by Michael Duca

Oakland A’s update: It’s pretty simple and straight forward that 40 years ago when the 1974 Oakland A’s won their third and final straight championship. Author Michael Lewis who wrote Moneyball would have been eight years old and it wouldn’t have been pretty much of a book to read if your comparing the 1974 A’s versus the 2002 team who won 20 straight games that season. You can’t write something until you get the idea and develop the idea.

I’m not sure it would have made a lot of sense for Lewis who spent a full year at the Coliseum and survived sitting with us over on the broadcasters side in the press box for a full season and still managed to write coherently about the subject. You can’t you do that about a team that played 25-27 years earlier. Your going to get unfortunately and it is human nature, the 1974 team is gonna feel like they were slighted. The 74 team held a reunion at the Colisuem last Saturday night.

That 74 team feels slighted because they didn’t get the credit that they desereved when things aren’t done the same way, that they didn’t get the credit that they deserved no matter what because there simply wasn’t the credit to be given then. Baseball was on TV on Saturday hence NBC’s Baseball game of the week. The local broadcast package was not something that the A’s had.

The 74 A’s never had a chance to get the recongnition that the teams do today, people who know baseball know that dynasty who won three straight World Series. The 74 A’s is as good a group of baseball players as anyone alive today has seen, because nobody alive today would remember those great Yankees teams from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. Most of us didn’t see them and can’t because there’s no TV clips from those days.

SF Giants update: Michael Morse the Giants outfielder’s key is to stay healthy, he’s been interupted by nagging irritating injuries for large portions of his career and I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t know the reason for that any better than anyone else or he would have avoided them. It’s not that Morse is a reckless player.

Morse doesn’t do the head first slide that put the Rockies Nolan Arenado on the disabled list for six weeks, he plays the game the right way, he plays the game striaght up but manages to get hurt a lot. If Morse can stay healthy he could end up hitting 25-27 home runs, he can drive in over 100 runs. Morse can be a linchpin for the team.

It will be surprising if Morse can make the All-Star team simply because there’s that silly requirment that every team has to have a player on the team. Your going to wind up usually taking a good outfielder from a bad team and there’s usually three or four bad teams and that pretty much fills up your outfield bench. So guys who don’t get voted in, in the first three outfielders, you usually see a significant drop off in talent once you get past them.

Michael Duca covers the Giants and A’s for http://www.sportsradioservice.com