Beaneball

Here is John Sickels' take on Kurt Suzuki. The gist of it is that Suzuki isn't a star in the making, but rather a solid big league regular. Any kind of hitting that rates as anything above "abominable" will be an upgrade on Jason Kendall, of course, but Suzuki may end up pushed out by some of the young catchers the A's have in the minors: Landon Powell (though he's not young anymore) or Anthony Recker, perhaps.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Oakland A's at 11:26 | |

Craziness in catcher-land for the A's: Jeremy Brown has retired and Matt LeCroy has signed up on a minor-league deal. Brown, just 28, apparently decided to quit for "personal reasons", which of course could be anything. LeCroy was basically signed to fill the void that Brown's retirement created.

Brown will, of course, always be remembered as the Moneyball guy who didn't pan out, the bad-body catcher who doesn't sell jeans. It's too bad he wasn't able to hang around long enough to join the fraternal order of backup catchers, because it's likely he was a good enough player to at least fill that role for a few years for somebody.

LeCroy, the former Twin, has great power (180 career ISO-SLG), but not much else (.260 batting average, .326 on-base, bad defensive reputation). He's probably not a threat to appear on the major league roster this year, and he might not even be a good bet to push Sacramento toward a championship: he had just a .560 OPS in Rochester last year, playing most of his games as a DH. (Jose Morales, an actual prospect, at least nominally, was the main catcher.)

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Oakland A's at 12:13 | |

Mike Sweeney has finally joined the A's. I remember back in the day, in the early 00's, A's fans wanted this guy so bad. After Jason Giambi left and we suffered through the power-less years (Scott Hatteberg?), there was Sweeney, laboring away in Kansas City with his .500 slugging percentages.

Unfortunately, Sweeney's only played 134 games in his last two years combined and had an OPS+ well under 100 last year, so there's a good chance he's done. But since he signed a minor-league deal, he'll give the A's some depth at first base and DH, and I'd probably rather have him make the team than Dan Johnson, if for no other reason than to have a right-handed option in the immobile-slugger mix with Jack Cust and Daric Barton.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Oakland A's at 09:27 | |

Keith Foulke has apparently come back to Oakland, signing a one-year, $700k deal. Foulke didn't pitch last year, and was terrible the two years before that after hurting himself, but that's not that big a deal because (a) the deal is cheap; (b) the A's aren't serious contenders anyway; (c) they have a ton of guys who can step in if Foulke is ineffective.

I like this quote from the AP's story: "I've never considered myself a closer. I consider myself a bullpen guy. There are times when pitching in the seventh inning is more viable." I don't know if he really said "viable", as opposed to "valuable", but the man sounds like a sabremetrician!

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Oakland A's at 10:00 | |