Thursday, August 19, 2010

Baseball: A's Style

Has anyone seen a flux capacitor lying around? Doc Brown? Anything from "Back to the Future" that might help me time travel? I'd really like to go back to 2002. Not because I miss having braces, or Avril Lavigne on the radio or thought bare mid-drifts were a particularly flattering look, but because I miss the Moneyball glory days. I miss the team that was worth making a movie about; the team that wanted to win so badly they rifled off 20 victories in a row and finished the year with their second straight 100+ win season. There was something to be said about watching a gang of ragtag misfits with a chip on their shoulders take the field every night. Don't get me wrong, I'll always support the green and gold, but right now the team is, as Simon Cowell might say, the equivalent of baseball wallpaper.

The boys are missing fire and it just seems like losing no longer stings as badly. I'm sure that's not the way it feels to the players at all, but from a fan's perspective, it feels like there's little urgency to win, at least this year, within the organization. Geren has the same expression, inflection, demeanor after a win as he does a loss. It's simply, "Ho hum, lost another game in the standings but what can you do?" I understand that it's a long season and you'd go insane (see Ozzie Guillen) if you lived and died with each and every inning, but come on, where's the emotion?

The teams of the early 2000's had it in spades. Miguel Tejada standing on the top step of the dugout swinging his arm like a windmill to wave a runner home. All 245 pounds of Jermaine Dye bringing T Long to the ground after he made a miraculous catch in Boston. Eric Chavez standing up in front of the team and telling them to get their act together. Everything that Jason Giambi did.

Yes, it occasionally got them in trouble (unchecked emotion was the perp in the 2003 ALDS) but it also got them wins. And it got them fans.

I think that if I left town for a few weeks and was completely cut off from any form of communication, came back and Gabe Gross was no longer on the team, it would take me awhile to notice. That's nothing against Gross, he's a very nice guy, but that's the point. It's a team full of "very nice guys" and that's about it. There's no star power and there's little personality on a team whose franchise possesses one of the most personable and wacky histories in baseball. Even the victory song went from the edgy "Rock and Roll All Nite" by Kiss back to "Celebrate" by Kool and the Gang.

I miss the days when fans knew generally what the lineup was going to look like every day. Maybe Mark Ellis would be moved out of the two-hole because he had been struggling for a few days, but for the most part, you knew who would be batting 3-4-5. You knew if that part of the lineup came up in a crucial situation, the other team would be a little nervous.

The pitching staff is still one of the best in baseball, and they haven't had shake-in-your-boots scary offenses since the early-nineties (which I don't really miss because I was four) but they've lost personality, they've lost interest, they've lost drama.

We saw a little bit of it at the beginning of the year, something to do with Dallas Braden, some guy from New York and a mound, but we haven't seen much of that same fire and passion towards winning.

Can we just go back to a time when, win or lose, it was going to be exciting? Can we please go back to Baseball: A's Style?