Beane continued unloading vets. That took the fire out of the team, now they are simply playing out the season.

Again I question the motives of Beane and A’s management. It sure looks as if they are trying to kill attendance.

Look at them now and before Bonds. They were a joke of a franchise without Bonds and they are a now returned to their usually sorry form without him.

50 plus years with no titles, yet he almost got them 2 single handedly. He was a one man team. A super star surrounded by scrubs.

Cubans teams always win. I suppose you enjoy losing and watching boring teams.

Mark Cuban and/or Barry Bonds would turn the A’s into the freak show that has been the Giants over the last couple of years. It wouldn’t be baseball. It would be a joke, which is what I hope you intended.

I understand the need tfor young talent, however unless the A’s have not drafted well for the past 5 years or so they have to be killing off the team for a reason.

No team dismantles itself when they are 6 games back in their division and 3 or 4 back in the wild card race.

Barry Bonds is sitting at home while a bunch of punchless 240 hitting AAAA players are starting for the A’s.

Call it what you want, but I believe A’s fans are being sold out by a greedy owner looking to relocate if and when his Fremont dream fails.

Maybe the Bay Area Media could recruit Mark Cuban to buy the team and restore it to its prior glory.

Monte,

If “prodigious and name-brand offense” is all that you and the fans want, you’re not true fans of the game. It’s more than home runs—it’s terrific pitching, young kids playing their hearts out, stellar defensive feats, and rooting your team on even when they lose. True fans know this and they come to the games. The fair-weather fans show up when they think something flashy will happen—like when the Red Sox and the Yankees come to town. But they aren’t true A’s fans or true fans of the game.

It really is a microcosm of what is happening in our culture with its cult-like fascination with celebrities behaving badly, and our mindless homage to the branding god. No one cares anymore about the essence of what made baseball or life in America great, and we are in danger of losing both. It’s all about flash, big names, and shock value—not about the purity of the game or the democratic dream. It saddens me to see this happening—on the baseball diamond and to our culture. We’ve lost our core values.

That being said, I hope the “kids” can show why Billy traded for them and pull off a miracle to make all the naysayers as speechless as the Aflac duck in the Yogi Berra ad. Both would be something to see.

Bee Hylinski
Alamo, CA

The A’s are loaded with slow footed, no hitting, mediocre to outright sorry white guys.

There are no athletes on the team (except Gonzales). If not for the pitching the A’s would be one of the worse teams in baseball. The line-up is ridiculous