A's Thru Z

An Emerging Star

2008-06-20T15:09:27Z

A major theme of this blog is the emerging star in his infancy with the ballclub, and that is Carlos Gonzalez.

Carlos staring out onto the field moments before gametime, seated next to Chavy, who symbolizes the old guard, leadership, and eight gold gloves. Flanking him are up and coming stars: Gregorio Petit and Daric Barton.

Cust, the traveled veteran, with the two young guys. This image says so much about where our team is right now: youth anchored by a few savvy veterans.

Carlos and Gregorio. The body language says it all: teammates, countrymen (fellow Venezuelans), good friends...sharing the first month in "the show" together.

This action sequence is a departure for me. The blog has mainly dealt with images behind the scenes. I've thrown this in to illustrate what a special player Carlos is. The natural, fluid swing, the grace, the power...the promise of the future.

In the clubhouse, moments before gametime. Billy Beane, though he's the GM, is informal and involved. He relates to Jack with ease....and Jack to him. There is a great reparté between Billy and the players that is very rare.

A little tribute to the past here...because although the past is prologue, it's often intertwined with the present...and the future. Rich Harden, Andrew Brown and Zebulon stand at attention for the national anthem.

Elly waiting in the dugout with batting coach Ty Van Burkleo before heading to the plate in the bottom of the 12th inning. Moments before, at the bat rack as he selected his bat, I said "God, I'm tired and hungry, let's end this." Elly replied, "Yeah, really...no kidding."

The players close around Elly. No matter how many times a walk-off home run may occur, it never gets old. You can feel the jubilation as the players converge around him.

With a third of the season gone, you can sense a different feel to these guys. Theres a warmth and a togetherness. It feels positive. It feels like something you can build on... Both as the season progresses and in the seasons to come...if we can keep the nucleus of this team together.

Z & S

"Old School" Never Looked SO Good

2008-05-20T01:35:51Z

Why this shot? What do we say? What's the caption? I don't know, this is right out of Boogie Nights! This could be Disco King (or Richard Simmons). I think the photo, the stance, the attitude, they say it all. I mean... talk about "turn back the clock"!

Here sitting in the video room where people come and go, you've got Alan Embree and Frank Thomas--two of the oldest veterans in terms of major league service, studying video and discussing opposing players and tendencies.

Everybody prepares for a game in their own way on different days. The hour before game time, some players are watching TV, some players are in the spread room having a protein shake, or at their locker contemplating, other players might be talking and horsing around. Here Emil Brown is taking a cap nap in his locker, catching 40 winks.

Here we have three of the big hitters on the club and they're all veterans, and at one time or another, also DHs. You can see the confidence and the camaraderie they're exuding there, while sporting those GREAT throwback uniforms...You've gotta love those socks.

You know, you're gonna see walk-offs from time to time--both with us and with other teams--but there is nothing like the jubilation and the celebration of somebody hitting a walk-off home run. And it's no different in the big leagues than it is in the little league...Just look at the faces, and how he's coming in and people are waiting...it's just amazing.

-z

Z shares a little artistic inspiration with Crosby for his big debut on the magazine cover...

It's a bird--it's a plane--no, it's "spidey" Z! In order to prep for the photo shoot with Crosby, Z made sure we had the light just right....

...for the man with real hops.

James Perez, lighting extraordinaire, is laughing with you Z, not at you.

Don't tell Z a white man can't jump - he had hops alright...in his head!!

-s

______________________________

These pictures concluded a successful homestand, and we're a quarter of the way through the season. We've got a young club that most people counted out before Spring Training even started. We're amazingly competitive. We've had some big ups. We had kind of a down road trip, but this is a long season, and I think the way it's started out gives us great hope not only for the future but for the rest of this season. These guys have come to play. Especially in this last sequence, you can tell the exuberance they bring not only as individuals but as a team. This is what winning baseball is all about.

Z & S

Clubhouse Hijinx + Celebrity Guests

2008-05-02T00:22:08Z

The A's have always been known for having a very open clubhouse, with a very warm, fun feel to it.

Every clubhouse is unique, but the A's, for any number of reasons, have always have one of the better clubhouse environments in baseball--and this year is no exception.
In the midst of that looseness, people have their own rituals and their own preparations. We start with Crosby: 10 minutes before the game, he's going to select the bats that he wants to bring down to the dugout to play with that day. Every player has got his own feel for something like that. It's a real gut thing. It's a cross between feel and superstition and what bat feels right for me today...what bat has hits in it, things like that.

In the training room, getting ready for the game. And yet, they are going through--what for this club is typical pre-game hijinx--and it keeps people loose, and it shows that we've really got good chemistry. Who says atomic bomb taken orally can't help shin splints?

Friends and players marveling that Ludacris has skills not just in the recording studio and on the stage, but on the diamond.

Ludacris hanging out with his posse, Jack Cust and Travis Buck before the game. I don't know who's more excited about it: them, or our guys. Cust looks like he's definitely down and he's from their hood, and they're all rolling to a hip-hop club in Jersey.

Travis Buck, showing he's human: he does put his pants on one leg at a time. You can really see its almost like big brother, little brother, here with Keith Foulke's son. He's in the clubhouse all the time with his dad, but its sort of an extended family of his dad and 24 older brothers.
This is a ritual that the A's have been doing for years: when we win a game, the clubbies put on a special tune that we play throughout the year (at concert intensity) and anybody who played in the game (in this case, Andrew Brown, Keith Foulke) and a number of other clubhouse players and attendants all wait and greet everyone who comes in with high-fives, and the celebration begins...
The pitchers' meeting is something that happens the first game of every new series. It usually takes place in Manager Bob Geren's office. The entire pitching staff comes in and Pitching Coach Curt Young goes over the opposing team's roster player by player, in this case, the Minnesota Twins. They talk about what the player has done, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. What I like about this picture is you have varying degrees of attention. Embree kind of paying attention...Gaudin having his drink...Eveland looking at Curt like, "Yeah!"
Frank Thomas had joined the A's that morning, come into the clubhouse, got his uniform, gone out and taken batting practice. Now Frank has come back in and we're going out onto the field to play the game in 30 minutes and he's in the lineup, so Tony DeFrancesco is sitting at his locker with him going over the signs. Frank is hitting the ground running and so have the A's as they end the most successful April in years.

Z & S

The Same Routine is Always New...

2008-04-14T22:18:04Z

We've departed the opening series in Tokyo and now we're back home.

While every day is different at the ballpark, there's a certain sameness to some of it...
Here we have Huston Street and Andrew Brown. This chess game has been going on ever since the first day of Spring Training. It's a daily thing. Who knows who's ahead or what the score is, but we've definitely got a real Bobby Fisher/Boris Spassky duel going on here. This game really defines clubhouse life: that while every day is different, some things remain the same.
Emil Brown, testing Rich Harden's new Samurai sword, which he purchased on their recent trip to Japan.... Finding out that it fits him to a T.

Every night before the starting pitcher takes the mound, there is a regular meeting. And tonight it's Curt Young, our pitching coach, with Kurt Suzuki, our catcher, and our starting pitcher, Rich Harden...except, there's usually three people in this meeting, and tonight there are four: Zebulon is an alter-ego, and he counsels Rich on the bench in between innings...so he's silent, but he's taking everything in.

Zebulon has been pictured mainly with Rich Harden up until this point, but he's also made inroads to many other members of the team...
Here, Kurt Suzuki is getting ready to go down to the bullpen. He's waiting for Rich Harden. The three of them are going to prepare to face the Boston Red Sox. You can tell Kurt is focused. You can tell Zebulon is focused. Rich Harden was feeling very good knowing that the three of them were going to the pen.
Rich Harden, in between innings, asking Zebulon if his mechanics are okay. And actually, his mechanics were okay, he threw a few less pitches that he threw in the opening game, but when he left the game he had not given up a run. So it was a successful outing at this point in time.

As far as Zebulon goes, some people think he could be an ongoing theme. Honestly, I don't know. Zebulon is a person that came to me on our last day in Japan. And just as the way things shook down, he immediately integrated himself into the clubhouse, much like Bemular did into the locker room of the 49ers in 1984. I know, that like any player, Zebulon could be with us all season, or he could disappear at anytime...

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Each homestand has it's own feel, it's own texture, and that's really what we hope to bring out in this blog. We hope to chronicle the feel and the changes as well as the sameness in the clubhouse and on the team as the season progresses from game to game, series to series and week to week.

Z & S

A's Take it to Japan

2008-03-31T16:49:26Z

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.

After arriving home everyone is running fast to try and escape the jet lag - playing exhibition games against the Giants this past weekend and resting up today before the home opener on Tuesday night.

Stay tuned.... Zebulon hasn't made his exit quite yet.

Z & S