Author: lleonardbw

by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

SAN FRANCISCO–The jury is still out for me regarding if the Oakland A’s are not going to move to San Jose they can only play at Oakland. The Giants say you can play at AT&T Park while their building a new park while their building a new park in Oakland. It would probably would make sense that the A’s would have to talk to the Giants and coordinate all of this. The City of Oakland wants to keep the A’s but their going to lose the Warriors who are gone, they’re going to build a nice place south of AT&T Park.

The Raiders, no worries only ten home games per year but their probably are going to be gone too. The City of Oakland needs the A’s more and the A’s need the City of Oakland. The ten year deal is possible although it’s just posturing now unless A’s owner Lew Wolf says no right away. Right now it’s more positioning and were not sure if it’s going to happen quickly.

This is a like a domino effect that things will fall into place that might as well happen, it’s a very weird situation and I don’t see why Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig doesn’t meet the A’s and Giants in the same room and say to them it’s for the better of the game let’s do a deal here.

The A’s can approach Giants president Larry Baer and ask him, “do you want $100 million?” so the A’s can go to San Jose and get terriorial rights back. The A’s gave the Giants territorial rights to San Jose under former A’s owner Wally Haas. San Jose was not the headquarters to Silicon Valley and it was just another city. It’s a very confusing situation and Wolf is not getting any younger and maybe he could sell the team and maybe somebody at Clorox or Dreyers might be able to come in and buy the team.

The A’s are not worth a lot of money now, their a bargain at $300 million in baseball terms, I wish I had $300 million and you could probably buy the A’s for $350 million. San Jose is a warm market town and it’s a warm weather baseball town. San Jose Mercury News reporter Mark Purdy says that San Jose has the population to support the A’s.

Remember it’s in the Bay Area and people who support the Giants don’t only live in San Francisco but they can come from Alameda, Marin, Palo Alto, and San Jose and former Giants owner Bob Lurie did a study a few years ago on who goes to Giants games at Candlestick, a lot of people during the Candlestick era said they came from the South Bay.

I hate to say it if you build a brand new ball park in downtown San Jose in a town with that kind of income and those people down there make good money. It’s the most properous area the Silicon Valley. It was named by the census that these kids down there are making six figures and they support the Sharks and it’s 41 home games and not 81 home games like in baseball.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for A’s baseball and does News and Commentary each week on Sportstalk

by Michael Duca

SAN FRANCISCO–Right now the word weakly means the Giants offense right now despite dropping a 12 spot on the Rockies on Wednesday it’s pretty clear it’s their still scuffling to put some runs together and it looks like Hunter Pence is starting to come out of it but maybe Pablo Sandoval will decide that’s it’s a better idea to just forget about everything and go hitting and not worry about contracts.

As of this morning a new issue came up Angel Pagan in his diognostic research on his knee we all saw it last year what it’s like not to have him in the line up maybe he got a little soreness that he can heal up and clean up. Also this one is concerning pitchers, if a pitcher has Tommy John surgery in the first place you have a mechanical problem, if you have a second Tommy John surgery you have a coachability problem.

You didn’t learn a thing from the first one, you went out and did things the same way and despite the fact their able to wrap the tendons, put titanian screws and their stronger than an original tendon was, it’s still possible to destroy it if you don’t go out and use proper bio mechanics in pitching.

It is beyond me how Major League teams can invest in a quarter of a billion dollars in a pitching staff but their unwilling to spend $100,000 a year on someone with a masters or a PhD in bio mechanics to be on staff to make sure that investment actually pays off.

Giants manager Bruce Bochy says he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Giants thrid baseman Pablo Sandoval’s agent, Sandoval changed agents last season and the agent has been fairly pushy in terms of trying to get the Giants to take a look at the new reality and understand what Pablo is probably going to be worth in the open market if he goes out there.

He was asking for five years for $90 million total, at $18 million a year average, honestly in this current market place considering that gives you fiscal certainty for a five year period forward. The only thing that you have to decide before you agree to a deal does Pablo have the discipline to maintain the weight and conditioning that he put himself through this year?

A’s pitcher Scott Kazmir getting $22 million is going to be a bargain, the world changed about a year and half ago, when this latest round of TV contracts came in and teams started reeiving upwards of $35 million a year and the national contract will grow to $60 million a year over the course of the contact. You add in things like the Dodgers with their local contract signed for $3 billion over a 25 year period.

These are just ludcrious numbers,now paying $11 millon a year for a pitcher who can go out and give you 30 starts is nothing. Thats a bargain rate your going to see very soon people signing contracts in the range of $200 million over their lifetime for maybe five or six seasons, it’s not far away.

Michael Duca does commentary on A’s and Giants each week for Sportstalk radio

by Michael Duca

If you talk to San Frnacisco Giants TV analyst Mike Krukow about the Giants offense he wouldn’t complain about it but his broadcast partner Duane Kuiper complained about the offense about guys who need to do some timely situational hitting which is a real issue for the Giants. Krukow started a little bit of a firestorm on Friday night when he said during the telecast that Giants catcher Hector Sanchez is not a Major League quality catcher and there will be repercussions coming down for that remark.

Krukow may actually be correct and it’s a serious issue for the Giants, the club needs a second catcher for those two days a week when they want to get Buster Posey out of the line up for a rest. Back up catchers are not considered to be offensive personalities but you really want them to defend. The pass ball that wound up costing Giants starter on Friday Matt Cain his first run on Friday night was just an utterly sloppy effort by Sanchez.

There was no two ways about it, its the same guy who won a game for them earlier on the homestand with a 12th inning single gave that game back in the standings on Friday night. The Giants faced a decent pitcher in Padres starter Tyson Ross who pitched four innings surrendered eight hits and no runs. Ross always had great potential he was a great pitcher at Cal and was a solid pitcher in San Francisco but he just never found a spot to break into on the Giants rotation.

Ross was pitching well in San Francisco and it looked like he got a spot to slide into in the rotation when he injured himself on the first batter and went out for three weeks and when he got back he never got that opportunity back. He’s always had the potential He’s a big tall pitcher and had trouble harnessing the mechanics, had trouble harnessing the leverage of his body and it could take him longer to mature to quote “get it” and now it looks like Tyson got it.

Oakland A’s update: When you get four walks from the opposing pitcher in the opening inning which happened when the A’s faced Houston Astros starter Jason Cosart in the opening game of this series Friday who pitched one third of an inning and surrendered seven runs and three hits and they managed to get four walks from Cosart and the A’s managed to match all of them with home runs this is an opportunistic offense who makes the job of the pitcher much easier. Go ask A’s pitcher Sonny Grey how easy it was for him to throw the last five innings with a seven or eight run lead.

We saw this on the last homestand in San Francisco when Tim Hudson was throwing 62 percent strikes to start a game and when they expanded the lead for him from 2-1 to 5-1 he started suddenly throwing 75 percent strikes he went out and started challenging the strike zone and saying “I hit it I got seven guys behind me a and one in front of me who will catch it.”

That’s what pitchers have to do, that’s what pitchers don’t seem to be able to do with the lead until they become very mature is to understand you don’t need to pitch for strikeouts and stats anymore with a four or five run lead and you pitch to make them contact the ball and make them hit the ball at people.

It was Josh Donaldson bobblehead day at the Coliseum on Saturday and you have to admit that his head is the only thing that bobbles. Donaldson has a .247 average, three home runs and ten RBIs and he owns the tarp, nobody defends as well as he does in the Coliseum. He scuffled a little bit to begin the season. He was struggling at the plate. It’s happens guys who are on fire in Arizona and all of sudden cool off and then it’s vice versa guys who couldn’t buy a base hit to save their life in the desert come up to the regular season and start hitting, it’s always interesting to watch.

Michael Duca does commentary on Giants and A’s weekly for Sportstalk radio

by Michael Duca

OAKLAND–I can not honestly say if ball park security or ball park operations at AT&T Park over the past week when the Dodgers and Giants were there for the three game series when Dodger outfielder Yesiel Puig was getting threats from the Los Zetas Mexican cartel how much ball operations knew about the threat and what did park management do in setting up protection for the fans, players, and employees.

The information that I’ve learned from ESPN is a harrowing account and it is a terrifying account and my first question that I asked when I got even an inkling of this story was how can baseball actually allow him to play? You got a situation here where a person is beholden essentially to Los Zetas cartel in Mexico for 20 percent of what he was going to earn but not on this current $42 million contract.

The understanding is that the cartel doesn’t have a claim on his earnings forever, it’s his bonus money that their after and 20 percent of his bonus money which is a little bit more of an open thing. While its certainly still illegal and it’s extortion and a bunch of other things it isn’t as bad as it’s originally made to sound.

You would understand that somebody would have to pay some kind of fee in the situation, the unfortunate thing is that whole market if you will is clearly human trafficking no matter how you slice it. It’s a violation of international law. We always knew that these players coming out of Cuba were stretching the laws in many, many ways.

You had to violate the laws of Cuba to get out, most people didn’t have too much trouble with that as would often times could rationalize breaking the laws of a country we don’t agree with. He had to break the laws of Mexico in order to get there and he had to bend the laws of the United States by taking advantage of the rather strange American immigration policy that Cubans who do come into the country without documents as long as they show that their Cubans and that they arrive on dry land and don’t come out of the ocean can get political asylum.

It’s all very strange but the bottom line is people involved in Puig’s extracton have died under very questionable circumstnaces. The Dodgers have had a full time security detail around Puig since he’s been called up from double AA Chattanooga and it begs the question, how safe are the fans in those arch ways in right field at Dodger Stadium? How safe are the fans in the areas in right field and how safe is the team?

It certainly has shed some new light on his cavalier attitude and towards the game in some circumstances and maybe it might explain why it appears he’s always concentrating on what he’s doing. I’m not sure how many of us could have survived getting this far. What’s critcial is the safety of the fans, the integrity of the game and the safety of Puig himself.

Oakland A’s update: The Houston Astros opened up a series in Oakland, the Astros who are a last place team begs one to say there are last place teams and I suspect that the Astros will end up in last place or they may win 15-20 more games than they did last year.

The Astros are an imroving team, they have the best farm system in baseball and you can’t take anybody for granted but obviously you don’t take a team that’s young and improving for granted. Particularly early in the season, the Astros don’t know any better, they don’t know they’re not good yet, so you have to play Houston straight.

I have the distinct feeling that A’s General Manager Billy Beane and Manager Bob Melvin know how to get the A’s to play everybody, the A’s are just beating up on people this year and I would be surprised if there is any let down by this team at any point this year.

Michael Duca does commentary on the A’s and Giants each week for Sportstalk radio