradley for one, like Ethier, without even a Triple-A AB, because Bradley isn't a good "clubhouse guy." Colletti should know better, too we know where his last team would have been without a certain divisive clubhouse presence, but he doesn't.

At A's Brand Baseball, we will gladly suffer anti-intellectualism if it means our home team gets Milton Bradley. We didn't go to Harvard, either, so the more GMs Billy can rip off, the better. Go A's.