The Late Late Edition (plus Music Review)

TOR 6, OAK 2

Sorry for the late reporting. I got really drunk last night and crashed at a friend's place in Alameda, spent most of this morning recovering. But I was at the game with 12,000 other fine A's fans. Come on, a Friday night, that wasn't balls cold with Roy Halliday on the mound and only 12,000 showed up for the game, that sucks. Went drinking in Alameda after that game, more about it later.

First things first, I accept full responsibility for the loss, I got a haircut yesterday. As a fan superstition, I do believe (tongue in cheek, of course) that my haircut was one of the factors of the A's loss. That Sampson thing is for real.

Boring A's baseball is back, and I hope it doesn't stay boring for long. This series against the Jays is a true litmus test to see if the A's have bounced back from their horrible start, as far as respectability in 2005 is concerned I do believe this is a must win series.

The Foothill High School Chamber Singers sang both the Canadian and American national anthems. In the baseball blogosphere I do believe I am uniquely qualified to critique their performance, so here goes. Very good blend, especially considering this is a high school group. At parts of our national anthem, the sopranos were pressing, they were probably nervous, and were sharping as a result. Towards the final cadence the bottom seemed to drop out of the bass section, it sounded like they tried to sound like mature basses instead of sounding like what they are, high school basses. They could have been reaching real low note, that kind of tension is not good for a vocalist. All in all, good performance, Foothill has one of the stronger choral programs in the East Bay, but they still can't hold a candle to Mt. Eden or San Ramon Valley, those two schools arguably have some of the best high school choral programs in the state.

Back to baseball. After an odd delay of some sort, the game started at 7:10 PM, the starting pitcher was Ryan Glynn, a callup from AAA Sacramento. I was surprised, to say the least, I was expecting Seth Etherton. It turns out that Glynn's promotion may have been intended as a shakeup of the starting pitchers. Let me give you a Ken Macha quote:

Namely, the A's put their starters on notice: Work into the late innings or risk removal from the rotation. Manager Ken Macha did not put it so bluntly, but he's clearly not interested in peering toward his bullpen in the early innings.

"We're looking for somebody to give us consistent starts, deep in games and give us a chance to win," Macha said. "The objective is to get at least six innings out of your starter."

-Susan Slusser, SF Chronicle 6/4/05

To ask the starters to go deeper into the games is not an unreasonable thing to ask, since the bullpen is so depleted with injuries. I really do wonder how this is going to affect Blanton tonight. Blanton's recent outings have been uh...less than stellar. If Blanton blows up, it's a sure thing that he's going to be sent down to AAA and get regular starts, but who's going to take his spot on the rotation? AAA is pretty depleted with injuries too. I'm going to guess that Yabu will get a few starts, if this scenario plays itself out in this manner.

There's not that much to say about the game itself except that Glynn pitched really well and was aggressive in the zone, it was too bad he was replaced by Juan Cruz who helped the Jays break the game open for them. The A's got hosed in the Hudson trade, but the Mulder trade was good.

The hitting was back to the boring ways of the losing streaks. Let's hope the A's return to their winning ways tonight.

About the beer I had last night. After the game, my friend Geoff and I went to Lucky 13 in Alameda, after a few rounds of Stella and PBR I decided to try La Fin du Monde. I'll tell you, that beer was so devastating that the French Canadians had to call it "The End of the World." It was 9.0% alcohol (!) by volume and tasted somewhat like root beer. I was slurring like a mo'fo' after that beer. That was the end of my night. And this is the end of my post.