Oakland A's Days

Five Things We Are Loving Even In These Dog Days of August

1.  The great A's breast cancer commercial with Rajai and Sweeney.
2.  That the Giants lost last night.
3.  That Kurt almost hit another homerun after getting plunked.
4.  That by beating the Angels the A's helped Ronnie Wash just a little bit.
5.  That every day gets us closer to next season when the A's have to be better.

Go Oakland!

Good Luck, Duke

We Hate You Matt Holliday

Hate is a word we try to use sparingly around OAD-land.  But that is how we feel about Matt Holliday.  Nobody was more excited for him to come to Oakland than we were.  At spring training we swooned over his huge hairless arms and thought he was going to make this season something incredible.  And then he was nothing but meh the whole time.  Like just completely phoning it in.  Suddenly, however, now that he is a Cardinal he is a frigging hitting machine.  It makes us furious.  We are done with him.  And this is to say nothing of the fact that Huston Street has saved 32 of 33 games and Carlos Gonzalez is a home run machine.  Ugh.

Go A's!

Yankees Ambivalence

Shutting out the Yankees was awesome.  Losing to the Yankees was terrible.  Listening to the game on the radio was terrible because the cheers whenever something good happens for the Yankees are as loud (if not louder) than when something good happens for the A's.  Watching the game on tv was awesome because Fosse talked about Dibs and ballpark food for like 10 minutes.  Seeing all the Yankee fans in Oakland makes us wonder where they all came from and what percentage of them have ever set foot in the Bronx.  But seeing all the A's fans in attendance reminds us that A's fans are loyal and proud and quirky and awesome and so we kind of feel sorry for people who'd prefer to just jump on the $250 million bandwagon.  Listening to Nick Swisher tell Marty Lurie how much he loooooves being a Yankee made us want to vomit.  But listening to all the gracious things he had to say about his time in Oakland reminded us what a delightful A he was.  We still hate A-Rod.  And Jeter.  But we still love Swisher and CC.  We hate that the A's had so many errors.  We love that the Kurt Suzuki revenge homerun is a real thing now.  Can you understand our ambivalence?

Go Oakland!

OAD Time Machine

We have often wanted a time machine.  We would use it to do all the regular stuff: stop Hitler, buy Google stock, keep our preteen selves from getting perms.  But the last few games have made us want a different kind of time machine.  We want a cut and paste time machine.  Here's why.  Rickey Henderson day on Saturday was amazing.  Rickey's speech was perfect ("Rickey have tears in his eyes, Rickey have love in his heart...").  Rickey holding up a golden base was perfect.  Rickey wearing a vest straight out of the Arsenio Hall show was perfect.  And the fact that it was an extremely enthusiastic sold out crowd made things so fun we could hardly stand it.  It was a reminder of what it was like back in the days when the A's went to the playoffs and the stadium wasn't always 2/3 empty.  Even the game was exciting -- until Ryan Sweeney didn't swing at a single pitch in the bottom of the 9th and the A's lost in the most anti-climactic, disappointing way.  So that is what we would do with our cut and paste time machine.  We would take the ending from Monday night, with the incredible Rajai walk off triple, or we would take all of the awesome offense from last night, and paste it on to Saturday night so we can have one perfect, glorious A's memory from this season.  

Go Oakland!