Results tagged “nickswisher”

It appears that the Billy Beane Player Emporium is still open for business as Beane just traded traded Nick Swisher to the White Sox for a bunch of prospects. The house-cleaning continues.

Much like "the Sopranos," our week-long look at the A's this season concludes with a look at pitchers and outfielders, as well as some closing thoughts on the A's from Christy. FYI- there's nobody gets whacked in this write up

Hey, "A's" isn't that hard to spell! Spelling bee champ (and proud member of the BART family) Evan O'Dorney from Danville threw out the opening pitch at yesterday's A's/Red Sox game.

-Warriors get 40 in the first quarter, then shoot the lights out in a 131-105 win at home. Mark Purdy isn't going to jump on the Warriors bandwagon just yet.

The Oakland Athletics this afternoon showed why this year’s team is infinitely grittier and more determined than playoff teams of years past. This collection of misfits and guys barely above the legal drinking age simply know how to win. They’ve outplayed and out-executed the Twins in the Metroblob, and showed the baseball world why they’ll go deep into the playoffs. Instead of Frank Thomas hammering the Twins into submission this afternoon, it was the likes of Nick Swisher, Marco Scutaro and Mark Kotsay running the Twins ragged. The 5-2 final score doesn’t reflect the way the A’s controlled this game. Boof Bonser, the Twins starting pitcher, never really had a chance against the highly selective, pitch-conscious A’s batters. They nitpicked the poor guy like vultures picking at an animal carcass. And in the end it came down to the basics: hitting, pitching, defense and the big play (something the Twins were touted as superior to the A’s). Esteban Loiaza, a man we’ve called out in the past, pitched like he’s been sipping on stud juice—he was simply outstanding before running into a couple of homerun blasts. It was also Swisher making adjustments and not swinging for the fences, but using that crappy dome for less glamorous doubles. Smart move, Swish! And it was Mark Kotsay’s brilliant inside-the-park homerun that sealed the deal on this little affair in Minneapolis.

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.

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 three-game series against the White Sox and ran their record over .500. And here's the thing about the streak that brought the A's from 17-32 on May 29 to 44-43 on: It coincided, more or less, with Rich Harden's, Nick Swisher's and Bobby Crosby's returns from the disabled list, and the team's being able to field its ideal lineup. In other words, we have reason to believe that the A's are, when healthy, this good.

Baseball is, like, so weird. A 6-game homestand that included Barry Zito’s first win since last July, Rich Harden’s first major league complete game and the catch of Eric Byrnes's life all sounds good, and the A’s got exactly that this week but still managed to drop 4 of those 6 to Seattle and Texas. This week alone, they went from Z’s W over Seattle in front of 30,634 fans on the kind of Sunday afternoon that the first day of May is all about to a rain-shortened 7-16 loss to Texas Wednesday in front of half that many.

Sunday night, the A’s finished a 3-4 road trip with a frustrating 0-1 loss to Los Los Angeles Angeles de Anaheim Anaheim. Joe Blanton pitched the first complete game of his career, giving up 6 hits and a run and making everyone who hyped him going into this season look good, but the offense didn’t bring in the two runs it would have taken to win the game.

Before a disappointingly small, but vocal and ultimately happy crowd at the Coliseum Wednesday night, the A's fought off a series sweep at the talons of the Toronto Blue Jays. Nick Swisher led the way with two hits, one of which was a monster home run to rightfield, and Jason Kendall, whose bat may have finally arrived from Pittsburgh, added two hits and two RBI of his own. Joe Blanton went six innings and gave up three hits and a run, maintaining the excellent starting pitching the A's have seen this season: if you're keeping score, or counting on SFist to do it for you, that's two good starts each for Blanton and Haren, and one apiece for Saarloos and Harden. And although Huston Street gave up the first run of his career -- and Octavio Dotel, maddeningly enough, his first of this season -- to give Blanton's win to Kiko Calero, the bullpen continues to impress.

Previously, on SFist: Giants fans got to attend a home opener. On Monday night in Oakland, it was Kirk Saarloos (1-1, 5.59 and still looking like a solid fifth starter) giving up six runs against the Toronto Blue Jays. Going into the game, the A's sat at three wins and three losses after series against Baltimore and Tampa Bay, and we'll take that. For now.