Category Archives: Oakland A’s UK

A regular column looking at the Oakland A’s from a British fan’s perspective

Thank you for the A’s: More fun when you win

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Four wins out of four certainly makes the baseball world seem a better place.

The Oakland A’s have turned on the style this week, buoyed by being at home in a city that the team looks set to call home for years to come.

The A’s marketing slogan this year, ‘Rooted in Oakland’, is a clear message of intent while the other sport teams in the area (Golden State Warriors in the NBA, and the Oakland Raiders in the NFL) get ready to move away in the next few years.

It’s not as though the A’s have been immune from the attraction of relocation, as the dalliances with Fremont and San Jose over the past 10 years prove, but through design or default it is they who are the last team standing.

This year has seen a complete change of tone from the club thanks to the arrival of new President Dave Kaval. He has made it his mission to be accessible and open with the fans and whilst undoubtedly there is a ‘good PR’ business aspect behind this, there still seems to be a genuine intent to reconnect with the fans after strained relations in recent years.

Kaval joined the A’s broadcasting crew during Friday night’s game against the Seattle Mariners to confirm that the team will announce the chosen site for the new ballpark this year, so there’s every reason to be happy as an Oakland fan and the team have even managed to put together a winning streak to enjoy.

Wins keep on coming

Two wins against the Texas Rangers and then two more against the Seattle Mariners have put the team on a 9-8 record.

The second win against Texas was the series finale on Wednesday and a day-game to enjoy during the British evening. The A’s jumped on Texas’ starting pitcher Martin Perez by scoring four runs in the first inning on their way to a comfortable 9-1 victory.

Khris Davis continued his home-run-hitting ways and once again spoke about his connection with the team and city, something you don’t hear much of from A’s players.

“I like coming to this ballpark,” Davis said. “It’s a grungy stadium, but I don’t need the fancy art, high-tech stadium to perform. I just go out there and play”.

You’ll find most comments about Oakland (either the current ballpark or the city in general) have a certain back-handed compliment feel to them and it often seems like the A’s almost treat that as a badge of honour.

Still, I expect players and fans alike will quite enjoy a “fancy art, high-tech stadium” once we finally have one.

Valdez faces the M’s

After the two wins against Texas to take that series 2-1, the A’s began a four-game series against the Seattle Mariners on Thursday night.

The big story in the opener was Cesar Valdez getting the start for Oakland. If your reaction to that name is ‘who?’ you’d be saying the same word as most A’s fans when it became clear he would make the spot-start in place of injured Kendall Graveman (the A’s nominal ace in place of the injured Sonny Gray).

Valdez is no rookie, he’s 32 years old and prior to Thursday his last Major League start came in June 2010. His Big League return didn’t last long, he pitched four innings and was optioned back to the Minors after the game, but he did all you could ask of him by keeping the team in the game and it’s a great story for him to have made it back to the big-time at all.

The weekend

The final two games of the series on Saturday and Sunday are both 21.05 BST starts, which will be particularly welcome as the A’s next series in Anaheim is the first of the season so far in which none of the contests are day-games.

Marcus Semien won’t be involved as the only real blow from the week has been him heading to the DL, likely for a couple of months, due to a wrist injury.

There were no dirt-bikes involved though, so that’s something.

MadBum indeed.

Thank you for the A’s: Two weeks into 2017

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Unfortunately, it’s probably been a fitting start to this new column.

The original plan was to write up my thoughts on the Oakland A’s opening two weeks on Easter Sunday.

Then Game Two of the A’s series against the Houston Astros happened on Saturday night and I thought I might wait a day for a more positive start.

Sunday’s game was then rained-out, the first postponement of an A’s home game for three years.

So, the omems don’t bode well …

A sign of things to come?

One thing you learn quickly when you jump on board with an MLB team is that in a 162-game season, most individual games don’t count for much. A gut-wrenching loss doesn’t have to hurt too much because chances are you’ll be playing again the next day, then the day after that, and the day after that etc.

I’ll be honest, I’ve always struggled a bit with that. I shouldn’t care too much about the A’s throwing away a 5-0 lead in a mid-April game, but I do.

In this case, there’s some justification in that it probably does serve as an accurate guide to the A’s in 2017. We have some good parts, yet the bad parts keep surfacing at inopportune moments and revealing the limitations of the team this year.

Keeping score and keeping awake

It didn’t help that I’d chosen the game as the first one I would be keeping score of this season. I’ve always enjoyed keeping score of games, irrespective of the fact that every detail you could ever wish for about a game is available at your fingertips online nowadays.

Whenever I’m emailed by Brits who have started getting into baseball and want to learn more about the game, I always recommend they learn to keep score.

Unlike in the States, most of us Brits don’t get into baseball by playing it as kids. Learning to keep score of games is the perfect way to fill the knowledge gap this creates. Quite simply, you have to pay attention to everything that goes on and therefore you pick up on all the little details that otherwise might pass you by.

It also matches up with my love of making things. You either enjoy spending a few hours with a clipboard on your lap, switching between different coloured pens and fastidiously jotting things down on a bit of paper, or the thought of it makes you wonder why anyone would want to do it.

I’m in the former camp, as you’ll see more of in future posts with some of the other things I do in following the A’s season.

A nightmare game

Here’s a scan of my completed scorecard of Saturday’s game, one that tested my commitment to always finishing a started scorecard.

It was the type of slow-paced game that apparently keeps MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred up at night, even to the point of the A’s TV announcers (Mark Mulder filling in for Ray Fosse) picking up on the Astros’ infielders struggling to stay focused in between pitches.

It was all going so well for Oakland after five innings. Trevor Plouffe and Khris Davis had both hit solo home runs in the bottom of the fifth (having both homered the night before) to make it 5-0 to the A’s and Sean Manaea had pitched five no-hit innings.

Then it all went to pot.

Three walks to load the bases and a couple of errors (the A’s have taken an early MLB lead in errors with 15 from their first 12 games) sent Manaea out of the game and started an Astros comeback that resulted in them scoring 10 runs across the 6th to 9th innings.

The game took just under four hours, finishing at 1am UK time. Not the most fun way to spend Saturday night/Sunday morning, it has to be said, but you have to go through the bad games to enjoy the good ones even more.

The good points?

Khris ‘Krush’ Davis has been the main positive story over the first two weeks. He’s a masher, plain and simple, and when you’ve got a few of those guys in your lineup you always feel you have a chance. The A’s really only have one of those guys, but one’s better than none.

It’s wonderful to read how Davis has taken to Oakland since joining the team in the 2015/16 off-season in Jeff Passan’s recent article and that he hopes to be here for years to come.

It’s not so nice to read – and know from previous experience – that Davis is unlikely to be on the A’s for much beyond this season.

Seeing former A’s favourite Josh Reddick serenaded with Careless Whisper on Friday night on his return to the Coliseum with the Astros put that into perspective.

Sometimes it does make sense not to extend a player’s contract and get some players back in a trade before they hit free agency. Jharel Cotton – a poor team’s Pedro Martinez? – has been another bright spot so far and he was part of the package we got back for Reddick and ‘Blistering’ Rich Hill last summer.

However the A’s have struggled for years in attracting free agents to Oakland (as Passan’s article notes). When you’ve got a player that’s quite good and wants to be here, why not spend a bit of money keeping him rather than blowing it on mediocre free agents (yes, the Billy Butler deal comes to mind).

We’re never going to be able to compete with the big spenders, but you know what, it’s nice to have a few players that are quite good, rather than just a collection of players that possibly might be quite good one day and players that are just okay (Jed Lowrie, Yonder Alonso etc).

Coming up

The A’s were 5-5 heading into the weekend series, which was the start of a 10-game home-stand (now a 9-game home-stand), so the two losses against Houston have put us back into sub .500 territory.

Three games against the Texas Rangers, then four against the Seattle Mariners, are what faces us over the next seven days.  Three of them are day-games so are convenient to watch in the British evening.

As for the title (the column, not the World Series)

The column title came about from a typical random thought process:

Easter weekend breakfast consisted of tea and hot cross buns. That reminded me of the lyrics from Autumn Almanac (“Tea and toasted buttered current buns, are to compensate for lack of sun …”) by the Kinks, which got me thinking of other Kinks songs, including Days.

So, Thank you for the A’s (Days) it is.

Although based on how I felt after Saturday’s game, it could have been Stop Your Sobbing instead, or Where Have All The Good Times Gone.

And as for Dead End Street, well things aren’t quite that bad. Yet.