Seems to me that the A’s have 3 assets (Gray, Madson, Lowrie) that are almost assuredly gone.
Difficult to speculate on what Madson and Lowrie can get but Gray’s baseline is more or less established by the Quintana trade (one top 10 prospect, one top 100, 2 interesting fillers)
Latest from Rosenthal:
Source confirms: #Cubs pursuing Gray even after getting Quintana. First reported: @jonmorosi.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 14, 2017
Will be interesting to see how hard #Cubs push for Gray. Pursuit makes sense given likely FA losses – and perhaps raises price for #Brewers.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 14, 2017
After the Quintana trade, the Cubs system is not great. Centerpiece wise, you’d need to pull from guys who already have major league service:
Ian Happ
Albert Almora
Kyle Schwarber
Happ would be intriguing, but I don’t see the other two guys as that attractive of centerpieces. I hope the speculation that they’re only driving up the price for the Brewers is true.
Kyle Tucker from the Astros a potential Gray centerpiece in your eyes?
If the A’s are trading 2.5 years of Gray to the Astros, Tucker has to be included. The A’s need as close to a fking A sure thing to justify sending Gray to an already loaded division rival, and the Astros’ other top prospects are too risky/not high impact enough to craft a deal around without Tucker.
Alonso doesn’t make the list of marketable assets who are most likely gone?
Sorry, just totally forgot about him, though personally I think the A’s might be better off extending him.
Yankees just lost Michael Pineda for the season, and possibly Greg Bird too, so they could be buyers for both Gray and Alonso.
They also have 7 prospects, including 4 outfielders, in that top 100 list.
The thought of Sonny in pinstripes makes me sad.
dude will look 12
The thought of Sonny in Houston makes me sadder.
Olney reports that the Indians are interested as well.
Nationals just lost Joe Ross to TJS.
Treinen was drafted by the A’s, sent to Washington as part of the trade for Jaso. Reliever having a bad year.
The two prospects are their 2nd and 3rd round picks from last year, both still in the lower minors.
This feels a tad underwhelming.
I didn’t have high hopes. Doolittle is broken most of the time. Madson turns 37 next month and is owed about $11 million through next year.
Both prospects are in the 6-10 range of the Nats averagish farm system.
This deal hinges a lot on how much you like Luzardo. He got good reports coming out of the draft, and his draft stock fell because of injury concerns, which were valid, as he had TJS shortly afterwards. He just came back from that and has only 13 professional innings under his belt. MLB.com characterized him as having #3 or 4 upside, though this was before he came back from TJS. I’m curious what the latest reports say.
Regardless, a 19 year old pitching prospect coming off a major injury seems like a poor choice to center a deal around.
I don’t like the inclusion of Treinen in the deal. He wasn’t a particularly great reliever before his poor year this year, he’s about to be arb eligible, and his inclusion certainly costs the A’s prospect capital.
Neuse is a tweener type. His bat is good, not great, and there’s iffy reports on his defense.
Doolittle and Madson aren’t elite relievers so you can’t expect them to return Chapman/Miller type packages. But they’re definitely in the next tier and the A’s are giving up lots of cost controlled years, particularly with Doolittle, so yes this isn’t very encouraging.
Trienen will be an asset to deal next year. He’s having a rough season but his stuff is FKing nasty. 98mph sinkers dont’ grow on trees.
Thanks, and go As.
I won’t pretend to know if the prospects the A’s are getting back are any good but I’m happy to see them continue to get rid of the over 30 players. I know Doolittle was a fan favorite with many but I never saw him as anything special. As far as Madson…I’ll likely forget he ever pitched for the A’s by Tuesday.
Now, let’s move on Alonso and Lowrie and DFA Rajai. Move Healy to 1B, Barreto to 2B, and Khris to DH…although I’ll miss his amazing arm. Olson to RF and have Joyce be a 4th OF or get rid of him. I’d love to see the closer with two names moved as well…go young.
Sonny makes me nervous but right now I’d keep him unless the A’s get blown away. If, and it’s a big if, he stays healthy he and Manaea would be a nice 1-2 punch.
They would have to trade both Alonso and Khris for that to make any sense.
and healy
I would like to give Healy every day at 1B in August and September, and Pinder probably gets a lot of outfield time. If Khris leaves, Carter is as good as anyone to finish the season as DH, but with Khris still around there’s nothing for Carter to do.
They also still have Olson who I’d much rather get major league at bats than Carter.
I think there’s some >0% chance that Chris Carter turns out to be a Carlos Pena late bloomer-type. Worth a flyer so long as he’s not taking meaningful playing time from genuine big league ready youngsters.
I’d like him to come back just so I could wear my Carter jersey with him on the team. I got to do that for exactly 1 game when I bought it.
I have my Jimmy Carter in 76 t-shirt…not sure if that helps.
I think it actually means you win!
Please accept this 6 pack of Billy Beer and our heart felt congratulations.
YeeHaw!
I’d do it just so he can walk out into the clubhouse past SuSlu and say “Happy Face.”
There’s Renato Nunez to consider as well. He’s as ready as he’ll ever be, so may as well run him out there over Carter.
Chris Carter…that makes no sense. Just commit to the young players. The season is lost and it’s not like anyone is going to the games. Everything this team does should be about being ready to compete in 2019.
2019 A’s contending pitching rotation:
Manaea
A.J. Puk
Graveman
Grant Holmes
Someone from a Sonny trade
Boy the A’s bullpen is going to be bad the rest of the way.
Simon Castro is pretty interesting. He’s struck out 15 per 9 in AAA albeit with poor control. From what I remember, he showed really good stuff in spring training.
But yeah, not looking forward to Axford, Casilla, and Hendriks in the high leverage innings going forward.
Or Treinen for that matter
Castro just gave up about an 800 foot HR on a hung curveball, but his stuff seems pretty good.
Thanks, and go As.
Agree. I like this guy.
Still to the team’s benefit to lose more and get a better draft pick. Especially if they start giving some new guys opportunities to shine (not withstanding the current dreck).
I know it’s sort of folly to prioritize positions when getting prospects who are two or three years away, but……can we at least get a dang CF prospect at some point if we are trading away the store?
Getting a middle-of-the-order outfielder has to be a requirement of trading Gray; if that’s not available now the trade can wait until the offseason.
Treinen was mostly a starter all the way through the Oakland and Washington farm systems, and even started 7 games for the Nationals in 2014. What happened there?
#squadgoals
As far as the signing the players long term…I’ll believe it when I see it.
My general rule of thumb is that when someone starts talking about the “the narrative” they are bullshitting.
They should probably save that money quote for after the Gray trade.
This one too.
I think the subtext (from the sfgate article version) is that they might be serious about signing players long-term after they have a new stadium. And that they are also serious about the new stadium.
It’s hard to believe they would commit to a higher payroll before then. But if they can get a stadium site finalized in 1-2 more years, and built in 5, then the current crop of rookies really could still be around when they are ready to start handing out market-level contracts.
“The Narrative” is one of my least favorite things about modern communication.
Interesting. It’s tempting to read this as a message to ownership.
Interesting.
More from Slusser
Free Kraut reporter Glorious Mundy will keep following this important story.
Thanks for the updates, GM.
Really encouraging note from BA on Luzardo:
And hey, the other guy can pull a Doolittle if the hitting thing doesn’t work out.
One of my favorite people ever to wear the green and gold. Good luck to him.
Ditto. One of the true good guys to play for the A’s in the Beane era.
Sheldon Neuse will probably not be good says Fangraphs
Oh, good grief.
Well, what other measure are you going to use that {checks wikipedia} is unitless and scale-invariate and takes into account the correlations of the data set?
The name doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue, but Mahalanobis distance has become a pretty standard tool for determining comparable players. On the one hand, it is more statistical jargon. On the other hand, seems much better than the comps that Toonces used to foist on us. (Update: Just went back to the old country and search for “comp” and found out that Joey Wendle will be the next Daniel Murphy.)
– As a player in the low minors, not a first-round pick, and a bit old for level, sure, Neuse is unlikely to ever amount to much. You don’t need a complicated machine-learning model to tell you that.
– More generally, the same is true for the vast majority of prospects – maybe they have a 90% chance of being a bust, 8% chance of being a fringe player, and 2% chance of being a regular or better. So their average long-term value is dominated by the outliers. I’m still not convinced that a statistical model like KATOH is much use for estimating those kind of low probabilities.
– The sentence refers to his Triple-A performance, but he is still at low A, so there is also a typo or other mistake here.
This would take an absurd package, but the Yankees may have the prospect depth to make it work if they are willing to include Gleyber Torres.
Not that great of package from the DBacks. Lugo is the only real prospect going to the Tigers.
If this the market for rental hitters, I’d temper expectations of an Alonso return greatly.
No New York Yonder then.
It looks like Chapman has a chance to be good at baseball.
fighting th pain, dr k’ing the thread
YES
More home is still home reassurance. Thanks doc, speedy recovery to ya.
Heyman
I’m assuming they think one or the other would come very cheap. As they should.
Interesting changes in the Qualifying Offer rules, including a once-in-a-career stipulation.
Stop. Heyman time
Moar Heyman
th ebrewers also have vogt, who can’t catch gray
You added an extra word at the end there…
my typos are out of hand
Latest late night rumor from Rosenthal is that the Brewers seem to be fading on Gray.
It’s sad to say but it looks like the Yankees are the best fit right now. And my feeling is that a deal can and will get done without the Yankees parting with Gleyber or Frazier.
Personally, I think the Yankees should be told to go FK themselves if they don’t want to part with one or the other of those top 2 guys. Guys like Morosi and Sherman are reporting that the A’s are scouting the Yankees AA and A affiliates heavily. My own wild speculation is that the A’s are equally motivated to move Gray as the Yankees are about acquiring him. And so I could see the A’s convincing themselves to build a package around this next tier of “interesting” guys as the Yankees would prefer.
Ultimately I can see Gray and Alonso being moved for a package like this: SS/OF Jorge Mateo, RHP Domingo Acevedo, RHP Zack Littell, and OF Estevan Florial
It’s not a bad package. But it just doesn’t include that one bonafide stud prospect you’d hope to get, and other teams are getting, for a player of Gray’s caliber.
Bad move. Either go for the top tier or wait until the off season when more teams will be interested. It’s not like he’s a pending free agent why act like it.
yep
FWIW, Acuna is #10 on that BA list. 19-year-old, already moved from A+ to AA to AAA this year and (SSS warning) hit better at each level. I could get pretty excited about someone like that.
Florial is #71, and the other Yankees not in the top 100.
Acuña sounds like the kind of prospect we would be thrilled to get, and therefore I assume we will not get him.
Sickels:
Honestly, I could be convinced to take Acuna for Gray straight up if the Yankees are sticking with those BS terms outlined above (no Gleyber/Frazier and two other guys who have no business being untouchable).
Cool graphic here
I could be talked into bringing back Brett for the rest of the season as another lefty in the bullpen, at the MLB minimum of course.
Robles is more in the Acuna/Gleyber tier than the Florial tier. So please FK the Yankees and let this happen.
More Rosenthal on possible Gray to Mariners rumors.
M’s have a very weak system. Their number one right now, OF Kyle Lewis, has ongoing knee issues. I’d stay away.
There goes that idea.
Axford. And we can throw in Jairo if they twist my arm.
Hell, I’d let them have Hendriks just for shits and giggles.
Axford Hendricks and Garcia sounds like an awesome guitar band though.
They would obviously have Scaramucci doing the Fandango too.
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Don’t you dare FKing cave, Billy.
Lucas Duda and Howie Kendrick have both been traded for pitchers in A ball.
We’re not going to get much for Alonzo or Lowrie.
Lucas Duda and Howie Kendrick have both been traded for pitchers in A ball.
We’re not going to get much for Alonso or Lowrie.
Bears repeating.
This sounds like getting up from the desk and starting to walk out, expecting the salesperson to say, “Wait, let me go back and speak to the sales manager one more time about this.”
But, meanwhile, the no-kidding short-term decision has been made.
I see it as Billy throwing in free one-day shipping. Trade for him tomorrow and he can be in your park starting the very next day!
The more I read about Estevan Florial and Jorge Mateo the less I want them. A 32% K rate as a 19 year old in A ball and a guy who spent parts of 3 seasons in A+ ball with a .700 OPS – and was suspended for two weeks last year with attitude issues.
Christ, these cannot be centerpieces in a Gray trade.
Surely there’s not imperative to deal now. Would the return from a January trade fora cost-controlled asset be so much worse? No need to induce extra artificial pressure.
Thanks, and go As.
He also says the A’s have “dropped their request for either Gleyber Torres or Clint Frazier.”
Ken Rosenthal on Facebook (because foxsports.com no longer allows the printed word:
Littell just went to the Twins for Jaime Garcia.
Fully on board with keeping Sonny if this is true:
Yeah, that’s ridiculous. He doesn’t get to dictate terms like that.
Also, that should be “reluctant” not “reticent.” Stupid NY Post.
He can dictate terms like that, but he won’t get what he wants. Unless it’s a can’t miss fucking A trade, hold on to him. More teams will be buyers during the winter, more prospects will have more numbers to evaluate on, and even next summer will have their teams. The risk is certainly there for Gray to fissile, but I’d rather hold on to him and take the risk than to give up a major piece so easily.
Brace yourselves
Oh for chrissakes Billy walk away
This is why I could never be a GM. At this point I would tell Cashman he cant have Sonny until he buys him on the FA market and I dont care if he offers up Judge and 4 clones of Judge
This is ridiculous. Just how big of a mark does Cashman think Beane is? Just how big of a mark is he?
I know we’re all waiting on Sonny, but other stuff is going on, such as:
Come on Dodgers, it doesn’t make sense to give up Verdugo or Buehler for half a season of Darvish. 2.5 years of Sonny however…
Farhan please save the A’s from themselves.
I keep waiting for somebody else to pull a last-minute surprise. Particularly Atlanta, which would see it as an investment for 2018-2019 contention and had a pretty good previous experience acquiring a local native/SEC pitcher from Beane.
Good for him
Agreed, and the fact that Oakland got any return at all suggests Beane maybe not completely washed up.
It looks like Vermont or Beloit got the “return”; whatever, it’s an arm attached to a live body.
From the Hillsboro Hops! (FSU was sporting their colors this weekend.)
D’backs just had to put Ketel Marte on bereavement (mom was killed in a car crash) so that’s their temporary fix.
So when they DFA Rosie in a couple of weeks, do we pick him up or do the Rangers?
Should add that on top of the Marte issue, Chris Owings broke his finger yesterday, so they are definitely short in middle infield. He might be able to hang around in Phoenix through August, and then you have expanded rosters.
They also put Chris Owings on the 60-day DL with a fractured middle finger, so Rosie’s tenure may be longer than that.
BOMBSHELL
Thanks, and go As.
Lowrie and Alonso seems to be dead issues. I guess Lowrie has the 2B job for one more month, then they call up Barreto on September 1.
Several trucks loaded with Pepsi seen leaving Yankee Stadium, heading west.
My sense was that Billy considered Gray a ticking bomb and didn’t want to sit on him through a dozen more starts. A “motivated seller” as they say in RE.
Incredible, incredible risk here. Fowler may not ever make it back and Kaprielian has had a long string of arm issues since before TJS. He’ll be 24 with virtually no professional experience when he’s ready to pitch again.
The only healthy guy in the deal is a incredible risk by himself with the aforementioned attitude issues, the lack of hitting success (he’s had a hot week and a half that inflated his AA numbers. He’s struggled the last 20 games or so in AA), and the lack of a true position.
And they didn’t even get Florial.
For better or worse, this is the bed the A’s FO has made for themselves. If it fails, I can only hope someone is paying attention and holding them accountable. I know Beane/Forst is virtually untouchable, but at a certain point, enough is enough.
It’s extremely annoying that the fucking Yankees got to keep their best prospects, even setting aside that we didn’t get any of them.
If nothing else, somebody named “Dustin Fowler” should be a successor to Mulder as one of the top golfers in franchise history.
Did they though?
Slusser is going in.
Christ, I love Susan, but it’s pretty clear that those valuations don’t hold up in the light of the two major injuries.
If the A’s got a healthy Fowler and Kap then yes this would look a lot better.
Slusser clearly gets a lot of info straight from Beane and isn’t going to immediately torch him on any major move.
Be that as it may, suggesting she’s dismayed by the fan reaction has nothing to do with torching Beane. She could have ignored it.
BA put Fowler in their midseason top 100, which was published a week after his injury.
True – Kap was the one who dropped. Mateo too though obviously for unrelated to injury reasons.
And at 89, Fowler is the only one of the 3 to make that list. Which is a little below the second piece in the Quintana trade. Lists aren’t everything but…sigh.
I’m surprised that she is surprised.
First, because she is dealing with twitter folk, some of whom are the casual fans who will always be upset when a favorite player is traded.
But also, even for us more sophisticated/jaded types, who have been expecting a trade for months, the return just doesn’t seem that great.
Having another SS prospect is nice, since it’s possible that none of our current SS prospects really belong at the position, but overall he seems more like another Yairo Munoz than another Barreto.
And I’m OK getting the injured but otherwise major league ready Fowler instead of the farther away Florial, but even surgeries that are “routine” have risk. Fowler could lose a step, which could make his bat a lot less interesting as a corner OF than as a CF. For the pitcher, TJ doesn’t always work, and even when it does there is increased risk for another injury down the line. And they are both losing development time.
If you compare with what the White Sox got for Quintana, who seems roughly comparable, (or what we gave up for Samardzija) it just seems underwhelming.
Maybe fan know more about the prospects beyond the fact that they were #4, 5, & 9 or their draft position.
clips from fangraphs
Yeah I’m going to go ahead and trust lenscrafters over those writeups that happened before two of the three suffered season-ending injuries.
oh, for sure.
Especially the Fowler injury. I don’t know I would call that standard. Kaprilien, meh, its not like there is terrible track record with those guys. Plus have to cleanse the A’s of the trigss USC cooties.
No one left from 2014 team now except for Lowrie, who left and came back, and will probably be gone again soon.
That makes Semien (A’s debut April 6 2015) the longest tenured Athletic. Several others who debuted that month are in the minors (Hahn, Canha, Bassitt) or the DL (Graveman, Phegley).
Or to put another way, we no longer have a player who was a teammate with Donaldson.
Or an even more depressing way, Billy Butler would be the longest tenured if we go by when they were acquired and count him as still getting a check.
Last remaining player from when I more or less gave up on baseball. Still not over it.
I hopped on AN to view the comments. I enjoyed your take the most. There are too many people there who think the risk is simply about recovering from injury. But I don’t think they’ve considered all the potential ramifications.
People don’t think of TJS as a big deal anymore, but that’s because they primarily know of major leaguers who had it and then came back. But there’s a huge difference between a major leaguer rehabbing TJS and a minor leaguer who has to rehab TJS and also develop and advance through all the levels of the minors like any other prospect.
And any injury that costs a young player large amounts of development time is scary. For a guy like Fowler, who already walks about as often in the minors as Healy does now in the majors, missing almost a year’s worth of at bats could really FK up that development.
And the A’s should be well aware of this – they’ve had talented prospects like Barton, Buck, Crosby, and Sizemore, who all missed large amounts of time because of injury and stalled developmentally because of it. On the pitching side, Ynoa is a pretty good comp for Kap, though he was far younger.
The point is that it’s not just about being able to come back from an injury completely healthy. The talent level can and probably has changed as well.
A 90+ loss team for the third straight year, running out players nobody has heard of. I’m excited about Healy, Chapman and Barreto and hopeful about some others such as Maxwell, Gossett and Cotton, and Manaea is progressing nicely, but for the average Joe there’s not much other than food trucks. After tonight and tomorrow, I see three dates when there will be 10,000 butts in seats: two fireworks nights and an Eck bobblehead giveaway. Otherwise the Coliseum is a good place for some privacy the next couple months.
One last thing to note: the A’s continue to build their reputation as an organization that’s willing to settle for your second tier (or third tier in this case as they didn’t even insist on Florial) guys instead of your bonafide studs for our bonafide studs. How nice of us to be so accommodating.
Don’t forget overpaying for other known players as well. Giving up our top tier guys.
This is what gets me. Beane hasn’t gotten a team’s best prospect since, what, the Haren trade? And since then he has moved the likes of Donaldson, Gray, and Gio Gonzalez with multiple years of team control. At some point he needs to take a stand.
Getting Washington’s top prospect for Gio would have been nice.
Well, OK. There are top prospects and top prospects. But regardless I’m still outraged.
It has been incredibly frustrating watching teams like the Brewers, Braves, White Sox, and even the Yankees trade top talent and get impact talent in return with the result being that they’ve quickly developed top 5 farm systems. The Brewers and Yankees are competing now, and you can be reasonably confident that the Braves and White Sox will be competing in the next 2-3 years.
Can we say the same about the A’s? Even with this latest trade, I’m not even sure this is a top 10 farm system, even after all the talent they’ve bled and the going on 3 last place finishes.
The real problem is the lack of true impact talent. I still trust Beane to find the 2-win players who have flaws. Even on last place teams we get the Marcus Semiens, Khris Davises. Even Yonder Alonso’s. Problem is we have a roster with 20 of these guys. And some of them fail. Nobody bats 1.000.
Problem is there’s nothing else. There’s no 5-win player to build around. So, you can’t upgrade very easily because everybody’s reasonable in the offseason when you look at the next year and yet you’re not good enough to win many games.
What the A’s really need is to develop two stars from late round picks. There hasn’t been a >3rd pick that has come out of nowhere and become a top prospect for the A’s. They’ve been pretty reasonable getting a 1st round pick who makes the majors but is nothing special, but they’ve gotten nothing else from the draft. And other teams get that one or two impact players from the draft out of nowhere. Maybe it’s all luck.
But frankly, I’m tired of it. I still think there’s a method to Beane’s madness, but this trade is make or break. If by this time next year, Kap is still not back, Mateo is still dogging it, and Fowler is not killing it, it’s time for a fresh start. 2012-2014 bought enough good will for the phenomenal Donaldson screw up.
You can make a trade that looks bad if you’re right. But they haven’t been. Not enough. And Beane still has not addressed his biggest weakness of getting star talent. Players with multiple 5+ WAR seasons Beane era: Chavez (4), Giambi(2), Donaldson (2).
Those stars make everything easier. And Beane doesn’t have the reputation or results to get carte blanche anymore. You either put up or your shut up.
< /rant >
Agreed, this is where I am as well.
He does seem to be prioritizing risky guys with potential star upside now. Mateo, Kaprelian, Fowler, Puk, Beck, and Allen all seem to fit that bill.
We need a regime change. It’s not that he isn’t skilled, but whether it’s stagnation, boredom, or predictability something isn’t quite right. I still think he should have been fired for the Donaldson trade. That was just inexcusable.
I think that was Forst TBH.
Thanks, and go As.
Doesn’t really matter who was involved, Beane is just as much responsible, even with his new position, for moves like that. Even if Forst did it all on his own, where was Beane then? Did they not talk at all? Does he really think the move was acceptable? That trade, in the moment, was a fireable offense to me. Regardless of who actually was involved, they both would have been gone had I been the owner. It was just *that* bad of a trade. I wasn’t opposed to trading him, but my god how could you possibly get so little.
sigh
So he negotiated against his interests. Has he not noticed that every time he has said someone was untouchable, he ends up trading them to get what he wants anyway? Not bothering to push it is how you end up making shitty trades.
Exactly. They were unavailable because Cashman said they were unavailable. Why wasn’t Addison Russell similarly unavailable? Why wasn’t Carlos Gonzalez?
Because they kept asking and you caved.
I will say that Beane at least fulfilled my request of getting a real centerfield prospect. He got one with a jacked up knee that may never fully recover, but I’m trying to stay positive.
Mateo’s baseball instincts are poor and his speed plays down on the bases and in the field.
During times like these, I wonder what Beane would’ve traded Trout for had they drafted him.
Worse than what we got for Donaldson. I have no doubts of that. He’d be part of a Shark-like trade.
I suppose it’d be easy enough to check, but is Russell the best prospect to have been traded (at the time of the trade) in the last five years? We can argue what his real upside is, but for an organization that lacks that star talent as others have mentioned, the irony is pretty rich. Also, when you factor in the return, any sense of a wry smile turns to a very sad frown.
Has to be. CarGo was 2008.
Thanks, and go As.
I believe Moncada is. He was top 5, if not the overall best prospect per some publications. Russell was more of a top 10 guy.
Also, is there any reason to expect Puk to be anything more than a 3rd starter at best at this point?
Puk does not have an upside problem. 1.93 FIP in A- ball last year, 2.22 in A+ this year. He was K’ing 14.5/9IP in A+!! He’s had two terrible starts in AA (0.1 IP, 4 ER, 1 IP, 5 ER), but otherwise has been pretty darn good.
Puk does have a downside problem. He’s still walking quite a few guys (3.3, 3.3, and now 5.7 in BB/9).
And frankly, the A’s are pretty good at developing pitchers, so I would rank him pretty darn highly, possibly #1 in the system. Will he be a true ace that we haven’t had since the big 3 (minus healthy Harden, singular seasons of Anderson, Haren, Hill)? Probably not, but he has the potential.
You don’t think that Gray counted as a “true ace” for 2014-15? I realize that his fielding independent numbers have never been that great, but over those two seasons he threw 427 innings with ERA < 3 (and FIP of 3.45 certainly isn’t bad).
Gray was very good and probably an ace in the same mode. Gray and Haren (and frankly some of the big 3 years) were all very good pitcherss but never best in baseball level. The only guys who really flashed that potential were young Hudson/Mulder/Zito, Anderson, and Harden.
Allowed 2 runs on a walk and two hits in the seventh.
Still a nice illustration of that upside though.
12 Ks in 6 innings with only 65 pitches?!
He finished with 13 Ks on 85 pitches in 6.2 innings.
Scary that he bottomed out after 6. Exciting that he accomplished what he did in 6.
Some interesting tidbits from Rosenthal (once you get past the blather about how teams should have made more trades).
Hey peeps, it’s not A’s or trade deadline related, but if any of you are up for it, it would make a few people smile
Done! That is awesome.
Thanks, and go As.
^^^
:) :) :)
Thanks, it will be such fun when they start arriving
Any handy salutations in Croatian?
“Pozdrav” would be “greeting”
“Bok” is like hi (supposedly it comes from greeting in the ever-polite Austro-Hungarian empire “Mein Beugen”, meaning “My bow”)
Of course, Colin, next time you are at the South Pole, you know what you have to do :)
I have some nice South Pole postcards that I can send, but it would be from an Ohio return address. There is still a possibility that I’ll be in Antarctica in Jan-Feb, but it’s looking less likely.
Ohio, South Pole, what’s the difference, apart from voting prowess?
Thanks!
I’m going to The Biggest Little City in the World tonight, with the Nashville Sounds visiting. I’m sure she has lots of lakes and mountains, but the Reno Arch is unique and tacky. Bojan je rekao da voliš primati razglednice iz cijelog svijeta. Pozdrav iz Reno, Nevada, USA. Bojanov prijatelj, Soaker. (And I ran that through a couple of translators to make sure I’m not swearing at her.)
Impressive! You sure you don’t have any Croatian ancestors?
On its way from Najveci mali grad na svijetu, where Franklin Barreto is tonight’s Beer Batter (half-price Uinta Hop Notch IPA).
And yours was the first to come!
Not sure why the width doesn’t work. Also, pretty cool that FK has its own stamps
Note that I did not translate “Playboy’s Girls of Rock N Roll” on one of the marquees in the background.
Mateo
Any of you guys know this place?
That’s in my neighborhood.
Good shop, and the owners seem like good people.
There is a Safeway selling much lower quality meat across the street.
I hope the protestors get eaten by wolves.
What utter BS. I feel like driving up to Berkeley through the worst rush-hour traffic imaginable just to buy a few steaks and pork chops.
Yeah, it’s cool. Expensive and cool.
Yes I would agree that is not universally accepted.
if animals want to become people, they should incorporate.
I believe some (even many?) animals are people. I also believe there is some level of survival of the fittest. I don’t begrudge a bear, for instance, eating a human anymore than I would a human a bear. What matters is how one goes about the process. Unnecessary pain and/or suffering is unacceptable. As is wastefulness. If a bear eats me. That mother fucker better consume and/or put to use all of me. A dmoas-skinned coat or a really nice pair of dmoas-skinned knee-high boots. Turn my skull into a cool coffee mug for those cold hibernating nights.
hey… at least they’re not serving seitan!
Reminds me of the rumors that Snapple was a supporter of the KKK. My favorite part:
Yeah, those guys are obvious klukkers.
Also the Procter&Gamble / Satanism one which stayed alive for decades.
Ha, I remember that one from high school. The boat and the Kosher symbol! Amazingly stupid.
Yankees make three errors behind Gray in the first inning, presumably trying to make him feel at home.