You still the man, Rick . . . You still the man. A bold prediction from A's Brand Baseball: By the time "One Shining Moment" ends on Monday night, Barry Zito will have thrown the first pitch of the Oakland Athletics' 2006 season to Johnny Damon, who will still be an idiot. Unless it's raining--we don't predict that boldly. When we came to you before Opening Day last season, the home nine were in... [continue]

A large portion of Western literature doesn't make sense to California kids. Specifically, we don't get all those poems about springtime, because it just doesn't feel like that big a deal. This is not to say that "there are no seasons in California." Rather, we mean that spring is nice, sure, but so are summer and fall, and Indian summer, and hey, winter isn't really that bad, either. There seem to be more poems... [continue]

To introduce Gilda (1946) at the Balboa Theater on Thursday, NoirCity founder Eddie Muller offered a familiar interpretation of the film: its protagonist (Glenn Ford as Johnny Farrell), like its director (Charles Vidor), is confused about his sexuality. Now, we've always found this reading a little juvenile, and a little too easy--most film noir, after all, is about homoerotic relationships (see also: cowboy movies) and the beautiful, dangerous women who threaten them. In this... [continue]

Frank Thomas has hit 448 home runs, and has hit .307/.427/.568, over his 16-year career. That's pretty impressive, but in the last 2 seasons, Frank Thomas has been mostly injured: he's appeared in a total of 108 major league baseball games. Whatever Frank Thomas does in the 2006 baseball season, he'll do in the uniform of the Oakland A's. Thursday, the A's signed Thomas to a $500,000 contract, which reportedly includes $2.6 million in... [continue]

In 1950, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the contemporaneous critical response to his stories and those of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, et. al. that: It takes a very open mind indeed to look behind the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time... [continue]

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... [continue]

Just like we said at the end of the 2005 season: the A's need pitching in '06. On Monday, Billy Beane surprised baseball insiders by putting on shoes with laces and signing free agent starter Esteban Loaiza (whose last name we're going to have to learn to spell, like the whole Harden-Haren thing wasn't bad enough) to a 3-year, $21 million contract. Though Loaiza's agent, Joe Boggs, expected the A's to get out of the... [continue]

Holy Toledo. Bay Area sports lost an institution on Tuesday morning, when A's broadcaster Bill King passed away after complications to hip surgery. He was, the Chronicle says, "believed to be around 80." King came to the Bay Area in 1958 when the Giants did, and worked games with Lon Simmons and Russ Hodges. He called Warriors games from 1962, when they moved to San Francisco, until 1983 (including their 1975 championship season), and... [continue]

We come to exhume Ken Macha--still, no praise. When A's Brand Baseball last appeared here, the A's and manager Ken Macha (right, not a recent photo) had broken off contract negotiations. $2.6 million over 3 years, with a team option for the 4th, was simply unacceptable to Macha, who became a free agent. The A's started conducting interviews for the vacancy, and our tone about the whole thing may have been somewhat cavalier. Imagine... [continue]

We've come to bury Ken Macha, not to praise him . . . 2005 was a down year for the A's, and they won 88 games. That's 3 fewer than they won in 2004--a year when they were expected to contend for the World Series. Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder are starting in the playoffs for the Braves and Cardinals this week, and A's pitchers had the 6th-best staff ERA, and the lowest opponents'... [continue]

We know, we know: It's Barry Bonds Week in Bay Area baseball. That's very exciting, but there's also a pennant race going on just across the bay from 24 Willie Mays Plaza. After Monday night's 2-0 victory in Cleveland, the A's are a game behind Los Los Angeles Angeles de Anaheim Anaheim in the AL West and 1 1/2 games behind Cleveland in the AL Wild Card race. There are only so many ways... [continue]

In May, while the A's struggled along 8 1/2 games behind Los Los Angeles Angeles de Anaheim Anaheim in the American League West, A's Brand Baseball promised not to mention the division standings any more until school started in the fall. It was hard to imagine, back then, that the A's would be playing meaningful games when schoolkids were buying pencil boxes and new backpacks, but here's this (Go Bears!), and here's this. After... [continue]

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... [continue]

So it's been kind of a weird season for the A's, and it has never been weirder than last weekend, when the trading deadline came and went without incident at the corner of 66th and Hegenberger. The A's made no deadline moves; Billy Beane, who says he spends April and May figuring out what the A's need, June and July going and getting it, and August, September and as much of October as possible... [continue]

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.... [continue]

Look, SFist is covering the Pacific Film Archive's Trouble In Paradise: Pre-Code Hollywood series because we think you should know about it and because (disclosure) it means we can walk past a "Sold Out" sign and a crowd of disappointed Berkeleyan film buffs at showtime, claim our free tickets and watch the movie. But our only real complaint about the series so far is that each film is only screening once, so if you... [continue]

Of I'm No Angel (1933), which screened Sunday at the Pacific Film Archive, film critics like to write that if star Mae West had spoken only one line in her career--"Beulah, peel me a grape"--she would still have been one of her era's brightest screen stars. That's always seemed hyperbolic, but the film itself makes a pretty convincing case. West (at right), more imposing than coquettish as Tira the Lion Tamer, wields physical presence... [continue]

The All-Star break, which ends when games start today, is a time for the players to give back to the fans (or some such nonsense). It's also a time for baseball writers to fill inches with reflections on the half-season in the books, and with hopes and dreams, if not predictions, for the half-season that arrives in Oakland Thursday night. The first half ended on a high note for the A's, who swept a... [continue]

The Giants and the Mariners are bad this year. Here at A's Brand Baseball, we take no special pleasure in writing that, nor do we do so in order to taunt the other baseball fans and writers on SFist. (OK, maybe a little of the latter.) Rather, we simply want to point out that when the A's won nine of ten games against those two sorry-a$$ teams at the end of June, it didn't... [continue]

1. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin. 2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented. 3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation. The "General Principles" of... [continue]