The A's are rebuilding yet again, and all they get is this Coco Crisp jersey
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| Coco Crisp is staying in Oakland, but he won't be accompanied by Bailey, Gonzalez, Cahill, etc. (Getty Images) |
Breaking news, outfielder Coco Crisp re-signed with the Oakland Athletics. Fine. Whatever. I long ago lost track of who and what the nondescript A's are fielding as a team. More importantly, so have most of their fans.
Who's on first? What's on third? Abbott and Costello had more consistency in their No-Name lineup than the Athletics. More chuckles, too.
Time was, president/general manager Billy Beane was a genius, Moneyball was cutting edge and the A's were plucky. They're not plucky anymore. They're boring. And brutal.
And with AL West rivals Texas and Los Angeles among the game's noveau riche via new cable television contracts, the A's are desperately in need of another market inefficiency to exploit. Best-case scenario for all involved is if they find it in San Jose, and soon.
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Maybe there's plenty of "upside" in the latest batch of prospects the scavenger-hunting Beane hauled in this winter. But there is absolutely no upside in 2012 with Gio Gonzalez, Trevor Cahill and closer Andrew Bailey gone. And there is zero upside for the immediate future.
"I think this is one last shot to get a new stadium," an executive with one major-league club says. "Be as bad as we can be to prove to baseball that we really need a new stadium.
"And they're going to be bad. They're going to be atrocious."
In Oakland, upside is always two or three years away. The constant wheeling and dealing ensures that. Players come and go like strap-hangers spinning through the New York subway turnstiles. Faceless, nameless blurs.
Last year, David DeJesus and Josh Willingham were supposed to add pop to the middle of the Oakland order. They're gone now, too. Overmatched owner Lew Wolff, unable to gain traction on a new ballpark, has given up.
Beane, master of the preemptive-strike trade, dispatched Gonzalez, Cahill and Bailey in deals ... the way he years ago traded Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder ... the way he shipped away Dan Haren ... and so on.
At least back then, young Athletics had a chance to grow up and become a Hudson or a Mulder. Now? I think maybe they're serving too many Red Bulls in the Athletics' offices. Young players are gone before the over-caffeinated A's even know what they have.
Beane traded Haren to Arizona in December 2006 in a deal that brought five players in return. Pitcher Brett Anderson, knocked out of the A's rotation last summer by Tommy John surgery, was one. So was Carlos Gonzalez ... yes, the CarGo who finished third in NL MVP voting in 2010 and has the tools for greatness.
Oakland traded CarGo to the Rockies -- along with closer Huston Street and pitcher Greg Smith -- for Matt Holliday in November 2008. Holliday was a bust, and Beane proceeded to deal him to St. Louis midway through the '09 season for third baseman Brett Wallace, outfielder Shane Peterson and pitcher Clayton Mortensen.
These trade threads are endless. Oakland shipped Wallace to Toronto for outfielder Michael Taylor. Mortensen was dealt to Colorado for right-hander Ethan Hollandsworth.
It is dizzying. With players coming and going at a rate that would exhaust your local UPS driver, how can anything lasting be constructed?
Andre Ethier is a two-time All-Star, won a Gold Glove last year and has developed into a potent middle-of-the-order hitter in Los Angeles.
Neither he nor Gonzalez had the chance to develop in Oakland. Ethier was dealt for Milton Bradley -- ouch -- in 2005, when he was 23. Gonzalez was acquired by Oakland when he was only 22 and was gone two years later.
Fair question: Did the A's rank last in the AL in attendance last season solely because of a decrepit stadium and another losing team? Or was no small part of it that the A's have become impossible to identify, even with a scorecard and a state-of-the-art DNA kit?
Dating back to when Sandy Alderson was sitting in Beane's chair, the A's have consistently believed that .500 is a waste of time (and, more importantly, a waste of money). If they can't win, they would rather finish last, cheaply, while rebuilding. There is some merit to that.
But now? The A's are like those Russian nesting dolls. There's rebuilding underneath the rebuilding. And more under that.
"Their young pitching looked great last year," one scout says. "It's too bad Anderson went down, but Gio is a top-of-the-line guy, and Cahill, I love."
Gio Gonzalez is 26. Cahill is 23. Neither is a free agent anytime soon. A couple of years ago, the plan was to build around young pitching.
Some in the industry believe Beane has become disinterested, that he's more turned on by soccer and other outside interests. I've known him for years and I find that hard to believe. He's fiercely prideful. And in baseball, if you have interests outside of the baselines, you're often viewed with suspicion.
Far more damaging to Oakland, I think, is the financial squeeze combined with the fact that Beane is just not surrounded by the same folks he had back in the heady days of Hudson-Mulder-Miguel Tejada. Paul DePodesta set the bar as Beane's No. 2 man. Oakland's drafts never have been great, but when Matt Keough was scouting for the A's, for example, their ability to acquire talent was far better than it has been for years.
Nick Swisher, Rich Harden, Joe Blanton ... all were recommended by Keough. So, too, was Jacoby Ellsbury, but Keough was overruled on that one. Then, personal problems sacked Keough's front-office career and he was gone.
The A's flounder on, projecting a $55 million payroll in 2012. Bruce Jenkins, the respected San Francisco Chronicle columnist, recently called Wolff and John Fisher "one of the most bitterly disappointing ownership structures in the history of Bay Area sports."
At this point, Charles O. Finley's donkey would be an aesthetic improvement. Coco Crisp? He may as well have signed with Triple-A Sacramento. Nicer ballpark, and when both clubs are home, the RiverCats have been known to outdraw the A's.
Later this month, with the category having swelled to 10 films, there is every chance the fine Moneyball movie will receive a Best Picture nomination. It will be the last bit of stardust for the A's, whose own picture has rarely been more bleak.
