S.F. Examiner: Baseball bubble isolates from football foibles

By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz — We’re in a bubble down here, Sesame Street with Saguaro.

The Niners are coming unglued. Bruce Miller arrested? What next? Jim Harbaugh coaching third for the A’s?

Read the full story here.

© 2015 The San Francisco Examiner 

Joy is gone from the A’s season

By Art Spander

OAKLAND — The joy is gone from the Athletics’ season. There’s a sense of helplessness at O.co Coliseum, a feeling that no matter what happens — and technically, they even could get to the World Series — the ending will be gloomy.

They’ll never catch the Angels, who remarkably about a month ago they led by 3½ games and now trail by 10½. That’s a given. The Angels got hot as the A’s went cold. And even by losing, the Angels on Tuesday night reduced their magic number to two.

What the A’s needed in their return home after a tough road trip with a decent ending was not only a victory but an efficiently played game, one that their fans — starting with the 19,385 in attendance — could use as a benchmark. Hey, they’re out of it, but they’re in it.

No, they’re not.

The A’s were dreadful Tuesday. Scott Kazmir threw two wild pitches. The infielders threw balls all over the place, charged with only two errors. The Texas Rangers, the team with the worst record in the majors, beat Oakland, 6-3. And everyone including A’s manager Bob Melvin was rocked mentally.

It’s like dressing up in a new suit and five minutes at dinner spilling ketchup on the trousers. It’s embarrassing. Or in Melvin’s words, “It’s disappointing.”

Poor Bo Mel. All a manager can to is encourage his players and fill out the lineup card. OK, in that madding lefty-right business, in the eighth, he can yank Brandon Moss, who had homered in the sixth, for righthanded batting Nate Freiman, who struck out. But playing percentages isn’t entirely sinful. Playing as did the A’s — spaced out, it seems — is very sinful. And very irritating.

“We just didn’t look like we were ready to play,” said Melvin, “for whatever reason. We got beat all the way around.”

The A’s yet may get to the wild card game. Then what? Do they perform as they did Tuesday night, watching Rangers' grounders bounce their way to hits and then watch Jake Smolinski hit his first major-league home run? Or are they able to reach back to the team they used to be in May and June?

“It was a hard thing to do,” Melvin said of pinch-hitting for Moss. Moss hasn’t had much success against lefties, and the Rangers had brought in Neal Cotts. Well and good, but a guy puts one into the seats his previous at bat, even against starter Nick Tepesch, and you figure he’s doing something right.

Then again, pulling Moss and inserting Freiman wasn’t the reason the A’s got bounced. They were, in a word, inept. They were too much like the team that lost 21 of its last 31 games. Whatever happened to the team that won 30 of its first 51?

“We didn’t play very good defense tonight,” said Melvin. “That’s the disappointing part. There’s an urgency.”

There’s also a mystery, or is there? The A’s have not been the same since they traded Yoenis Cespedes for Jon Lester the last day of July.

The A’s surmised with their budget they couldn’t sign Cespedes when his contract expired at the end of the 2015 season. The A’s — general manager Billy Beane — surmised, as the last two years in the playoffs they couldn’t beat Detroit without one more great starting pitcher.

Everything flip-flopped. Now the A’s not only might not face the Tigers, they might not even make the postseason. And the young A’s, who were built both physically and mentally around the enthusiastic Cespedes, fell apart after the deal.

The other kids start thinking, “If they trade him, what’s going to happen to me?” They lose their confidence. The team starts losing games.

So, Cespedes, a fan favorite, is gone. Lester probably also will be gone. And worst of all, the A’s postseason chances may be gone. Such a fragile balance.

Melvin, who’s been through the good times and bad times, with Arizona before coming over to manage the A’s, was asked how he deals with what happened to the A’s against Texas.

“Yes,” he admitted, “it bothers you. But you have to come back and play another game.”

And, they hope, play it far better than the last one.

Firing of Warrior coach disappoints A’s Bob Melvin

By Art Spander

OAKLAND — Bob Melvin has been there. Has heard the phone ring the way Mark Jackson did. Heard the order to come to the office the way Mark Jackson did. Heard the words he was fired the way Mark Jackson did.

Melvin is a baseball man, who played for the Giants and others, and has been the Athletics' manager a month short of three years.

Melvin, who grew up in the Bay Area, also is a basketball fan, a Warrior fan “all my life,” as he phrases it. 

So we talk to the guy nicknamed BoMel, grab him outside the dugout at O.Co Coliseum Tuesday before the A’s were beaten by Seattle, 8-3.

Because of the nature of the Coliseum complex — Oracle Arena attached to the big stadium — the Warriors, A’s and Raiders are in a way connected symbolically.

Maybe 100 yards over Melvin’s shoulder is the court where Thursday Mark Jackson coached his final home game for the Warriors, offering cryptic words before tip-off that nothing after this season would be the same.

Now he’s gone. Now Oracle is empty. Now Bob Melvin, A’s manager and Warriors fan, is disappointed. He is not alone.

Melvin, fired as manager of the Mariners after the 2004 season, fired as manager of the Diamondbacks after 2009, might have offered a different viewpoint, been more noncommittal or simply mused, “That’s the business.” He did not.

“I know Mark Jackson,” said Melvin. “Consider him a friend. I’m surprised, a little disappointed as a Warrior fan. But I’m certainly not an expert, and I don’t know what went on inside.”

We’re told that inside, Jackson was not trusted by the front office. Told that Jackson argued with the son of Warriors owner Joe Lacob. We know Jackson dispatched two of his assistant coaches. There was conflict. There was inevitability.

Not for Melvin, who graduated from Menlo-Atherton High down the Peninsula and then played baseball at Cal. He didn’t want Jackson ousted. On the contrary.

Melvin remembers the Warriors' years in the wilderness, the stretch of 17 seasons when they made the playoffs only once. This year under Jackson, last year under Jackson, the Warriors were a delight, a link back some 40 years when in 1974-75 they won the NBA title.

“I would like to thank (Jackson) for his unbelievable contributions in getting the organization to this point and the success that they had,” said Melvin. “And I believe he’s going to have a lot of choices afterwards.”

Jackson never had been a head coach at any level, much less the NBA, the top of the heap, when chosen out of the ABC-ESPN broadcast booth in June 2011. Now he’s experienced. Yet that doesn’t mean there will be an opening.

Or that a team that needs a coach will accept Jackson, a pastor in southern California, who may have been a bit too religious for those who controlled his destiny.

Melvin’s rookie managerial season was 2003 with the Seattle Mariners. He made it only through 2004.

“I expected to be fired,” he said. “I was with a team that was on its last legs. We won 93 games my first year. We lost 99 the second year. They needed to start fresh. I understood.”

He took over the Diamondbacks almost immediately, managing Arizona from 2005 through 2008 and winning the National League West in 2007. But when the D-Backs started 2009 a disappointing 12-17, Melvin was dumped.

“I didn’t understand that one as much, because of some of the success we had,” said Melvin. “It’s never been an ego thing. I’m not an ego guy. It’s all about the players anyway. But there’s disappointment because you feel you’re working hard and doing a job, and at least in the Arizona situation I felt we made some big strides to get where we were.”

Mark Jackson’s strides with the Warriors were plenty large, but that sign of progress became irrelevant to those in command.

“The old adage, that you’re hired to be fired, I don’t necessarily agree with that,” Melvin insisted. “The intent is to stay there for a long period of time. So I kind of take exception when people say you’re going to get fired anyway.

“That’s kind of a of a defeatist attitude.”

It’s also reality. As Bob Melvin and now Mark Jackson realize.

The Sports Xchange: A's Chavez gets his first win of season

By Art Spander
The Sports Xchange

OAKLAND — It's not exactly a Hollywood story, so call it a Fontana story. That's a working class city in Southern California about 40 miles east of Hollywood. Yet the location in this instance is not as important as the plot. 

"It's all about getting an opportunity," said Bob Melvin, manager of the Oakland Athletics, "and doing something with it. Jesse got that opportunity." 

Read the full story here.

Copyright © 2014 The Sports Xchange

‘I’d boo me too,’ says A’s new closer Jim Johnson

By Art Spander

OAKLAND — Opening day is for baseball. Opening night is for the theater. But if the A’s, the defending AL West Division champions, had tried to play an afternoon game Monday they would have been rained out. After dark they merely were shut out.

Only one of 162. That’s the way major leaguers reflect on every defeat. In the major leagues if you lose one out of three you’ll have great season, a 90-win season or better.

But it hurts to lose that first one. Especially at home. Especially in front of a rare sellout crowd, 36,067.

Especially when the relief pitcher you traded for in the off-season enters in a tied ninth inning and pitches so poorly that Oakland not only loses to the Cleveland Indians, 2-0, but he is booed when pulled after three of the four batters he faced reached base.

The A’s had a reliable closer in Grant Balfour, but they — meaning GM Billy Beane and others in the front office — saw a reason to acquire Jim Johnson from the Orioles and dump Balfour. Johnson had more than a 100 saves over the previous two years for Baltimore.

He made his first appearance in Oakland’s first game. He was not at all impressive.

“I did everything you’re not supposed to do as a pitcher,” confided Johnson, who to his credit didn’t try to hide in a clubhouse packed with reporters and TV cameras.

What he was supposed to do remains conjecture. What he did was walk the first man he faced, Asdrubal Cabrera, give up a single to the next man he faced, David Murphy, and hit with a pitch the third man he faced, Yan Gomes. Bases loaded and no one out. Help!

Nyjer Morgan’s fly to center got an out but it also got Cabrera home on a sacrifice fly. Nick Swisher singled to center, scoring Murphy, and as the disenchanted gathering at the O.co Coliseum provided an accompaniment of boos, out went Johnson, replaced by Fernando Abad.

“I would have booed me too,” agreed Johnson after a debut not long to be remembered. “It’s not the way you want to start with a new team. It’s too bad after the way Sonny Gray battled. But there will be better days.”

Gray, named to start an opener for the first time in his brief career, thought there wouldn’t even be a game because of the afternoon downpour. The uncertainty had him even more nervous than a 24-year-old with only 61 days of major league experience could ever be.

“It was kind of tough mentally,” said Gray. He walked two of the first three Indians batters and needed to throw 29 pitches in the opening inning. Still, no one scored — then or in the subsequent five innings Gray pitched.

Of course, no one scored for the A’s in nine innings, including the eighth when they had the bases loaded and one out. Josh Donaldson had hit one more than 400 feet off the center field boards, but the A’s on base ahead of him, Daric Barton and Coco Crisp, had to hold up on the ball to make sure it wouldn’t be caught.

After Donaldson’s blast, reduced to a single, Jed Lowrie struck out and Brandon Moss grounded to first.

Oakland manager Bob Melvin, a stable sort, shrugged off the entire experience. The A’s had been unable to play their final exhibition Saturday at Oakland against the Giants because of a rainstorm. Maybe just the opportunity to get through game, even a losing game, was a relief of sorts.

The A’s are built on pitching, and through eight innings Gray, Luke Gregerson and Sean Doolittle provided shutout pitching. No complaints there.

The ninth undid them, but if you can’t get a run on offense then something bad is bound to occur.

“He walks the first guy,” said Melvin, a onetime catcher, analyzing Johnson’s ineffectiveness. “But he’s always the type of guy who’s one pitch away form getting a double play. It just wasn’t his day.”

At noon you’d have sworn it would be no one’s day except the groundskeepers. The rain was coming down hard, and not far away in Berkeley lightning hit a tree and split it down the middle. At 4 p.m., three hours before the scheduled first pitch, workers were pushing water by the gallon off the tarp covering the infield.

The poor A’s, was your only thought. Tickets already sold. Anticipation high. A couple of exhibition wins over the Giants at AT&T Park in their rear-view mirror. How cruel the sporting gods are.

Then, as if on cue, the sun came out. The A’s and their fans finally had a good break. Until the ninth inning.