The Athletics look to complete April with a winning record for the second time in five seasons of the Geren era. They were 17-12 at the end of April 2008.
Ellis feeling under the weather today.
— Jane Lee (@JaneMLB) April 30, 2011
DeJesus CF
Barton 1B
Jackson RF
Willingham LF
Matsui DH
Suzuki C
Ellis 2B Kz 3B
LaRoche 3B 2B
Pennington SS
Brett Anderson vs. Colby Lewis.
Brett Anderson is going to tear the hearts out of the Rangers and feed them back to them.
Kalima shaktiday!
Beltre would have been worth the money purely to keep him from hitting against us.
Well, that could have been a lot worse
Colby Lewis so far in 2011: 113 batters faced, 10 home runs. Ooof. Even more ominously, he’s giving them up to guys wearing green and gold helmets.
…but look out Colby, here comes Anderson right behind you.
Well, that couldn’t have been any worse
Ah, f—
I’m having the most All-American day of my life: having my son help me change the oil and spark plugs in my truck, while listening to the ballgame on the radio, followed by milkshakes.
I figure we’ll cap it off by invading a small but resource-rich third world nation.
This evening you ought to set aside that Communist “Forbidden Island” game and teach the kid the selfishness and greed of Monopoly.
Just remember to equip yourself with a “Too big to fail” card before the game to allow you to draw on the bank whenever your cash is running low.
Awesome. All that’s missing is a bike ride and catching fireflies at dusk.
This is America: roasting S’Mores at dusk.
Candy must always enter into it (and no, milkshakes do not count as candy, they’re checking off the ice cream box)
The positive from this game: Kz wasn’t in the original lineup, then goes 0 for 3 with 3 K’s (and is pinch-hit for by Sweeney in the 9th). That story is a few pages closer to The End.
In my spring training reports I’ve noted that Kz is easily the best Athletic as far as willingness to interact with the fans. I’ve never talked to him but he seems like he’d be a great guy to sit down and have a few beers with. So I’m very disappointed that it hasn’t worked out for him on the field in Oakland, but I don’t think a team as offensively challenged as this one would be able to put up with him anymore even if he were playing good defense.
And I think you should take Kz to a bar and have those beers with him tomorrow around 1 PM.
LaRoche at 3rd would spare us from Kz, and also spare us from LaRoche at 2nd. Win-win.
Yeah. There is no conceivable excuse for that first inning decision.
The next time the Rangers got someone to 1B, a guy near us yelled: “Andy, think about what you’ll do with the ball!”
Bobblerickey’s: obtained
Barton-o-graph: not obtained
Enjoyable baseball: not obtained
Eye-bleeding “defense”: obtained
For part 1, all credit to Andeux. It was a jungle out there and he was our guide.
Apparently bobbleheads were still available much closer to game time. But I’ll take the credit for minimizing time spent waiting in line.
All in all, a beautiful day at the ballpark apart from what transpired on the field.
What was your line-time minimizing advise?
They had the gate over by will-call open, and the line was way shorter there. (And even shorter for the nm’s since we let them cut in with us).
Also, Free Kraut!: obtained
I think whenever it’s gold tops day it should be mandatory for CoCo to floof his hair.
Also, scoring…yay!
Seconded.
Win! He’s on the postgame show…and said he went with the poofy look because of the gold jerseys!
Awesome.
Love it.
Five…runs?
Five runs?
Nice win, though I wish they hadn’t put Fuentes in at the end.
And go Sharks!
[arches eyebrows, looks in batgirl’s direction]
LOL I wish. Liz Lemon is cool and all, but a Rickey placement would be A-mazing.
Class act.
Also, 2 of 3 ain’t a bad start.
Unbelievable talent and personality. Could run for mayor of Oakland and would win.
And, like you, he’s still in his pajamas.
Oh, I was talking about me the whole time.
(Also – I finally got out of pajamas and took a real shower. All I can say is…after a hospital stay that long, the hair may not be able to be saved. I am seriously considering seeing a sheep-shearer.)
Straight razor at a barber shop. Best way to deal with that particular issue.
Well that’s an interesting chant that took over the Phillies-Mets game. The original “fear the beard” is done for.
What was the chant?
USA, USA, USA. People in the stands were getting news that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. Obama just did a speech announcing it.
Yup. In a crushing blow to Democrats, and moment of major triumph for conservative foreign policy (for reasons I’m sure will be explained tomorrow), Bin Laden is dead.
C’mon man – even this gets your partisan hackles up?
Especially this.
Yeah – saw the news, just wondering what the specific reaction was.
Happiness is wrong.
It’s not joy or relief.
Apprehension comes close.
Grim business, revenge. Playing the emotional card wins elections. Loses elections. Finally tracking down a radical figurehead, given the amount of resources we have as a country…I dunno.
It feels…Pyhrric and ripe for exploitation, even if it is “my side” that exploits it. It feels manipulative, like we’ve now justification for a decade’s worth of war. I don’t know.
But I do know my reaction is not to grab my beach ball, head for the mall in DC and start singing “We Are the Champions.” That seems really, really wrong.
Also, the timing seems a little…contrived?
It’s eight years to the day of W’s “Mission Accomplished” speech. It’s also apparently the same date in 1945 that Hitler was declared dead.
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now…
The burial at sea was an odd touch.
I’m going to call conspiracy theorists who doubt the actuality of this mission “Deathers” (as in, “Where’s the death certificate?”).
I can see why you might want to avoid a burial site which could become a shrine and/or a place of desecration.
Dancing in the streets and t-shirts with tabloid slogans are a pretty crass reaction though, and something he might have addressed – even tangentially – in the announcement.
Those drunken revels were inevitable, I guess, and couldn’t help but evoke the similar images from elsewhere after the towers fell. Both were revolting in my view — demonstrations mostly of the stupid things people will do when the camera lights go on, but that will be taken by others as evidence of barbarism abroad in the land.
I wanted to be quietly proud of the apparent precision and capabilities and courage of the team that carried out the work. But my mind’s-eye image had to share space with drunken chest-thumpers chanting ‘USA’ for the cameras. Hard to reconcile those images.
The dancin’-‘n’-chantin’ reaction looked just like idiot celebrants from anywhere. Once again putting the lie to American Exceptionalism — which, I’ve been thinking lately, really needs to be retired as a term of art. It’s simply (more or less) local jingoistic patriotism, which has always existed everywhere. Calling it “Exceptional,” even to attempt to rebut it, validates the term as in designating suicide bombers as “enemy combatants.”
But exceptionalism is a key part of any empire’s ideology, necessary to explain why making the same mistakes as previous empires won’t have the same consequences this time.
… which is why it’s never, in fact, exceptional.
I guess my thesis would also be sort of like denying the divinity of any god …
I don’t think “American Exceptionalism” means what you think it means.
I think it was an elegant touch: quick, decisive, final and apparently not an insult to the guy’s religion. THAT’s an exit strategy.
This story will get more and more interesting as multiple layers of Pakistani government complicity are revealed, I hope. I wonder if the CIA had a mole at the Abbottabad building permits department, circa 2005?
A professional cricket team and a field hockey stadium? Maybe Lew should look into getting himself one o’ those moles …
Baseball Head loomed up over the centerfield wall at Aces Stadium at the Stretch, and mouthed “Take me Out.” It was the best thing about that place, by which I mean Reno.
There were some interesting subplots last evening — you had to feel for Lara Logan, fresh from her 60 Minutes comeback that I thought was really well-done. But she just couldn’t keep her mouth shut in the later, live commentary on the bin Laden killing, dominating the discussion and wildly speculating about stuff she just could not have known to any sufficient degree of certainty when she said it. The anchor guy had to pointedly ask for specific responses from her polite co-commentator. She badly needed an editor.
Also interesting how the information morph’d, and how amateurish were the graphics. Abbotobad started out as a village 150 miles from Islamabad, then later variously became an “affluent suburb” thirty miles from the capital, and a “city of a million people.” The googlemap entry indicates that it is not very big, area-wise, and it’s on the main drag all the way to China. It also shows a good-sized hospital, golf course and several ballfields.
The regional graphic on CBS looked like a fourth-grade civics project with political borders traced and retraced, badly.