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.
Goodbye Nick Swish
It's Got to Be the Morning After
Here's todays sports news
The A's are Against the Ropes
The Detroit Tigers look like a team of destiny. It's usually a bad sign for any opponent when a team finds several ways to beat you. Instead of completely shutting the A's down like they did Tuesday evening, the Tigers matched each A's offensive threat with a flurry of runs of their own without a blink or stammer. And they showed us all why they, indeed, have the best bullpen in the Major Leagues. They slowed the A's momentum down just enough to deliver a decisive knockout blow in the eighth and ninth innings, a tribute to their indomitable will and Fernando Rodney's 96 mph fastballs and Todd Jones' craftiness. They are clearly this year’s Chicago White Sox, able to find the slimmest cracks and crannies in a team’s defenses and exploiting the hell out of them.
The A's Finally Have an Opponent
The A's might have wrapped up their playoff spot days ago, but the big question of who they would play was still up in the air. Finally, this afternoon, the A's got their opponent, the Minnesota Twins.
What's the Score, Boys? What Did Bugs Bunny Do? What's With the Carrot League Football Today
Not that we watched a lot of football yesterday, but we saw that red haired woman in the Nissan commercial enough times to make us feel like we need to introduce her to our parents.
What's the Score, Boys? What Did Bugs Bunny Do? What's With the Carrot League Baseball Today?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
A's 4 White Sox 2- Esteban Loaiza held the White Sox to just enough runs to allow a pretty week A's O to win the game. The A's were 0 for 16 with runners in scoring position but still scraped together four runs. How'd they do it-- aggressive base running, defense, situational hitting-- small ball. Now how about that? The game so pissed off Sox manager Ozzie Guillen that after the game he launched into a profanity filled tirade about the lack of booze in the visiting locker room. Anyways, the Angels won so the A's remain five up but the magic number is now 11.
A's Brand Baseball Midseason Report: Bye Bye Byrnesie
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.
A's Brand Baseball: 41 Losses Never Felt So Good
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 necessarily mean much. The home nine continued its hot streak, though, and took two out of three at home from the Chicago White Sox, who still carry the best record in the majors. After Tuesday night's eleven-inning victory over the Blue Jays in Toronto, the A's find themselves with forty-one wins and forty-one losses.
A's Brand Baseball: Do We Hear Three in a Row?
Some might suggest that the A’s only took two of three at the Coliseum this week from the of-all-things-still-major-league-leading Chicago White Sox because the Sox played two games like a Little League team whose coach missed the draft. They would probably go on to suggest that the two wins, which evened the home team’s record out at 11-11, don’t mean much with respect to its April slide, because again: major league baseball players aren’t going to give up that many games on errors at shortstop. The White Sox managed to drop two in a row in exactly that fashion, though, opening the door for eighth-inning heroics from Jason Kendall on Tuesday and an RBI single in the bottom of the ninth for Marco Scutaro, SFist’s utility infielder of the month, on Wednesday.
A's Brand Baseball: The Cruelest Month
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.

