Main Page | Recent changes | Edit this page | Page history

Printable version | Disclaimers

 Not logged in
Log in | Help
 

Oakland Athletics

(Redirected from Athletics)

The Oakland Athletics are an American League team.

Table of contents
1 History

1.1 Beane Era
1.2 Pre-Beane Era

2 A's and BBTF
3 Newsstand
4 Blogs
[edit]

History

[edit]

Beane Era

The A's general manager Billy Beane is the shining knight of the sabermetric crusade, in theory using the right statistics intelligently to build a superb team on a limited budget. He also throws chairs, is uninterested in selling jeans, puts a milo on people, and, according to Joe Morgan, wrote Moneyball.

It has been said (even by Beane himself) that his shit doesn't work in the playoffs, where the Oakland nine were eliminated in the first round from 2000-2003, going 0-9 in possible clinching games during that stretch. In the following seasons of 2004 and 2005, they choked a bit early, blowing AL West Division leads in September to the rival Angels.

Having traded two of the Big Three pitchers that fueled their run to the playoffs, the A's progress in 2006 was closely monitored. The A's got the choking label removed by winning the AL West that year, then sweeping the Minnesota Twins in the divisional series. Some believe they got the label right back by being swept by the Detroit Tigers in the ensuing ALCS.

After an under-.500 season in 2007 hampered by approximately 801 player injuries, Beane made a big splash by dismantling the now-expensive no-longer-superb team, trading its veterans (including the relatively young Dan Haren and Nick Swisher) for prime prospects. He said it was the most excited he had been for the club in years, and owner Lewis Wolff implied that the new plan was to rebuild the team with cheap young talent to be a force once the team's new Fremont ballpark (Cisco Field) opens in 2011-12. Beane continued this rebuilding process in mid-2008 by trading rotation starters Joe Blanton and Rich Harden for even more young prospects.

Once the team makes the move out of the old Oakland Coliseum, Wolff is expected to rename the team "The Oakland Athletics of Fremont" or something similar, following the lead of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

[edit]

Pre-Beane Era

Many baseball clubs in the early years of the sport were called "Athletic Club" of this-or-that city. There were "Philadelphia Athletics" entries in all the 19th-century major leagues. The American League grabbed the city and the name in 1901 and kept it until the club relocated to Kansas City in 1955. There, they served as a sort of conduit of players from the minors to the Yankees but also attracted the attention of megalomaniac owner Charles O. Finley, who transferred them to Oakland in 1968.

The team's nickname has at times been just "A's" in a sort of KFC-type move, but now seems to be "Athletics" again. Finley in the 1960s and 1970s was intent on creating his own style, dressing the players in bright yellow and green and coercing/enticing them into fantastical mustaches and baroque personal nicknames. Later Oakland management has stressed more retro connections to the team's Philadelphia origins, even reviving the "White Elephant" mascot and sleeve logo embraced by owner/manager Connie Mack in the team's early history, when John McGraw used the phrase to insult the franchise. McGraw's 1902 comment came back to haunt him in 1905, when the Athletics played the Giants in the World series, and Philadelphia fans presented him with a toy White Elephant, which he accepted with surprising grace. McGraw had the last word, as the Giants won the Series four games to one.

Except for their "lost years" in Kansas City, this franchise has been perhaps the most consistently interesting in baseball history. Mack built all-time great teams in the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s, and stripped them down as fast as he built them. Finley built one of the greatest of all dynasties in the 70s, and decimated it once the free-agent era began. When the A's have been good, they have been very good. The franchise's record of nine World Series Championships is third behind only the Cardinals and Yankees. Billy Martin arrived for a brief but very high-profile experiment in rebuilding in 1980. Then GM Sandy Alderson and manager Tony LaRussa built another great team in the late 1980s, winning one World Series and three consecutive AL pennants; this team was in turn stripped bare again before the Beane era began.

Bill James grew up in the Kansas City area as a young KC A's fan, and later drew upon the boyhood experience of following those terrible teams to write a very good essay for one of his Baseball Abstracts.

[edit]

A's and BBTF

The Athletics, despite what most would have you believe, are not really the standard-bearing Baseball Think Factory team. In fact, surprisingly few Primates are A's fans. However, most enjoy lauding the sabermetric moves of the A's, causing rancor among the anti-saberist crowd such as Backlasher and RossCW. Some Primates, like Danny, fall into both categories (A's fan, sabermetrics fan), and are consequently mocked as fanboys by the same crowd. BBTF discussion threads involving the A's are quite likely to be derailed by such back-and-forth shenanigans.

For other A's fans, see Fans of my team.

[edit]

Newsstand

[edit]

Blogs

Retrieved from "http://digamma.net/btfwiki/Oakland_Athletics"

This page has been accessed 4481 times. This page was last modified 18:49, 6 Oct 2008. Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.


[Main Page]
Main Page
Community portal
Current events
Recent changes
Random page
Help
Edit this page
Discuss this page
Page history
What links here
Related changes
Special pages
Bug reports