Braden gives Oakland exactly what it needs: A face

By now, all the heart-warming backstories about Dallas Braden's perfect game on Mother's Day in front of the grandmother who raised him with a breast cancer promotion as cover have been told, and they'll be told as long as hearts can be re-warmed.

Now comes the fun part. Packaging Dallas Braden as the new, personality-enriched Oakland Athletic -- a very rare commodity indeed.

You see, Braden was famous one moment before this moment, the dustup with Alex Rodriguez over the sanctity of the pitcher's mound, and no matter what your position is on unwritten rules, Braden's position was clear, and pugnaciously so. A roughly anonymous pitcher ready to get busy with Rodriguez often comes off as silly, but Braden didn't stop after the initial salvo, and has now backed up his talk with pocket aces.

Well, OK, a pocket royal flush, which of course would require a form of Texas Hold-Em with five hole cards.

You see, the A's have combined on-field mediocrity with utter facelessness, a relentless blandness born of underpaid and under-established youth afraid to stand up and lead with the face. It's safe, it's dull, it's part and parcel of a franchise that seems to have 2½ goals:

1) A new ballpark in San Jose.
2) Cashing revenue-sharing checks in the meantime.
And ½) Winning.

That isn't an exact representation of the facts, but it's how it looks, both in the Bay Area and, to the extent that anyone else cares, outside it. Nobody doesn't want to win, but it's how it is prioritized that people notice, and in Oakland, the low budget is a fetish delivered with religious conviction, and the working-below-the-radar thing looks a lot like working underground.

Enter Dallas Braden, all chin-out attitude and a perfect game to back it up.

Braden is a hidden gem, rhetorically. He answers questions with an impish sense of humor and as we have seen in the Rodriguez flap, unafraid to throw an elbow, and not just in the corner either. He gives a team that once thrived as a chippy underdog some, well, chip.

And if he offers cover, other Athletics can kick in attitude at their leisure. They can stop being the double-secret alternative to the San Francisco Giants and their own face, the dry-ice cool Tim Lincecum.

Plus, Braden needs cover himself. Leading a one-man charge anywhere means one casualty. His teammates need to rise up for him, as he is willing to rise up for them. He's the one who took the lead, and he'll still have to back up Sunday with results, but this is a moment when the A's can stop being a team that likes blending into the background.

There are other teams in the same leaky boat, defending their dullness as fiscal responsibility. Kansas City. Toronto. Pittsburgh. San Diego. Houston. At a time when crowds are down (albeit in that small-sample-size way that early May always seems to bring out), personality is good. And not contrived, try-too-hard-to-get-on-TV personality, but real pugnacity in the face of the odds, born of upbringing and background. You know, like Dallas Braden.

Not every team has one, to be sure, and nobody has one with a perfect game on the résumé. Mark Buehrle has the perfect game, but he doesn't need to bring the sizzle. He works for Ozzie Guillen, who works for Kenny Williams. The Chicago White Sox need sizzle the way a grease fire needs more bacon.

But the A's just got one, and one that was made organically, without planning or artifice. Dallas Braden has a chance to be the real deal, both as a pitcher and as a franchise face, without breaking a sweat. Well, OK, they'll need him to break a sweat when pitching, but the other thing ... naahh.

This is his moment, piled on top of his 15 minutes. He tilted at Alex Rodriguez, looked good doing so, and then backed it up with a moment straight from Central Casting. If Central Casting still existed, which it doesn't, and if Central Casting didn't churn out cliché-enriched nonsense, which it did while it existed.

Yes, Sunday was Dallas Braden's story to his grandchildren, and it may even be a made-for-Lifetime movie. But what comes next -- Braden becoming the sandpaper-and-laughs face of a franchise that has been working behind a ski mask for most of the past two decades -- is the interesting thing, the one thing that can save the Oakland Athletics from the irrelevance they so adamantly seem to court.

And they can actually take that personality into the one thing they care about most -- prime real estate in Santa Clara County. Then they can move on to the ½ the rest of us care about.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.