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......

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......

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......

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......

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'......

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......

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......

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......

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......

In May, when the A's were busy losing twenty of twenty-four games, and trotting out starting pitchers that even A's bloggers didn't know were affiliated with the organization, we here at A's Brand Baseball were considering a change in strategery. Not "giving up on the season," exactly--more like emphasizing reasons to care about the A's that didn't involve hoping they would actually win baseball games. We'd have instituted a Rickey Watch (.302/.494/.397, 1 HR,......

In which we review a homestand, and preview the first series of a road trip to the NL East: A's third baseman Eric Chavez was named American League Player of the Week for the week ending June 5. That's pretty good under any circumstances, but even better when you consider that on Wednesday June 1, Eric Chavez was having another bad week in what has been (we hope) a forgettable first third of the......

When the A's left the Bay Area for nine games against Tampa Bay and Cleveland, we at A's Brand Baseball wrote: Such a break from major league competition could be just what the doctor ordered . . . We were right, too: those games against the A's really helped out the Devil Rays and Indians. Until Monday night's 11-inning comeback win over Tampa Bay, the A's had lost 9 games in a row; it......

Local sportswriters are abandoning the A's bandwagon this season like it was, well, a sinking ship. In February, Ray Ratto predicted a 60-win season on ESPNews (later, he amended that to 65. Thanks, Ray). Then, Bruce Jenkins rhapsodized about intelligent baseball, threw up his hands and conceded the AL West. We can never tell what the hell Scott Ostler is talking about, but we're pretty sure this, which includes the season's first lazy connection......