Brownie Points

 

The best way I can describe the 2022 Oakland A's is that they have a Cy Young caliber pitcher by complete accident. 

The A's, in a year where tanking is frowned upon, decided to tank anyway. Sean Manaea gets traded, Chris Bassitt gets traded, Mike Fiers doesn't get re-signed. And you figure they wanted to trade Frankie Montas, and might get to do it midseason anyway. So the idea is, trade away all the good pitchers, team loses a lot of games, in come draft picks hopefully. Keep the rotation bad, let the good pitchers come up.

And then...they forgot that they had a really good pitcher left, cause he's been injured the past few years. So now Paul Blackburn's 6-2 with a 2.26 ERA and now all of them look silly. You know, 'come see our team with all these bad pitchers and this one really good one we forgot we had.'

This is like the plot of a 90s film or something. You know? Joe Pesci plays an MLB manager determined to tank his team and sell it to european industrialists, then retire to Guam. And the one guy getting in the way of doing this is the new golden boy pitcher, played, I'm assuming, by Brendan Fraser, who can't stop winning games. So Pesci tries to have him killed, he narrowly avoids death, and things get worse for Pesci. Like a cross between Major League, Mouse Hunt and Death to Smoochy. Call it Splitting the Ace, give it an August release, it's the surprise hit of 1994. 

If it seems like I'm struggling to figure out how to write about this A's team, it's because there's not really a ton to talk about. Nobody in the lineup is hitting over .250, and the top hitter on the team seems to be Christian Bethancourt, whom nobody has thought about since 2014. Seth Brown is leading the team in home runs with a blistering EIGHT. Cristian Pache is an incredible outfielder with a -15 batting runs average. Ramon Laureano, Tony Kemp, Elvis Andrus and Chad Pinder are doing nothing to keep the momentum of the old squads going. Jared Koenig has joined Adam Oller and Zach Logue as call-ups who can't seem to keep MLB runs down. It's just a dull, unexciting mess, and I feel bad for A's fans that their GM had to tank as well.

If they trade Blackburn, they're gonna riot, pretty much. Nobody's going to games, then even less people will go to games, and then Manfred will come in like 'what's this? A baseball stadium that's RANDOMLY APPEARED IN LAS VERGAS?'.

Coming Tomorrow- A recent comeback story that's actually persisted.