I had no delusions of this team winning the division at the beginning of the 2021 season. In the past few days I have read comments comparing Sergio Romo to a white flag, but you'll see that I wrote on this very blog some months ago that I saw the Romo and Elvis Andrus acquisitions as a white flag with no implications of competing before a single ball was hurled or a single bat was swung. It's impossible for a team who is tip-toeing the paper-thin line between "good" and "average" to lose two All-Star caliber players (Marcus Semien, Liam Hendricks) and supplant them with two decrepit, below average players who are barely ML caliber. Who was relegated to pick up the slack? Because no one on this roster did-or was even capable-and the numbers to be replaced were insurmountable. The fact that either player stepped on the field wearing pajamas with Oakland stitched on the front was a middle-finger to the fans. A ruse. The same tired and time-honored baseball front office hoax of getting the fans interested by virtue of a "name" player who "did it in the past" rather than the ability to put up numbers for your team today -and the uneducated, fringe fans fall for it...every...single....time.
We as fans are supposed to "trust the process," but where does a team go with a 29th ranked minor league system and zero ability to sign high profile free agents? Are we as Oakland fans to forever wish upon a star with the likes of Skye Bolt or a myriad of AAAA players? To dig through the trash to find somewhat capable players with obvious flaws and then leave it to management to disguise said flaws? Make no mistake about it, the contention window has closed with this current team, and with the threat of a move to Las Vegas imminent-these are times of high anxiety for fans of the green and gold. We are staring into the void of the baseball universe and having an existential crisis while the front office is trying to prove their "brilliance" by playing a glamorized version of Strat-O-Matic. Dare I say the Devil Rays have surpassed the A's at their own game in this respect? A World Series appearance, the best record in the AL, and a stacked minor league system tells me.... hell yes. Humbled and surpassed at our own game as a billionaire con-man (burn in hell John Fisher) hiding behind the scenes uses the team, the city of Oakland and MLB in order to extort and develop hundreds of acres of publicly owned land posing as a "stadium project."
These are bleak times with no foreseeable respite.
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