With team done in desert, movers pack gear for Japan
MESA, ARIZ. » As A’s players filed out of the Hohokam Stadium clubhouse to warm up for their Cactus League finale, team staffers armed with cardboard U-haul boxes, metal hampers, and hand trucks rushed into the clubhouse.
Much like the rest of Oakland’s spring camp, the club’s equipment managers needed to work fast. They had little time to pack up for the team’s departure to Japan on Thursday.
“We’ve got a lot of boxes,” one team employee called out, his voice rising above the chorus of zippers and duct tape, and the rattle of hangers being stripped of clothes soon to be stuffed into suitcases. “It’s a twotruck year.”
The A’s have been on an unusual timeline this spring with their season opener coming more than a week earlier than the rest of Major League Baseball. For the A’s, Opening Day is Wednesday — in Tokyo — against the Seattle Mariners. The teams will play again Thursday.
And then, when the A’s return home with two regular- season games under their belts, they return to exhibition play for three games against the Giants in the Bay Bridge Series on March 24-26. On March 28, the A’s play their U. S. season opener.
“It’s a weird deal,” A’s infielder Cliff Pennington said.
Pennington would know. The veteran has played two overseas season openers and is well aware of the challenges of such excursions.
“The shortened spring is an adjustment,” he said. “And then the weird part is coming back after playing real games, and then having to play exhibition games again.”
Yet, Pennington will be the first to say the trips are worthwhile.
“The small negatives are way outweighed by the number of awesome and cool parts about it,” Pennington said.
Pennington was on the A’s 2012 team that also began its season in Japan against the Mariners and lights up when recalling his favorite moments. He took a helicopter tour above the city, visited the U. S. embassy, played baseball with Japanese kids and took in one of Tokyo’s famous fish markets.
“It’s a different world compared here,” Pennington said. “It was really cool to get to see.”
A’s manager Bob Melvin and general manager David Forst also have positive memories of that 2012 getaway. They think it bonded a young roster and laid the groundwork for the team’s surprising 94-victory season and AL West division title.
“It was very impactful for us,” Melvin said. “There were a lot of guys that had not played together in ‘12 and I think it went a long way.”
That isn’t the case this year as Oakland brings back most of its key players from last season’s that advanced to the playoffs. Still, the A’s think something good will come out of the trip.
“We don’t have a young team, but as we do every year, we have new guys,” Forst said. “I do believe that each trip we’ve gone on has been a good experience for the group. That’s part of the reason we keep volunteering.”
But to make it work, the A’s needed to tweak the preseason routine. The team had MLB’s earliest report date for players and was only able to play 19 Cactus League games. No player still on the roster had more than 35 at-bats and only two pitchers threw as many as 10 innings.
There’s a potential danger in overvaluing the season-opening games as well. Pennington was on the 2014 Arizona Diamond- backs squad that started the season in Australia. But after the team lost both games to the Los Angeles Dodgers, “it was like the air came out of our balloon,” Pennington said. Arizona lost 16 of the next 21 games upon its return..
“Yeah, these are two games that matter,” Pennington said. “You saw in the division last year, it comes down to a couple games, so we do want to win them. But we’re also not going to put all our chips in these two games.”
Pennington said the same goes for individual performances. In 2012, he had three hits in two games in Japan. Then he got but one hit in his next 15 at-bats.
“Inevitably, somebody on the starting lineup is going to go 1-for-8 or 0-for-7 and have a couple strikeouts and is going to be sitting on a technically ‘ bad start’ for a week,” Pennington said. “It’s not a bad start. It’s two games. But it’s going to feel like a weight that’s much greater than that.”
Melvin hopes some of the challenges will be good for his players though. He sees the break from a normal spring routine as an opportunity for his group to grow.
“You get so caught up in baseball here, your routine here,” Melvin said. “They’re going to see that baseball is played a little bit differently there and it’s going to be looked at differently. The crowd is different. There’s a lot of fun things that you’ll expand your horizons.”