How many heartaches must we stand before we find a team to let us win again?
Motown at Oaktown for three:
Friday 7:05: Michael Fulmer vs. Triggs
Saturday 6:05: Jordan Zimmermann vs. Hahn
Sunday 1:05: Justin Verlander Daniel Norris vs. Gray (oh yeah, the Tigers were rained out yesterday)
Holy Toledo!
Callahan: Reserved “for plays Bill would have deemed worthy.”
Should probably give Korach control of the button.
That is an excellent idea. He pressed the button to bring it to life last night.
I’m cautiously optimistic. The sign hits the right note between throwback font and modern LED lights, isn’t overbearing, and has a slight undertone of Oakland kitsch. I like it.
I certainly hope they use it tomorrow!
The font is reminiscent of the “Billy Ball” logo.
I don’t know if I would describe the use as limited. They used it 3 times today AND lit it up red, white & blue during the national anthem.
Good job on the title, Soaker.
Unfortunately the Phil Collins version didn’t quite match the theme so I left that Youtube video out.
Yep, with the Tigers we need the Motown version.
just tuned in. heard one pitch. you’re welcome
Holy Toledo, Ed! Good job!
On the Holy Toledo subject, the 17th anniversary of the Wild Alcoholic Dreams game should be noted (grabs tequila out of the cabinet).
Safe!
No, Khris came off the bag just for a split-second while the glove was on his body.
Out!
shouldn’t that be a double?
The scoring on those plays reminds me of something I saw yesterday. Is this a stolen base or not?
The answer is, it’s a caught stealing.
have I ever mentioned how much i hate scoring rules?
This game is trending in the wrong direction.
no vince, that is not a routine ground ball it was hit in a spot he rarely (presumably) hits the ball
Joyce sucks eggs.
I’m hoping the BABIP argument pans out as the year progresses, but he had 284 PA with the Angels in 2015 and it didn’t exactly pan out then.
aduci can pass to the left hand side
god I wish that joke would work
Peanut allergies are how we thin the herd.
You’re definitely exiled to the Outer Mongolia of the Coliseum if you want to be in the peanut-free zone.
This post is sponsored by the House of Representatives,
Rajai can still scoot.
Joyce sucks more eggs.
Bizarre animation piece between innings time warping through A’s history from Foxx thru Reggie, Rollie, Rickey, Hudson Mulder Zito in some kind of chase the rolling ball caper. Just odd.
Yeah, I think I saw that one on the last homestand. It’s as if the thought is “Gee, dot racing seems to work, so let’s invent six different versions of it.”
Triggs has buzzard’s luck.
Hiring a former catcher to be a manager is almost a cliche at this point.
We can probably unplug the Holy Toledo sign for the rest of the evening.
Yeah that thing isn’t going to get much use.
triggs is good now?
Miguel Cabrera is not the best hitter in baseball. Mike Trout is the best hitter in baseball and it’s not even close.
Mr. Bed, Bryce Harper on Line 1.
I’ll take Trout over Harper everyday of the week and twice on Sunday.
You know I’m starting to think we aren’t going to win the World Series this century.
How about we call the game, huh.
Why, there was some drama right there. Will Trevor Plouffe GIDP? No, he popped up instead.
Seriously, when Davis is at bat just show his at bat.
So, is Maxwell going to do the catching and Vogt is going to DH while Healy sits on the bench…um, why?
It’s only the third game Healy hasn’t started. I do want Maxwell to catch almost every day until Phegley comes back. Vogt can do his team leader stuff from the bench. We need to start sorting through the Nashville roster and giving guys chances to excel or suck in regular play in Oakland.
I want Healy at 1B everyday. No more journeymen in their 30’s taking at bats from younger players. As far as team leader stuff that’s what the manager is for so send Vogt on his way.
What might make this season most interesting for me would be for the team to be 20 games under .500 by the middle of June, so the Astros-style sorting of the young players would be the story for the final 3 months. They would have to be willing to accept a 100+ loss season.
I have no problem with them bottoming out. At bats for Alonso, Joyce, Plouffe, Rajai, Lowrie, and Vogt have no purpose. This team isn’t even in the same league as the Astros so let’s build for 2019.
i am with you on everyone except alanso. he seemed neat this year
I want to see players who have a chance to spray champagne in an A’s clubhouse. None of the guys you named will do that in the future (Vogt has done it but won’t again). Four years ago the Astros were going through a lot of young players and many of them were terrible and disappeared quickly, but there were enough Altuves and Keuchels in there too.
Yep…Soaker for GM.
I come back to the site after a few days off and Bed is talking baseball. What a year, what a year…
I’m as surprised as you are.
I like this pitcher for Detroit.
If game threads are like this in May by July it’s just going to be Ed continuing his one sided war with Vince alone.
uhg. its…its…uhg
so earlier when I couldn’t type i heard a jake smolinski radio promo
That’ll get people to listen to the games.
How you gonna keep them down on the farm once theyve heard Jake Smolinski?
We have Food Trucks! We have 77 different beers! We have a Holy Toledo sign! We might have a Rickey Henderson statue! What we don’t have is an interesting baseball team.
And Soaker wins the game thread.
a light up sign!
So, who has a more secure job for life Beane or Scioscia?
beane,
He hasn’t been the same since Angelina divorced him.
Scioscia won’t manage that much longer but he has a front office job there for many years to come.
I guess championship flags fly forever in Anaheim.
flag
Heh…good point.
vince? spinning on a lazy susan?
Plouffe and Joyce…Joyce and Plouffe…both suck eggs.
2017 A’s “booted by ploffe”
WTF Maxwell?
That run should not have counted, but apparently Melvin didn’t request a “crew chief challenge” within the alloted time.
wahl cut his era in halk
Next stop Cooperstown.
my phone battery died. let me scramble to listen on another device?
Hurry Ed…you don’t want to miss the excitement!
Joyce still has a shot at the Golden Sombrero on Cinco de Mayo.
Rats, but Rajai did make some history there.
Maxwell showing some catcher’s speed there.
Well, that game sucked so no one gets any apple slices.
I have the TV sound muted, but Canseco, wearing the “JUICED” tank top, has an expression that says “Why the FK did I take this stupid job?”
he can’t figure out “because paycheck”?
I think it’s been a long time since Jose was too good for any job.
I still have much capping to do, but if you’re heading for the windows early, Primera picks Fast and Accurate (3) to win the Kentucky Derby.
No idea how I’ll bet it yet, but I think Classic Empire (14) is the best horse in the race and well suited by his post position and racing style for the likely modest early pace. Very pleased he’s up to 8-1, great value.
OK, I think I’m settled. Seems like the rain will hold off the rest of today and the track will be dry by post time.
It’s the most open Derby in years, so we’ll see, but I love Classic Empire (14) to win at 8-1. I also think second fave Irish War Cry (17) has a chance at 9-2, and if we’re going to see a longshot I’ll take a stab at Dubai-based Thunder Snow (2) at 16-1. I wish that price were better…no shipper from the Emirates has ever won the Derby…but maybe Thunder Snow has the talent to be the first.
Other horses I could see hitting the board are Hence (8), Battle of Midway (11), McCracken (15), and I guess maybe the favorite Always Dreaming (5), though we’ve seen high-strung Pletcher horses melt down in front of the huge crowds too often for me to pick him to win.
Here’s my ticket, barring a major change in conditions or odds:
$50 to Win on Classic Empire (14)
$10 to Win on Irish War Cry (17)
$10 to Win on Thunder Snow (2)
$3 Exacta with 14 over 2,5,8,11,15,17 ($18)
$1 Trifecta with 14,17 over 2,8,11,14,17 over 2,8,11,14,17 ($24)
For the rest of the Upgrade clan, Primera has $10 to Win on Fast and Accurate (3), Segundo goes long with $10 to Win on Sonneteer (12), and Nurse U has a straight $10 Trifecta with McCracken (15) over Battle of Midway (11) over Irish War Cry (17).
Happy wagering everyone. Now it’s julep time.
Man I love mint juleps. I have this really great recipe, albeit pretty strong:
1 teaspoon (heaping if you like) powdered sugar.
EXACTLY 2 teaspoons of distilled water
4 ounces of your favorite whiskey
4 mint leaves
Get yourself a highball glass, and then muddle the mint, sugar, and water. What I like to do is just kinda smoosh it down a little bit once or twice. Then, add your ice and whiskey to a second highball glass, throw the first one in the fucking garbage, and drink your goddamn whiskey neat.
Thanks, and go As.
Legitimate riposte.
mostly just an excuse to type out that joke. Go horsies!
Thanks, and go As.
Either way we’re drinking whiskey by the glassfull.
i love you
Thanks, and go As.
Thanks, and go As.
[picard pic]
how the fuck is it neat if you put goddamn ice in it??
yea yea yea
Thanks, and go As.
Fucking weather people. Raining now. Track could still turn up fair, but if it’s sloppy I still like my picks for the most part, especially Classic Empire. If it’s slop I’ll cancel everything with Thunder Snow.
With an off track that’s one too many random elements to stay on Thunder Snow. At 16-1 I like Hence a lot more, who has a slop win back in Jan. Swap the $10 Win bet off 2 onto 8, nix 2 from the exacta (-$6), change Trifecta to a 8-11-14-17 box at same price. If it’s a Hence-Midway-Classic/Irish tri I will be lovin life.
This is completely incomprehensible to me and I respect that.
It means the Upgrade children are going shoeless this year.
I should think more about Show bets. I liked Battle of Midway to get a piece. I’d imagine there’s a long term show bet strategy that rewards good but conservative handicapping. This would of course require vastly more time than I’d ever be willing to invest. Not to mention bankroll discipline.
Gormley seems like a British name. It’s always raining there.
GORMLEY
In fact, named after British sculptor Antony Gormley!
Excellent, the swells are walking through the mud and shit, I love this part.
I got $2 to win on Gunnevera
i put it all on long shot…
combat fell! long shot fell!
all we money gone a hell,
all we money gone a hell.
and long shot… him kick de bucket
long shot kick de bucket.
As a fan of US history, I’d love to see Battle of Midway prevail, but I fear his trainers will not crack the opposition’s codes in time.
Well done, sir.
Alas.
I am far too drunk to parse Ray and Glen’s thoughts on the timing and strategy of the instant replay challenge rules.
is there a a level of drunk in which you could parse it?
I will work on this and report back.
Baseball’s replay rules seems needlessly complicated.
Do the A’s practice defense?
Yes, in the clubhouse when Alonso plays grabass.
Is this a ballgame or a Hitchcock movie? That’s a lot of birds.
And it’s only the 2nd inning. The seagull volume in last night’s sparse parking lot was downright alarming.
They can smell the scent of death coming off the A’s.
I got crapped on today. With the number of birds circling the stadium I knew it was only a matter of time.
I was rooting for them to unload on Angela Sun during one of her banal on-camera segments.
Good grief…I sure wish I didn’t pay for the entire season. This is unwatchable.
a lot of tigers are wearing white shoes
i like how the best hitter in baseball always looks to the third base coach for a sign
Never too big for the fundamentals, kids.
This is painful.
that’s what ryon said
At this pace we’ll never see the Holy Toledo sign…unless they start doing it for the visiting team.
Maybe next time they elect a new pope.
Good timing, Brian.
his wasn’t holy toledo worthy
No, it wasn’t but I don’t blame them…it’s a new toy that they wanted to play with.
“Plays Bill would have deemed worthy” has evidently been twisted to “every home run” already.
There’s plenty of room out on that wall. If they want a sign they will actually use, how about one that lights up with FUCK.
Play the kid everyday…just not at third.
In other news, I’m using the December/January football technique of watching the game on the app and Chromecast. This prevents me from having to run outside every inning and clear the snow from the dish. It was supposed to rain, it’s colder than expected, about 3 inches so far and still going. Welcome to May.
Snow in May is pure evil on a stick.
ray…who is xavier bogarts?
Isn’t he one of the X-Men?
It’s just not happening for Hahn tonight.
101 pitches and can’t complete the fourth inning. Ouch.
I think Detroit has had the bases loaded 300 times this series so far
i like yonder
half over?
I watch quite a few other teams’ broadcasts on MLB.tv and I can’t recall any broadcast team destroying a 4-2 game with food idiocy the way Kuiper and Fosse are doing tonight.
Well, a 5-2 game, in the time it took to type that.
they are one of the 5 worst, probably 3 worst.
It has stopped snowing, so I knocked off the snow and have gone back to syncing the radio to the TV picture. I can’t do that when watching on the app because the time delay of the online video is too long.
i am usually radio, but when I do sit to watch I try for ken, but my computer restarts a bunch and I end up listening to ray and glen a bunch too
My hardware solution to the delays limits my ability to delay the radio broadcast to about 16 seconds max. There’s a software solution, allowing for longer delays, which requires hooking up another computer, and I do have an old Windows XP Netbook I could use for that, but the situation hasn’t come up often enough to bother with that.
why is rajai?
well?
I thought it was a koan.
Re-tooled!
Ed may be on to something with this Yonder fellow.
IBIYA
I haven’t thought of Alonso as someone who would bring anything more than a marginal prospect in July. It sure would be nice if a contending team were willing to pay up to grab him.
There was a big homemade sign in RF last night that said FIRMEN A KHRIS, any idea what this means?
Sign Khris
can we get puk to round rock?
edit: midland
Won’t be long. He seems like a guy we could see in Oakland next July.
If the bobblehead was for the first 15K then I guess everyone there got a bobblehead.
That has to be one of the smallest crowds for a Bobblehead Night in MLB history. I think Korach said 16K.
Well, is a Bob Melvin bobblehead really anything all that special? I’m not into memorabilia so maybe I’m wrong.
Most bobbleheads are on EBay five minutes after the gates open.
I might have a Carney Lansford one in the garage somewhere.
Most of mine have decapitated themselves in various falls. The one that has survived is a George Brett from an A’s road trip to Kauffman Stadium some years ago, and he still stands proudly next to the Ooma device under the TV.
Casilla has only pitched one inning in the last week. I would go ahead and use him here rather than Montas.
Are the NBA playoffs the most predictable thing in professional sports?
Yes
Let’s just get to the Cavs and the Dubs. I really wish the first two rounds were best of 5.
This year has been especially non-competitive. The whole season has been one big prologue to the boss fight at the end. Even I’ve gotten a little bored.
The NBA is better when there are at least 4 teams that have a legitimate shot at winning the whole thing.
It’s not even close. There are 2 right now:
– Lebron’s team.
– The team that built itself up by happening into three top-10 players, and then added KD over Harrison Barnes.
Thanks, and go As.
The Warriors are the Warriors because of a couple of ordinary lucky occurrences (Curry and Klay falling to them in the draft) and a couple of very freak lucky occurrences (finding a top 10 player in the second round and Curry’s ankles healing right after he signed a contract so cheap they could get Iguodala and then Durant).
Add good management, and the only way to even compete is to have maybe the greatest player of all time.
Maybe they need to double the games per season with far fewer days off so they have to use the whole roster.
Does every reliever throw 98+ now?
This FKer
its been so long, i’ve lost my anger toward sulk rod
its coming back
Would be nice to beat him.
Confirmed. It was nice.
Indeed.
yup
is that the first time no doubles defense worked?
And that’s why baseball is still a great game.
I sometimes type a Game Over comment onto the clipboard with 2 out in the 9th.
Hanging in there and battling to a one-run loss after a crappy starting pitching performance enhanced by errors…feels like a Moral Victory right now.HOLY TOLEDO
That was worthy of a Holy Toledo.
Well how about that?
With that win to heck with apple slices…Pizza for everybody!
Rent out the party room at Round Table.
Bleg: if I were to get Mrs N a tripod for her Nikon DSLR, which ones should I be looking at, or what features should matter?
um, bob?
He has never played an inning in the outfield in pro ball. But, if you aspire to be Adam Rosales, you have to give it a try. Don’t forget to run out your walks!
just can’t keep rosies glove or bat out of the lineup
Well, bat at least.
Radio was saying he was playing there in minor league spring training?
this inning is full of dumb luck
This is why Daniel Norris lives in a van down by the river.
Damn almighty it is fucking glorious day to be Californian.
I love the logo of the Edmonton Oilers, beautiful lines.
It’s gorgeous.
The Ducks logo on the other hand…
That was a pretty good classic Bill King call. Ron Gant with a second-deck homer that “left a trail of fire in its wake.”
So (shoutout AV) Alonso is now a prodigious power hitter with a stone glove?
wait. i don’t need to clarify, do i?
totally makes sense at the beginning of some sentences. especially questions about a change over time. it’s just those answers that begin with it that are odd and draw attention. and i’m not like irked by them. just curious about how they go, why they happen, what they say about the speaker/s and our times. same with all of those things. the vocal fry and the mansplaining (and the womplaining) ([ducks]) and the i feel like and the rising-tone declarative sentence and the… yada yada yada.
—
sorta related, i found a new toy: https://books.google.com/ngrams
Don’t get me started on “I feel like.”
i mean…
Would be nice to beat him again.
Indeed.
Confirmed. It was nice again.
This plus the Giants’ weekend in Cincinnati.
2/3 of the front of today’s Sporting Green is about the A’s (game story + Ostler on untarped the third deck). There’s only a tiny note to go to B5 to read about the Giants losing the weekend 31-5. They are going to get letters I bet.
Well we now know that Ostler is shit at guessing kids’ ages. The “age around 12” Kevin referenced at the end of the third deck column is my friend’s nephew (he’s 7.) He did get right that Kevin was hungry and had eaten an orange.
About 12 years ago Ostler showed up with 8 teenage boys and kicked me out of the seats I had upgraded to in a half-empty section…in the 7th freaking inning!
What an asshole.
Pie a la Healy! Suck it K-Rod!
“I was hoping it hit off the wall”
Shut the fuck up, Ray.
Thanks, and go As.
Such a rally killer
Let’s be fair, he meant it was a fly ball that looked playable and he was hoping it would at least graze the wall so that Lowrie could score. They both didn’t think based on earlier shots out that way that it wasn’t likely to carry. There was no implication they were hoping for a double over the homerun. They’re shitty are articulating it, well shitty at their jobs really, that just wasn’t where the dumb was.
RY ONNNNN!
Healy is kind of delightful to listen to.
He’s thoughtful!
Thread title still proved apt.
Indeed.
My home nightmare is over. My dog tore our home phone lines Friday of the week before last, so we’ve been without internet since then.
i totally read the score wrong on my phone.
Ugh, two walkoffs against KRod and I missed it.
Oh man, Chuck Grassley is such an unbelievable hack.
John Cornyn also pretty bad. Sally Yates just very politely clowned him.
And of course Ted Cruz steps up to outhack both of them. Respect to the master.
EDIT: Yates ate his lunch too.
bookmarks, keywords, or something? for those of us not watching live. i want to match comments to correct replays.
Cornyn and Cruz both tried to make her look like a hack for ordering the department not to defend the muslim ban and she flipped the tables on both of them.
So far the only Republicans to ask anything remotely on topic are Sasse of Nebraska and Lindsey Graham.
Edit: Graham is also being a hack.
lol.
i just wish any of this mattered
It matters. I just wish it mattered faster.