Rob Neyer (Insider content), on the A's recent vets-for-prospects trades:Last season the A's won 76 games. If they brought back the same team next season, they'd have been lucky to win 86 games, which almost surely wouldn't qualify them for the postseason. Essentially, 85 isn't much better than 75, and if you're going to win 75, you might as well win 65. Assuming, of course, that winning 65 puts you on the road to 95.
And if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.
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All serious A's fans here in the Bay Area live in hope. We hope these B+ prospects develop without career ending injuries. We hope the team finally moves to Fremont, or anywhere close and new, sometime while we're young enough to walk through the turnstiles unassisted. We hope that Billy Beane's weaknesses (yes, he has them-remember Terrence Long for 4 years?)aren't overshadowing his strengths.
The only good thing that will come of all this in 2008 and 2009 is that I'll be able to do walk up 3rd row seats again. That hasn't happened since Giambi moved from 3B to IB. Look for a payroll drop from $ 75M in 2007 to $ 50M by the end of 2008.
Was just thinking about this trade and realized just how much it looks like a trade that I'd see in my fantasy baseball league. A team that's out of it trading its unprotectable studs for a handful of cheap protectable players.
Of course those rules keep only about 4 teams fighting for the title every year while the rest have to retrench for next year. And if any of them are lucky, those cheap keepers blossom.
Otherwise they are signing Hideo Nomo.
APBA guy says he'll be able " to do walk up 3rd row seats again ". No doubt he's right.
Gets me wondering though...many thought post Haren and now post Swisher that this was concrete evidence that Bonds would not come to Oakland. But, assuming the A's won't be competitive this season wouldn't Bonds be a good attraction?
There won't be much - if any - competition for his services and I think he might play for not a lot of money - well relatively - just to get to 3,000 and tell everybody to go f--- themselves one last time.
He is Bonds after all.
To the law firm of Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel:
From the Law Offices of Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga and McCormick:
We appreciate that you quoted our client in re blog posting about Rob Neyer. However, we would appreciate it if you would use an actual photo of our client, one Julius Henry Marx, instead of the current snapshot of a high school student in a craptacular costume.
Yours, etc.
A child of five would understand that the picture I had up there before wasn't really Groucho Marx. So I sent someone to fetch a child of five who found one that really was.
The law firm of Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel stands corrected!
Wasn't the team that won 76 games also essentially the same team that went to the playoffs the year before? OK, Piazza was less productive than Thomas, but Piazza soon lost out to Cust.
Neyer spends enough time complaining about selective endpoints, except when it's to his advantage.
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