BATTER UP: OAKLAND ATHLETICS

Counting down the seconds till Opening Day when life begins anew involves providing a "starting nine" for all 29 major-league teams, and if there's time, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays too! Presenting: The Oakland Athletics.

1. A modest proposal: The A's are moving to a ballpark in nearby Fremont, Calif., perhaps as early as 2010, where they could become known as the Silicon Valley Athletics at Fremont. Know what? Here's what baseball should do: Repatriate the A's to their former home in Kansas City, which is desperate for a winner and where Billy Beane can try to work his Moneyball magic with the Wal-Mart pinchpenny David Glass as his boss. Let the Royals have Silicon Valley.
2. Don't call it a comeback, they've been here for years: The A's tend to have two types of players. There's some on the way up and some whose careers are in Heather Graham country -- they haven't been heard from much since about 2001. Newcomers such as DH Mike Piazza and left-fielder Shannon Stewart have been productive in the recent past, but if they hadn't slipped, they wouldn't have signed on with the A's for short pay.
3. At this rate, he's Steve Carlton in 1972, except right-handed and Canadian: Victoria, B.C.'s Rich Harden at this writing has a 1.32 earned-run average down in the Cactus League and has got 25 of his 41 outs via strikeouts.
   
   Now let the other white cleat drop... here's the respective spring training ERAs for Oakland's other four prospective starters Joe Blanton, Dan Haren, Joe Kennedy and Esteban Loaiza: 9.69, 4.50, 20.48 and 5.63. Granted, these are small sample sizes (via Catfish Stew, one the best A's blogs going).
   
   The trouble with Harden is staying in the rotation -- he's tossed 175 innings in two seasons, far less than former A's ace Barry Zito used to throw in one.
4. A bunch of drunken fratboys, minus the drunken: One offshoot of Moneyball is that the A's focus on college players has left them with a roster of pretty boys with names such as closer Huston Street (top photo). Street has nasty stuff, but he's a closer, I mean, c'mon. Where's the accoutrements of late-inning intimidation -- shop teacher glasses (Tom Henke), fearsome facial hair (Goose Gossage), or fearsome facial hair combined with borderline craziness à la Al Hrabosky (pictured), the quondam Mad Hungarian?
   
   Seriously. All you need is a picture of Huston Street and a picture of Al Hrabosky to know where the diamond game has gone in 30 years. Sweet monagoose, these players today resemble the family Ronald Reagan imagined he had -- would that they were anything like the family he actually had.
   
   Late A's owner Charlie Finley, who once paid his players to grow mustaches, must be rolling in his grave.
5. In reality, the A's should be fine: The lineup is pretty thin gruel for fantasy leaguers, but the A's won a good division getting offensive production which ranged from middling to just slightly short of appalling, and Piazza is coming in with higher expectations than ex-DH Frank Thomas did in 2006. Their bullpen was stellar last year,
6. Where have you gone, Eric Chavez? The A's third baseman hasn't gone anywhere; it just seems that way after two injury-married seasons. Offensive numbers across both leagues aren't what they were seven, eight years ago, so it could be that the hitting drop-off has made a number of players who are now in their late 20s and early 30s seem like underachievers.
7. Retro Cool A: There's a plethora of candidates from the 1972-74 Swingin' A's who won three straight World Series titles despite getting into fights in the locker room almost every day. Jim (Catfish) Hunter (right-handed pitcher, 1965-74) rolled with it all the way to the Hall of Fame and kept smiling right up until Lou Gehrig's Disease took his life in 1999. Bob Dylan even wrote a song about his fight to win free agency after Finley violated his contact in 1974.
   
   (As songs written about 1970s American League pitchers go, it's probably right up there with Warren Zevon's 1980 ode Bill Lee.)
   
   Suffice to say, Catfish's deeds and advice -- "The sun don't shine on the same dog's ass all the time" -- live on.
8. He's so glad he didn't use his middle name, Harold: New A's left-fielder Shannon Stewart is the best player ever to share his name with a Playboy Playmate and an Ottawa-born poet (two different women, just to be clear). Good friend Greg Hughes once interviewed one of the Shannon Stewarts -- I mention this since Greg is about to do a major blog revamp and would appreciate any input.
9. Need-to-know: The master switch for the A's is the left side of the infield. A healthy, happy Chavez and shortstop Bobby Crosby could equal an extra 10 wins and keep the A's in post-season contention.
   
   The A's still stack up as a second-place team, but enough cracks are appearing. It suggests they're keeping up the franchise's century-old tradition of having several good years followed by a long slide down, but people have said that for a couple seasons.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.