Category: Oakland Athletics

by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

OAKLAND–The New York Yankees who had trouble with the Oakland A’s in the last few years they won the first game of the three game series over the weekend 7-0 but the A’s came right back with wins on Saturday and Sunday at the Coliseum. It was a great weekend, Derek Jeter one of the greatest players that I’ve ever seen, 20 years imagine that with the same team with the Yankees.

When you talk about some of the great Yankees like in the circle of Babe Ruth, Lou Gerhig, Joe Dimaggio, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, superstars like that and he’s the only Yankee with 3,000 or more hits. That is incredible. As everybody knows every American League team is giving Jeter a tribute when he visits their park the A’s gave Jeter some fancy wines from the Napa Valley and a check for his foundation for $10,002.

The two dollar part was in honor of his number two which will be retired and he was very happy and it was a very simple ceromony and Jeter is a humble man, he’s a simple man and the A’s did the right thing with him and he’s just a terrific person and forget his hits career he’s one of the best shortstops of all time.

For Jeter to play in New York for 20 years and never to have anything negative reported about him it’s incredible and he’s just a tremendous citizen of the United States and New York and I hate to say it the Pride of the Yankees like the movie that was dedicated to the late Lou Gerhig but he’s really the pride of the Yankees in this era.

A’s and Rangers three game series: The Texas Rangers are amazing as they came into the Coliseum 34-35 with eight games out of first place and there are three teams on top of them the A’s, Angels, and Mariners. Rangers manager Ron Washington as I always tell people you can have the best jockey in the world but if the horse is limping your not going to win the race.

With all respect to former A’s manager and the Arizona Diamondbacks Chief Baseball Officer Tony LaRussa he had some great teams in Oakland. You need the talent, talent is what wins in baseball it’s not the great manager. The manager could put in all the signals he wants and do all the strategy he wants and you still need to execute. This is a sport of execution of opportunity and the Rangers just lost Prince Fielder for the rest of the year .

Tribute to the late Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn 54: The Oakland A’s paid a tribute to former Padres slugger Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn at the Coliseum before Monday night’s game versus the Rangers with a moment of silence after the announcement of his passing on Monday morning. Gwynn was very dedicated to the game and with 3,141 all time hits. Gwynn left way too early at the age of 54.

His death was led by the cancer that spread after years and years of chewing smokeless tabacco and he took a leave of absence from San Diego State where he was head coach for a time and then stepped down to be assistant batting coach. He was Mr.Padre, he was the guy in San Diego and former Red Sox all time hitting great Ted Williams wanted to talk to him years ago.

There is a lot of good stuff about this man and he left us too early and it’s been a rough year so far with the passing of A’s former pitcher Bob Welch who supposed to be at the Coliseum on July 19th for the A’s 1989 reunion who won the earthquake World Series when they swept the Giants that season. Some of the great ones who have passed away this year, former Padre broadcaster Jerry Coleman, former Yankee coach Don Zimmer, former disc jockey Casey Kasem and former Sacramento TV sportscaster Ken Gimblin.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for A’s baseball and does News and Commentary each week for http://www.sportsradioservice.com

By Morris Phillips

The A’s may officially be baseball’s second-best team, but on days like Sunday, they look the best by a wide margin. Just ask the Yankees, who fell to the A’s 10-5 after falling behind 10-0 after just four innings.

The win was the A’s second straight over New York after Friday’s humbling 7-0 loss and allowed the A’s to extend their lead in the AL West to 4 ½ games after the Angels fell in Atlanta on Sunday night. But what continues to standout about this club, is their statistical dominance which at least argumentatively places them above all 29 other clubs. After 69 games, the A’s have allowed the fewest runs in baseball while scoring the second-most. In terms of runs differential, no one’s close to Oakland with that number standing at +132 after Sunday’s blowout.

“What is says that we are able to get starters out of the game early like we did today and get into parts of the bullpen that aren’t as significant as the back end of it,” manager Bob Melvin said.

The A’s used the long ball to dispatch the Yankees on Sunday starting in the first inning when Derek Norris connected for a three-run shot off New York starter Vidal Nuno. Coco Crisp hit his fifth homer of the season in the second inning—also with two runners aboard—and the A’s had a quick 6-0 lead.

Starter Jesse Chavez took the ball from there, going six innings allowing just five hits and a run. Melvin then pulled the plug on Chavez who at the age of 30 has never thrown more than 100 innings at the major league level. Chavez threw 89 pitches, but it was quality over quantity, according to Melvin.

“You could tell right away he was on it pretty good,” Melvin said. “Cutter to both sides to the plate, good curveball to create a gap between the hard stuff and the off-speed stuff. Threw a few good changeups; the first 60 pitches were really good.”

For New York, Nuno was gone two batters into the fourth inning, allowing eight runs on eight hits. Nuno saw his record fall to 1-3 while Chavez improved to 6-4.

Derek Jeter was honored before the game by the A’s in his last regular season game at the Coliseum. Jeter finished the game 1 for 3 with a sacrifice fly in the seventh inning that trimmed the A’s lead to 10-3. Jeter’s decision to return to baseball for one more year after his injury-marred 2013 season has paid off so far with the shortstop hitting .271 on the season.

A’s third baseman Josh Donaldson was dropped to sixth in the lineup due to his prolonged slump, but he came up with an RBI single in the fourth that put the A’s up 10-0.   The A’s managed 12 hits on the afternoon with all but Jed Lowrie and Brandon Moss producing at least one hit in their starting lineup.

On Monday, the A’s continue their 10-game homestand with three games against Texas. The Rangers’ Colby Lewis will face Oakland’s Drew Pomeranz in the 7:05pm contest.

by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

OAKLAND–A 38 minute power light failure during the game this Saturday at the Oakland Coliseum made news. The Coliseum makes news often, a dilapidated place that is not worthy of Major League Baseball. A’s second baseman Eric Sogard says that is one of the things he likes about the place, that “you never know what’s going to happen next”.

Well, the fans, the people that pay Sogard his salary, obviously do not love the Coliseum, if they did, they would have sellouts every day every night. Because they have won two-consecutive Division Titles,and could be under way to a third one, so they are winning, but the place they play is far from fan friendly. The place is a toilet, an embarrassment to this organization and to Major League Baseball.

I never take anything “serious” a player says, they are just ballplayers, not philosophers. Many times they are not honest, they give you the company line, the truth is that every A’s player would love to be playing in a brand new ballpark, a ballpark that would provide them with a spacious dressing room, instead of the Motel 6 type of accommodations they have at the OCO.

I have been covering the Oakland Athletics since the mid 1970’s, only a handful of sports media people that are alive today can claim that, and trust me, the Coliseum was never the issue back then. The issue where the fighting A’s, fighting with themselves, with their former owner the late Charlie O Finley, but at the end they were also winning, consecutive World Series.

The Athletics were the pride of the Bay Area back them, the San Francisco Giants were dying at the box office at Candlestick Park, who was much worse than the Coliseum today. The wind at The Stick would even knock down pitchers on the mound, the freezing wind in the middle of July made Candlestick Park the worse park to play baseball in the Major Leagues for decades.

Anybody who knows the story of Candlestick Park understands what happened there. The Mayor of San Francisco at that time and some contractors built that park on what was land filled by the bay, but they got a sweet deal, a deal that is regarded as “dubious” in nature.

Joe Torre was present at the OCO this Saturday night, he who has the ear of the Commissioner, but this Commissioner has no ear for the A’s, he is concluding his tenure and he could never make a decision about the Athletics wishes on moving to San José. So for me, this Commissioner is not even worth of mentioning as far as this case is concerned. Yes, he made money for the owners, but so did Hayman Roth in The Godfather.
What would happen next at the OCO? Only God knows.
Play Ball!

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for A’s baseball and does News and Commentary each week on http://www.sportsradioservice.com

by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

OAKLAND–When you hit a walk-off Homerun, you make the Major League Baseball highlights with another bunch of walk-offs that day, but when you make a throw like the throw that Yoenis Céspedes made to the plate on the recent series in Anaheim against the LA Angels, you stand alone. Over 300 feet on the air to Norris the catcher who put a tag on Howie Kendrick for the out. Now, we do not see this very often, do we? After I called the play in Anaheim, my broadcast partner looked at me and said “what was that?”

Céspedes is leading the major leagues in assists from the outfield. During a previous series, also against the Angels at the Oakland Coliseum, he threw two Angels runners out at the plate, in the same inning, first Angels catcher Chris Iannetta, who is not very fast, and then Kole Clahoun who is really fast. By-the-way in that same game Yoenis drove in five runs.

Josh Donaldson is having a great season, although the last series in Anaheim was his worst, fielding and hitting, Josh is having his best season so far and will be the starting third baseman at the July 15 All Star Game for the American League; yet it is Céspedes who is making baseball news around the country.

It is very simple. With all the changes in baseball today, true baseball purist still love to see an outfielder with a great arm throwing a runner at the plate or at any base. Granted hitting a 500 foot home run is something to admire, same can be said about a great throw to the plate that negates a run to your adversary.

It is one of the real talents of baseball (to have a great throwing arm)that is now-days basically forgotten. And for the new baseball fans, the younger crowd, they are not used to see throws of that
sort. Could be that in the US many kids that have a good arm, are immediately converted to pitcher.

Yoenis told me in Spanish; “I just threw the ball”, he is a man of few words, he is not playing to make Sportscenter, he plays hard all the time and loves the big stage, so if it happens it happens, he never changes his approach, because he came from Cuba, where if you play baseball you play hard all the time, and in Cuba you are playing basically for free, for what in the US it is called “perdiem”type of money.

In Cuba there is no free agency, agents or owners, it is all own (everything) by the Cuban government, in Cuba there is only one employer, the Government.

I remember vividly what Céspedes told me during the first time we met, at the A’s Spring Training facility in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2012, when he had not played a game yet during a regular season: “Yo quiero que la gente sepa quien soy yo” trans: “I want the people to know who I am”. He was a star in Cuba with the Granma team for close to a decade. And by the way, they know who you are now Yoenis.

So, no, I am not surprised at Yoenis Céspedes, he is a complete athlete, not just a baseball player.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for A’s baseball and does News and Commentary on http://www.sportsradioservice.com