A's Take it to Japan

So, we've got a reoccurring theme in this early blog and it's Zebulon.
The Japanese have always been very big into animation and into monsters, starting with Godzilla. Godzilla spawned Bemular, his son, who spent the entire 1984 season with the 49ers, both at home and on the road, on the buses, in the locker room.

I found Zebulon, a distant cousin of Bemular and Godzilla, in a toy store in Japan on our last day there, brought him into the clubhouse, introduced him to the players, receiving varying ranges of enthusiasm and curiosity. Rich Harden immediately took to him and wanted to know if Zebulon could eat with him.
And Zebulon watched as Rich got down on some noodles and then he wanted to know if he could actually come to the bullpen with him. I said, "You know, that'd be ok...I've gotta take him over to the other clubhouse, familiarize him with the Red Sox and the stadium." So Zebulon hung out over there where he was immediately both laughed at and looked at with curiosity by most of the Red Sox and then he came out for their stretching and Dice-k and Okajima immediately came over and their curiosity was infused with much more of a reverence. "Oooo ... Oh yes... !"
And from there, he went down to the bullpen and Rich requested that he be able to sit in the dugout with him during the game. He and Lenny DiNardo went and got a breathe-right strip for his nose (his horn), put a baseball in front of him, and at the end of each inning, Harden would come back and sit next to him in the dugout...
....and I think we all know the rest, Rich Harden pitched lights-out, striking-out nine over six innings as the A's beat the Red Sox 5-1.
 Zebulon isn't an "I" guy so he's not taking any credit...and so I thought it was appropriate, actually important, to have something like this show up in our blog because this is truly "behind the scenes"... "the story behind the story."
Jack Cust, Mike Sweeney, "Puddin" (Adam Rhoden, video coordinator).

We have video monitors set up and they record everything: every pitch, every at-bat, etc. What you often see during a game, certainly with a DH and sometimes our position players, is after an at-bat, if they have time, they'll run back into the clubhouse and they'll look at their at-bat on the video monitors to see what pitches were thrown and how their swing was.
Now this shot of Bobby Crosby and his wife was taken in the Harujuko section of Tokyo, which is sort of a cross between the Haight-Ashbury in SF and the Village  in NYC with a particularly Japanese spin on it. It's mainly young people between the ages of 15-35. High fashion, and when I say high fashion, I don't mean the Champs-Elysees, it's more of a punk-new wave look. A lot of color, a lot of attitude, a lot of flash.
The A's front office traveling party: our two owners (Jon Fisher and Lew Wolff), PR (Kristy Fick), announcers (Ken Korac, Vince Cotroneo), GM (Billy Beane), Asst. GM (David Forst), David Rinetti, Jim Wilson, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, Huston Street, Bob Geren, Alan Embree, Travis Buck, Mike Crowley, Ken Pries. Everybody who's anybody in the A's front office in the room where General Maccarthur met the emperor Hirohito for the 1st time at the end of WWII which is now the main conference room in the US Embassy.