Though the A's continue their incredibly petty and punitive refusal to retire Reggie Jackson's number, it was good to see Reggie, at age 57, jogging about the ballpark in an A's jersey -- even as he aligns himself with the enemy New York Yankees.

Meanwhile, Reggie's still doing things like this:

"We are the best team. We have the most talent and (Yankees manager Joe) Torre does a fabulous job along with ...," Jackson said, immediately prompting members of the audience, each whom paid $10 apiece for the privilege to ask questions and seek autographs, to boo and hiss.

Jackson, recognizing the crowd's negative response, continued and didn't apologize. He dug his cleats into the batter's box.

"You can say whatever you want. When you win five or six World Series in the last seven or eight years, you can say whatever you want," Jackson said. "But the fundamentals of the game is really what the difference is."

As that writer says, the fundamentals are hardly the difference between the A's and Yankees. The Yankees had more talent for awhile, and have been lucky the past few years. To claim that the reason the Yankees won a few playoff series over the A's and won some World Series is because they execute the rundown better and hit the cutoff man more often is to be ignorant of how small the differences in teams' skills in those areas are. How many professional second basemen don't know how to properly execute a rundown? Tweet