The good news is the A's recently picked up their tenth win of the season. The bad news is tonight they have to play the Astros, who just activated Jose Altuve. He is revved up and ready to cheat-I mean play. So, even if they've set themselves back by a bit, that's a large mountain to climb.
What's weird is that there are individual performances that still make the A's an interesting team. If things keep going at this rate, we will have someone hit a 50+ steal season as a rookie in Oakland [which hasn't happened since....no don't tell me it's right there..], and we will have at least one 30+ homer year. They're not the most multi-dimensional performances, but if they were, ownership would have had them traded years ago.
Brent Rooker is having the best season of anybody, hitting .295 with 11 home runs and 30 RBIs, which is pretty fantastic for a guy who looked like a burnout after last year. True, they are mostly using Rooker as a DH, which also means there's not much use for Jesus Aguilar and, well, Shea Langeliers is forced to catch more often. But they are making sure one of their best players gets to play as much as possible, and keeping him as a DH means there's less of a chance of injury, even on a team which lost one of its sole returning position players, Seth Brown, less than two weeks into the season. I do worry of the sort of cinderella nature of Rooker's rise, and how it may not be good for many longterm plans, but it's nice that he's doing well.
It just seems like so many trusted players on this team have big pieces missing. Ramon Laureano is still a defensive hero but he's only hitting .226. Esteury Ruiz is a great contact hitter and a stellar baserunner that's terrible defensively. So many young players, like Langeliers, Jordan Diaz, J.J. Bleday and Ryan Noda, are great with power-hitting but haven't figured out some of the other stuff yet. Diaz had 2 homers during a Yankee loss, that alone is incredible. You also have three great young pitchers from the Frankie Montas deal, J.P. Sears, Ken Waldichuk and Luis Medina, and none of them are doing well at all with opposing offenses.
I don't know if much is going to change substantially if people like Brown, Paul Blackburn and, eventually, Mason Miller get activated. This is gonna keep being a sad team to watch, and hopefully these types of performers will keep at it so the A's get to leave with something before the cries for the Vegas move get louder.
Coming Tomorrow- A rookie who had a tour-de-force game a few days ago.
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