Archive update

We’ve moved to freekraut.net.

Archive only

This site exists only as an archive of an ambitious but ultimately failed experiment; it will not be updated.  The Second Foundation exists, but you’ll have to find it yourself.

-salb918

Game thread to tide us over ’til transition time

GO HERE.

Everybody is there now. mikeA gso has even posted a disturbing photo to inaugurate the site.

You gotta create entirely new logins. Do that, then the re-naming thing. Then go forth and populate the new site with the usual insight and frivolity.

---

Leave this dump behind and head over to FK 2.0 … when nevermoor says so.

Royals up 1-0 going to bottom 2.

A’s vs Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus vs Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

P & P & Z

The team meeting, and not a crappy opposing pitcher, led to the offensive explosion. This is so well written. Thank you.

Royals

This thread is for discussing the Royals, who are playing against the A’s right now.

DLD 051209: The Great Empathizer

1. I’m not sure, but I think this is arguing for robot umpires:

[He] now proposes to appoint a Great Empathizer who will call balls and strikes with a strike zone that depends on the sex, race, and social and economic background of the players. Nothing could be more damaging to the fairness of the game[.]

2. Let me get this straight: Ostler is calling someone else a “twit”?
3. Slusser brings the reportage for her take on the Moneyball-movie article
4. mikeA should change his name to mikeT:

as a child, one night I peeked out from my bed covers and I saw a court jester wearing curly-toed shoes and a spiked hat with bells on sharp points

5. And speaking of dreams:

The night before last I dreamt that I was a basketball, and everything I experienced was through the up and down motion of being dribbled.

Inspired by item 4:

The “Watch out! Don’t accidentally write anything interesting!” Lame Duck Open Thread

Lest your genius be lost in the translation to Free Kraut 2.0.

I’m not gonna fall into that trap, lemme tell ya.

I’m considering the baseball geek cross-Bay double header on Wednesday.

Followed by live coverage of the Planck launch at 6am Thursday green star oaktime.

Dividing Things Into Categories

The 2008 A’s had a .686 team OPS, which was the worst team mark in the AL since the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who went 49-113. 2009 carry-overs from the that team are hitting at a remarkably similar clip.

In other words, not even their MOTHERS! could pretend that they had even a shred of offensive talent, or really any other type of human worth.

A’s players not on the ’08 team so far:

.219/.293/.319

I feel bad that the A’s suck, but I feel worse that these players’ MOTHERS! were too reticent in exercising their constitutional rights.

Bob Melvin Fired, replaced with Daily Link Dump

Effective immediately.

Wait a second.  A.J. Hinch?  Late ’90s catcher-of-the-future A.J. Hinch?  The guy who put up a 328/420/568 minor league line in 1997 and was at one point a top-50 prospect?

Hey, is that Corey Koskie? (September 13, 2000 - Dave Ross/Oakland Tribune, via Flickr, without permission)

Hinch, you will recall, arrived in Oakland in 1998 in the same position-player bumper crop that yielded Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada, Ben Grieve, Scott Spiezio, and Adam Piatt.  He’s best remembered for being packaged with Grieve and Angel Berroa for Cory Lidle, Johnny Damon, and Mark Ellis.

The incoming and outgoing talent in that trade looks a little silly eight years down the line, huh?

Hinch and Eric Byrnes were teammates on the 2000 squad.  While it’s not that strange to have a manager manage a former teammate – Joe Girardi is doing it in New York and Ozzie Guillen did it in Chicago – what is strange is that Hinch is only two years older than Byrnes.

{edited to remove universal strikethrough pervading the rest of Free Kraut, fsu}

Dear Babs …

Boy, I dunno — Rich Guy’s private letter to Babs “Big” Boxer (originally provided without a clear trail of provenance by Zennie Abraham) sure strikes me as Bybee/Yoo-ish.

Suresure, each individual fact vets out — but the way he concatenates them, collapses timeframes, and raises outmoded issues (unpredictable walkup crowds? I thought the A’s had spent the last 5 or so years addressing that … so that they’re predictably tiny) makes his entire framing pretty specious.

Now, I myself don’t hold a brief for Oakland or Alameda County — personally I’d prefer that the A’s new stadium be sited somewhere within easy walking distance of a BART station within 30-40 minutes of downtown SF, but Crywolffisher has every right to move wherever the heck they want to. And there are obvious economic/regulatory/infrastructure advantages to SJ.

But this Dear Babs letter is a supremely dishonest piece of work.