Fans: Rooting for laundry, even as the jerseys they’re wearing become outdated
A’s fans know better than anyone else what “Moneyball” means, and it means saying goodbye, again and again and again.
It means heartbreak. And it means getting stuck with yet another A’s T-shirt with the name of the dearly departed on it.
This week, the people to whom A’s fans were saying goodbye to were the beloved Sean Doolittle and fellow reliever Ryan Madson. Gone, farewell, poof. They were shown the door so fast that fan Phil Johnson, who bought himself a lower-deck seat to Monday night’s game, hadn’t gotten the word.
“Doolittle’s gone? he said. “I was working all day. I hadn’t heard. That’s the way it goes.”
More than other teams, Oakland is known for shoving players onto the trading block once their salaries are running high or their shelf lives are running low.
“I’ve seen a lot of good people go,” said
Jeremey Fackrell of Fresno. “That’s the way the A’s are. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ticked off. But I’ll always be an A’s fan.”
“I liked Doolittle and Madson,” said Ruben Diaz of Antioch, who was checking out player jerseys in the souvenir store. “If you’re buying a jersey, you have to ask yourself if you’re wasting your money, if they’re going to still be around.”
The key part of Moneyball being money, the A’s are off the hook for the roughly $11 million remaining on Madson’s contract through 2018, as well as about $6 million that Doolittle was guaranteed through next season.
That will pay for a lot of officially licensed player jerseys that stadium souvenir vendor Antony Early was seeking to unload. The jersey market — which is at least as hard to figure out as the mysterious metrics of Moneyball — is the only place where a smelly used one ($400) sells for more than a factory-fresh new one ($225).
“People don’t want to buy jerseys of players who are gone,” Early said. “That’s understandable.”
Vendor Ron Vezzali has a special place for T-shirts of former A’s. It’s called the 70%-off rack. Shirts emblazoned with the name of infielder Trevor Plouffe, who lasted only a few months before being cut in June, are there. A $30 one is marked down to $11.92. A deal like that on an infielder is what A’s executive Billy Beane keeps seeking.
The revolving-door school of baseball operations takes its toll on other metrics, such as attendance, which, like on-base percentage, can be measured with precision. On Monday, fewer than 10,000 warm bodies came to watch the A’s lose 3-2 to Tampa Bay. One of them was Alice Ray, who was perhaps the only fan on the premises who didn’t mind the hail-and-farewell stuff. Alice was attending her first A’s game and she also happens to be 10 months old.
“It’s part of the game,” said her dad, Markus. “It’s part of life. It sucks.”
Countless sections of green grandstand had not a living soul seated therein. The Coliseum looked like an inside-out watermelon. High above the outfield were emblazoned the names and retired numbers of the preMoneyball crowd: Reggie Jackson, Rickey Henderson, Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers and Catfish Hunter.
Meanwhile, fans took to their blog site, Athletics Nation, to scratch their collective heads about the most recent of the recent swaps.
“Most of us can’t know from our vantage point,” wrote Tim Eckert-Fong. “Prospects are wonky, far from an exact science, and it’s a bit silly to pretend otherwise.”
“Billy Beane is finally rebuilding the Oakland A’s, and it had better work,” wrote Jeremy Koo.
Like A’s fans scouring their Cracker Jack boxes in search of the elusive prize, the diehards at the stadium were trying to figure out how they made out in the latest trade, and how to pronounce the name of one Sheldon Neuse, a minorleague infielder whom the A’s acquired in the swap.
“I don’t know,” said Tricia Drossini of Lompoc. “Noyse? Noise?”
“Nice?” asked Dave Morosco of Modesto.
Actually, it’s “noose,” like the thing that some A’s fans think has been placed around their necks by team management.
“Look,” Morosco said, “the A’s have been a minorleague system for majorleague baseball development for so long that nothing is a surprise. You root for the organization, not the players. Otherwise, it’s hard to keep track.”