Frank Thomas signs with the A’s
1y, $500k.
So here’s why this is totally awesome:
– Frank Thomas is a great bet to pound the ball when he’s in the lineup. He may not hit .250, but he’ll draw a ton of walks and hit for good power
Here’s why this kinda sucks:
– He’s not going to be in the lineup that often. He’s old, he seems to be increasingly fragile. He’s barely played in 100 games over two seasons
– So you have to be prepared to have someone else play instead, and expect they’re going to get at least 40 games and maybe all season
– Pasting the ball if you can’t manage to hobble to second turns him into a single/walk/home run/out machine
For $500k? That’s not a bad deal at all, especially for a team like the A’s that stock their AAA team with interesting players who can step in to help the roster flex around injuries. I mean heck, if he tears up his knee in spring training and spends all year on the DL, they’re not out that much money at all.
It’s a nice little gamble.
NY Times: Partisan thought is unconscious
From the Paper of Record (and other things):
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
There’s a lot more here, and it’s really good.
This seems applicable to baseball thought, and particularly the “camps” debate.
From personal experience, I immediately thought of the stadium debate, when I didn’t know enough about it and was too emotionally tied up in it. You can go back and look through the Usenet archives and see me running around acting like a goat, and while the other side wasn’t conducting itself particularly politely, I look back on some of it now and think “that one guy made a perfectly logical series of arguments, and I just really angry about it.”
The realization that untoward belief in one side or another can lead to an weird state of dedicated ignorance unsettled me, and I think it’s played a big part in my long and rocky development as a writer.
Anyway, it’s interesting to ponder.
Nightengale: M’s get new attitude
When was the last time this was the off-season storyline? I think it wassss… 2004? That went really well.
Anyway, quality quote fodder in this column. There are some pretty smart Bavasi comments, and there are also some put-down-the-beverage-first gems:
“I loved our moves,” says closer Eddie Guardado, a clubhouse leader. “We needed some attitude in that clubhouse, and we got it. Those guys are good players, but to me, that attitude they bring will be huge for us.”
I thought you were supposed to provide that attitude. What happened? You were supposed to be the joker who kept things loose, and Sexson was the guy who’d keep them focused. What went wrong?
On Everett:
“(Manager) Mike Hargrove really wanted this guy,” Bavasi says, “because of his approach to the game. We gave him his choice of a couple of guys (Jeromy Burnitz and Jacque Jones), but he pushed for Carl the whole time.”
May the universal wheel of karma deal out appropriate justice. May Everett fight with you all year long while hitting .000 and otherwise making your life miserable until you’re fired and replaced with Dan Rohn mid-season.