An Open Letter to Billy Beane
Dear Mr. Beane,
Let us preface this by saying that we love you. We are fully aware that only your unique brand of general managineering has separated us from the Kansas City Royals for the last decade or so, and we are eternally grateful for it. So we appreciate your work. We admire your genius. We want to believe in you.
So with that said, I hope you can take this question in the spirit with which it was intended: what the crap are you doing? Seriously, WHAT THE CRAP ARE YOU DOING??!!! WHAT IN THE STEROID-RIDDLED MEMORY OF JOSE CANSECO ARE YOU TRYING TO DO??!!!
We understood the Haren thing. We expected the Haren thing. Even when we gave up one of the five best pitchers in the American League without getting a single Major League-ready player in return we understood. We’re rebuilding, we said. This is for the best, we said.
And let me let you in on a little secret – as much as we loved Marco Scutaro, and as much as we whined about you trading him for . . . whatever it was you traded him for . . . we all knew that he wasn’t really all that good. So we accepted that too.
But the Swisher thing? We don’t get it. We just don’t get it. Not only did we give up the best position player on our team without getting anybody Major League-ready in return, and not only was that player 27 years old with another four years left on his relatively-inexpensive contract, but in Nick Swisher we lost potentially one of the most marketable players in baseball.
What do we mean by “marketable”? It means that Swisher is entertaining, he’s talented and he’s fun to watch. In short, Nick Swisher is an excellent reason to buy a ticket. And with Blanton and Street almost certain to follow him out the doo, and no reason to believe that Ellis, Chavez and Ducscherer aren’t far behind, there don’t look to be many of those left in Oakland come Opening Day.
And no, we don’t consider Bobby Crosby to be a good reason to buy a ticket. Don’t bother asking.
Like I said before, we understand the rebuilding thing. But there’s a big difference between watching a rebuilding team with only an outside chance of making the postseason, and watching the worst team in baseball. And right now the A’s look a lot more like the latter than the former.
I can watch a rebuilding team. I don’t know why I should bother watching the worst team in baseball.
I’m thrilled that you think Oakland will be a better team in the future for all this. I’m glad. But let me tell you what it sounds like when you talk about the future. It sounds like you’re expecting the Athletics to be the best team in baseball in around three or four years, right about the time the team picks up and moves to Fremont. It sounds like you don’t care how many Oakland fans you drive away with 100-loss seasons and “dramatically-improved” farm systems, because in three or four years you’ll have shiny, new Freemont fans; software executives who’ll pay eight dollars for garlic fries and watch their Blackberries more than the game. Who cares about those worthless fans you have now? Hey, they can’t even fill in the third deck!
We’re not so sure about the future, Mr. Beane. Every year we read at least three Rob Neyer columns about all the “great, young players” the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are stocking up on. They still haven’t made a postseason.
As we said at the beginning, we want to believe in you. If sometime in the near future you give an interview on athleticsnation.com and tell us all about how much potential this 2008 team has and how much fun they’ll be to watch and how Oakland is a near certainty to win the AL West in 2009, we’ll probably believe you and get excited all over again. Mychael Urban is excited already.
So please, please tell us what you’re doing. Tell us why we should bother to attend a single game next season. Tell us why we should keep caring about an organization that doesn’t appear to care about us. And tell us why we should bother to follow a team that can’t even be considered a contender for best team in its own parking lot right now. Please.
Sincerely,
CurveBallCity
PS Have you considered a “Beat Bobby Crosby with a Stick” Day? We’d buy at least sixteen, maybe seventeen tickets for that.
Comments(5)
Quit your whining and always remember how good you have it. A GM with an actual plan and an eye for talent to boot. You have no idea what it is like to look the worst team in baseball in the face every year, and certainly not for fifteen straight years. Always remember the words of Andy Dufresne – “hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing, and no good thing ever dies.” We lost hope roughly ten years ago…
The Swisher trade makes no sense. I’m still trying to figure out the benefits of that one. Beane usually gets it right, so lets give it a while before we get all up in arms.
Swisher may be fun to watch, but his career line of .251/.361/.464 is not really that impressive for a corner OF/1B (he’s never slugged .500). Yes, he might get slightly better for a couple of years, but take a look at all his comparable players at Baseball-Reference.com:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/s/swishni01.shtml
Bubba Trammell? Phil Plantier? Jose Cruz, Jr.? Yikes. And then to get a lefty who led the minors in Ks last year at AA, plus another good pitching prospect and a young OF who could still develop into something? Sign me up.
Actually Billy Beane is really, really smart. In mid-market baseball economics you need to get a large group of talented young players coming up at the same time. In the best case scenario this group couldn’t compete next year, now in the past he could have waited and traded his stars in the final year of their contract but with other GM’s getting smarter he realized he needed to unload these guys sooner and get guys who will improve the next round of players chances at being great. Think of it like trying to re-create a sine curve, you unload current underpaid young players if you can’t compete now to give you a better chance for the future.
Yeah, seriously. Quit whining. You don’t have any idea what it’s like in Pittsburgh. This, only worse, every year, forever and ever, and they don’t even try to pretend anymore that it’s not this way. You know what? Drive to Fremont. It’s a lot closer for you than it is for us to drive to 1992.