I have posted no links for a short period. Few things were happening. But here are some links.

Baseball America's Top 10 A's prospects is live. It's the four pitchers up top with Michael Choice coming in fifth. Jermaine Mitchell and Michael Taylor at eight and nine are ... interesting. David Wishinsky uses the same word in re: Mitchell and points out that Clay Davennport's projections for the outfielder are not rosy even though he'll play the season at 27. He doesn't have a lot of growth left if he's to follow a typical aging path.

Jonathan Mayo's Top 100 list is also out and the A's have six players on it, with Jarrod Parker the top listed player at #26.

Tommy Milone, sadly, is not on the list.

In future top prospect news, the A's signed a 16-year-old shortstop named Yairo Munoz. That link has video that I did not watch because this computer likely cannot handle it. Munoz's defense is apparently stronger than his offense, and he got just shy of $300,000 to sign.

Jeremy Barfield's latest blog post is up. He talks about his feeling that he's underachieved so far and how he has to, in his words, keep blinders on regarding the A's outfield situation and the odds that he can break into that.

We know from Twitter that Barfield is a particularly plugged-in individual. I wonder how many minor-leaguers follow the roster machinations of their major-league squads, and how closely. Were I an agent with a perfect relationship with my client, I would probably advise him to completely ignore everything going on at the major-league level. You can't do anything about it, so listen to the development team about what they want you to work on and go out and perform your best.

Bartolo Colon is officially an Oakland Athletic for one year at the cost of $2 million. I'm sure he'll be adequate.

In fondly remembered ex-A's news, Brad Ziegler avoided arbitration with the Diamondbacks.

The headline here was going to read "and other A's links," but nothing jumped out at me, so:

Jane Lee has a new mailbag up, and as with all mailbags, the questions (and occasionally the answers) are hilarious.

The first question, about what the deal is with Manny Ramirez, is totally legit, and Lee mentions that she hasn't been able to get confirmation of Oakland's interest in the DH candidate.

From there, though, the thing devolves. First comes "is Rich Harden on the roster" which is something I'd tend to ask Google, "is Sean Doolittle really a pitcher?", ibid., and "what about Hideki Matsui?", which ... please don't ask about that. Let's not remind Billy Beane that he's available. Are there actually fans who want to watch Matsui? We can fight all day over Seth Smith and Jonny Gomes vs. Collin Cowgill and Michael Taylor, but at least it's reasonably certain that Smith/Gomes are better hitters right now than the latter two. Who is Matsui better than?

Image by Matt Bandi

As I mentioned previously, Andy LaRoche is the last in the series of A's utility men, coincidentally, since Adam Rosales, Eric Sogard, and Andy LaRoche lined up one after the next in a list of team members by PAs amassed.

LaRoche was actually a sort of supersub for five weeks from April 7th to May 15th, starting 19 of the team's 35 games in that span and playing every infield position (though, to the A's credit, he only started at first once, an April 13th win over the White Sox). Come the Ides of May, however, LaRoche was hitting .239/.311/.313, so he was glued to the bench for a week, managing just two plate appearances, until he was called into duty from the 22nd to the 27th by a Kevin Kouzmanoff groin injury. He didn't do much better with the bat and found himself designated for assignment on June 5th and outrighted on June 8th.

Kevin Kouzmanoff was himself optioned on June 6th, with the A's recalling Scott Sizemore to take his place as the new third baseman, but Sizemore seized his opportunity and neither Kouzmanoff nor LaRoche sniffed the majors in Oakland the rest of the year.

LaRoche wound up with just a .219 TAv in 104 plate appearances, squarely and sadly in line with his career numbers. He was a big-time prospect once upon a time, including two top-20 rankings by Baseball America, before 2006 and 2007. He knocked the snot out of the ball in the minors while playing third base, but a 252-PA trial in 2008 turned out too ugly to type, and a full season at third base for the Pirates in 2009, while nothing to be ashamed of, came out basically league average. 2010 brought more ugliness, and the main positive to take away from 2011 for LaRoche is that he stood around at shortstop for forty-two innings, something he'd never done before as a professional at any level, and looked better than Adam Rosales at the spot, at least to my untrained-and-prone-to-overjudging-errors eyes.

LaRoche is in Cleveland now, where he's not on the 40-man roster. As a 28-year-old utility man who couldn't even stick in the A's third-base vacuum of 2011, his career might be effectively over. Minor-league contracts, NRIs, an appearance in the majors here or there is probably all anyone should expect from him. To the extent anyone remembers who he is 15 years from now, it'll probably come as something of a surprise that he got into 40 games with the A's in 2011.

Clay Davenport has projections up on his site and he's posted the first iteration of some standings built from those projections. The confidence intervals around these figures are obviously quite large, but they're an interesting glance at a general idea of Davenport's system's idea of team quality.

Being an 80-win team, as the projections currently figure the A's to be, may or may not be a good idea from a 2015 perspective, but remember that less than a month ago, the perception, and I don't think it was unique to King Kaufman, was this:

No thanks. I'll be back when the A's return to MLB competition MT @jonahkeri @YouTheManNick Root for a stadium.

— King Kaufman (@king_kaufman) December 29, 2011

The crux of Kaufman's argument (stated about a week before that tweet) was that the A's were pulling nonsense to try to argue to MLB that they couldn't compete and thus needed a new stadium. With Seth Smith, Jonny Gomes, and Bartolo Colon all in the fold instead of running with young (likely inferior) in-house options, and Manny Ramirez possibly on the way, what's the narrative now? Is it still dirty business? A delaying action? Certainly they're not on pace with the Rangers, but were they that even if they added Smith/Gomes/Colon to Cahill/Gonzalez? (Kaufman's tweets came before the Bailey trade, and in any case, that's a closer.) I'm not inclined to think they would be.

Maybe that wasn't a terribly unreasonable argument at the time (though it did, as a side issue, point up the way his fandom is different from mine -- I don't feel that I have the option to just quit being an A's fan), but with a fuller picture of the A's entire off-season, I think it at least calls it into question, even retroactively.

Graham Godfrey was a prospect once upon a time despite being drafted in the 34th round by the Blue Jays -- he was a JC transfer to an NCAA school and presumably had a strong commitment to returning for his junior year, because it took $200,000 for Toronto to sign him. It didn't take long for them to send him off to a new team, though, trading him (along with Kristian Bell (not that one)) to the A's in the winter of '07 for Marco Scutaro.

Image by Chris Lockard

Godfrey had pitched at Lansing in 2007, throwing 110 innings as a starter with an underwhelming strikeout rate (6 per nine) but a solid walk rate (under three). He's kicked the strikeout rate up a notch in the A's system (typically finishing the season in the mid-sevens) while still generally keeping the walks and homers under control. He had a bit of a freakish season by the old standard numbers in Sacramento last year, going 14-3 with a 2.68 ERA, but his component stats, while nice, don't blow you away the same way.

His two Baseball America writeups, when he fit into the middle of the Jays' system before 2007 and the back end of Oakland's in 2008, said that he had a low-90s fastball, a changeup that improved a lot from '06 to '07, and a solid slider.

A look at Godfrey's PITCHf/x data reveals a pitch that Gameday classifies as a cutter, two different breaking pitches, and a change-up. The fastball velocity is basically average, coming in around 91, and the slider and curve bring average horizontal movement with below-average drop. The whiff rates on all his pitches are below average, and his fastball seems to work up in the zone, which doesn't strike me as a good combination.

Godfrey's decent results (3.96 ERA, 4.30 FIP) come from keeping the walks to a minimum, as he allowed just five (plus one hit batter) to the 112 batters he faced. He rode the I-95 shuttle in 2011, as he was called up on three separate occasions: he replaced Bobby Cramer on June 10th (and starting on the 10th, 17th, and 23rd of that month) and was sent back down in early July after Rich Harden and Brandon McCarthy made their returns; he was called up to make a start on August 27th, and sent back down two days later; and he returned to the team, making one start, after Sacramento's season ended.

Godfrey might have a shot at the rotation in 2012 as a filler pitcher if the A's feel Brad Peacock or Jarrod Parker aren't ready. Otherwise, he'll presumably battle for a bullpen spot with Ryan Cook, Jerry Blevins, Neil Wagner, Jordan Norberto, et al. There isn't a lot of pitching depth on the 40-man roster to start the season if Dallas Braden isn't ready, so, depending on how Oakland feels about Tyson Ross, any injury or scuffles might see Godfrey getting starting nods in April and May. With a solid defense (as long as Jonny Gomes is on the bench) and the Coliseum behind him, this shouldn't result in too many disasters.

David Wishinsky does not like the Gomes signing / Allen trade rumors, and launches from them into a larger look at Oakland's supposed rebuilding plan.

This is the second time I've seen Nico mention that the A's are "using two roster spots for one lineup position" as if that's some big damning thing. What else are you supposed to use roster spots for? They're a scarce resource, but is having a "true" fourth outfielder in that spot rather than a platoon somehow more valuable?

I guess the A's are interested in Manny Ramirez. I don't really know how this would work. He'd miss the first 50 games of the season, which would presumably be Chris Carter time at DH. But then if Chris Carter does well? You're prepared to send him down at that point? If he's hitting, say, .370/.500? And if both Carter and Barton are playing well? (I'm working under the assumption that Brandon Allen is traded and Kila Ka'aihue is in AAA, as he probably should be.) So you don't even have the option of moving Carter to first? An extra bat is an extra bat, so maybe you trade away Jonny Gomes at that point and just deal with Manny's defense in left on occasion. Is Manny signing up to potentially be a part-time player?

I don't know how it all fits. I do know that a lot of A's fans are going to be mad (and it'll be interesting to see how the high-handed moral crowd gets mad at signing Manny for entirely different reasons than the "play the kids" crowd gets mad), some number are going to be happy, and the rest of us are going to wait to see how it all shakes out.

It certainly doesn't make much difference on the 40-man roster. Pedro Figueroa can go. Adrian Cardenas can probably go. Sean Doolittle can probably go. There's room for cuts, even without considering a Brandon Allen trade for someone who's not on the forty.

And for what it's worth, while I'm not mad per se, I'm not entirely happy with the prospect of burying Carter, either. You can whine about how he "didn't make adjustments" all you want, but he's basically had a month in one year and some scattered ABs in another to make those adjustments. Maybe you're supposed to make them more quickly than that, but "didn't make adjustments" sounds to me like nonsense talk for "hit badly in a small sample," especially when that's talk coming from outside, not from scouts or FOTs (front-office types, to steal a Will Carrollism) inside baseball.

Also, do have a look at his PITCHf/x charts. If you can see a pattern of being consistently busted inside with fastballs, as is a claim I've heard as the knock on him, then you're better at this than I am.

Here is Wishinsky on it.

Nico has a look at the "service clock" issue with the A's young starters, which I think is a valuable thing to do. It's easy to jump and say "no wait we'll lose them to free agency," but 2015 isn't actually so far off, even for Jarrod Parker and Brad Peacock, if they start in the rotation this season. Sure, the A's would "burn" their minimum-salary years on non-competitive teams, but they'll still be under team control into the window Beane is aiming for. Further, Brett Anderson, Sonny Gray, A.J. Cole, and a variety of less certain options (not that Gray is all that certain to be a starter, but compared to, say, Raul Alcantara? You get my point) are also still going to be around.

Further, if the A's really are competitive in 2015, the plan is for that to coincide with the opening of a new stadium and new revenue streams that will allow them to be more flexible, more able to pay Parker, Peacock, and Milone their arbitration salaries (or long-term contracts they've signed in the meantime) while still being able to afford the last year of Brett Anderson's deal and whatever else arises in the meantime. (Daric Barton's contract, say, since he's sure to finish his transformation into John Olerud this year.)

David Fung has a graphical look at the A's window for contention. You do have to know the quality of the players for yourself, and he ends the sentence at the top of the graphic with a preposition, but it's pretty cool.

This Richard Justice piece from interviews with Billy Beane and David Forst confuses me. It makes no attempt to answer the question of how the recent moves (Colon, Smith, Gomes) fit with the earlier ones (Cahill, Gonzalez, Bailey). I'm not even against the moves, but I would love to know, to the extent the front office can be open about this stuff, the operating theory for 2012 -- a lack of belief in Michael Taylor and Collin Cowgill seems to be part of it, and we can speculate on how Oakland feels about alienating a fanbase that has an easy alternative just across the Bay (as opposed to, say, Mariners fans -- where are they going to go?), but every quote I've seen is platitudes and repeated statements about mediocrity. I trust that there's a theory. I just want to know what it is.

Summer Anne Burton disses whoever got the Dallas Braden perfect game tattoo, which is totally wrong. That tattoo is boss.

Eric Sogard, appropriately enough, is the next subject of the retrospective series. Appropriately because Adam Rosales was the last position player covered, and Andy LaRoche will be the next, so we're stacking up all of our utility men in a row.

Image by SD Dirk

Sogard, who supposedly went to "Thunderbird High School" in Phoenix (this clearly cannot exist) and Arizona State before being drafted in the second round (!) by the Padres in 2007 and traded to the A's with Kevin Kouzmanoff for Aaron Cunningham and Scott Hairston, probably never had the power in his bat to be a big-time prospect, but if he could hang defensively, there was plenty to make him a solid, useful player. He hit for .308/.394/.453 in 2008 at Lake Elsinore (in the Cal League), a line that Clay Davenport translates to a very solid .266/.340/.380 performance. If Sogard could stick at shortstop, that's not so far behind what Derek Jeter did this year as basically a league-average player.

Sogard's performance at San Antonio looks less impressive, as his SLG fell to .400, but the translated line is nearly identical. His season and a half at Sacramento provided more of the same, and while his 70 big-league at-bats didn't come out happily, Davenport's projection system still thinks the bat is basically league average, giving him a 50th percentile projection of a .255 EqA.

Sogard's 2011 had him spending the first half of the year in AAA before being called up on July 15th, replacing Chris Carter on the roster, but replacing Adam Rosales in the hearts of minds of A's fans. (Rosales, who hadn't been off the DL for very long, went down to Sacramento the next day for Jerry Blevins.)

Sogard drew starts at the three hard infield positions and seemed like a perfectly adequate player, if perhaps a bit underwhelming on defense at shortstop. The A's, with some justice, appear to believe in Cliff Pennington's defense at short. Were it not so, you might see the two in open competition for the starting job given the approximate equivalence of their bats. Sogard probably cannot displace Scott Sizemore at third, who brings a little more pop, or Jemile Weeks at second, who has legitimate potential to be a well-above-average (if perhaps overrated by those who like singles better than walks) second baseman and a fan favorite to boot. This leaves him battling Adam Rosales for utility time, with Rosales having the fuzzy feelings of a good 2010 season while Sogard brings ... well, I'm not sure. Funny glasses, I guess. Both players have options remaining, so the A's can pick and choose to their hearts' content without worrying about losing one or the other.

As usual with players at this stage of the retrospective game, even if Oakland were planning on contending in 2012, the choice between Sogard and his competition wouldn't make or break the season. You'd like to squeeze out every win you can and not have an actively bad player in the role, but neither guy is that. Either will be fine.

The #Athletics are shopping 1B Brandon Allen, says a BB source. No room for him with all the other young bats they've added.

— Jerry Crasnick (@jcrasnick) January 19, 2012

Brandon Allen is on the block, which doesn't necessarily mean that the A's don't believe in him (or don't believe in him relative to Daric Barton and Chris Carter). Maybe they believe he's exactly as good as Carter and/or Barton, but that he has more trade value. Or maybe they even believe he's slightly better than those two, but his trade value outstrips his likely actual value, and that more time in the bigs would expose that actual value and reduce his trade value. Or maybe, cycling back around, they really do believe that Barton and Carter are better.

They could also just be asking around to see what they can get for him and will find that his trade value isn't high enough to be to their liking. We'll have to see it play out, but it's hard to tell solely from the fact that Allen is the one rumored to be on the block what this means about how the A's feel about him.

A trade would, obviously, clear the decks a bit, let Barton and Carter get full-time at-bats, let Kila be at AAA in case Barton dives into another shallow swimming pool, and just generally realign their assets in a more balanced way.

My Polish brother Joe Pawlikowski has a look at Allen for River Ave Blues. For some reason, he does not link to this video. Joe is hopeful that, were the Yankees to acquire him, hitting coach Kevin Long might be able to work with him on his difficulties hitting the inside stuff, but notes that other teams would probably be willing to pay more than the Yankees for his upside as a regular, while New York would be attempting to acquire a platoon DH.

Tim Williams at Pirates Prospects makes a scary comparison of Allen to Jeff Clement.

Satchel Price includes Allen on his list of possible DH targets for the Tigers at the Daily Dish.

Is this related to the signing of Jonny Gomes? I don't know. As I said after the Seth Smith trade, though, I think we can separate the three-man 1B/DH battle from the fight of youngs (Cowgill, Reddick, Taylor, Mitchell-ish) vs. olds (Crisp, Smith, Gomes) in the outfield. The person hurt by a Gomes signing is presumably going to be Cowgill, who seems most likely to have been the fourth outfielder with a Reddick-Crisp-Smith starting group. Trading Allen feels like more of a way to alleviate a different logjam.

There is, once again, however, the question of the 40-man roster, and I would once again suggest that Adrian Cardenas could be the one to go if the A's were to hang on to Allen. Adam Rosales might be underwhelming, but Cardenas has put up minor-league power numbers that look like Rosales's major-league ones. One does not simply .418 SLG into Mordor.

Anyway, Gomes is by all accounts a poor outfielder, and his overall hitting line won't blow you away, but he's murdered lefties to the tune of a 132 wRC+ over the course of his career (904 PAs over basically seven seasons), so if Billy Beane was lying and the A's really do want a platoon partner for Seth Smith, well, here you are. Giving Beane the benefit of the doubt, which, why not, because look at the name of the blog, it's likely that he saw Reddick in one corner and Smith in the other and realized that when you do want to sit those two, even though you're not in a platoon situation, you may as well do it in optimal ways by benching them against the proverbial tough lefties, letting a masher from the other side take over for the day. (Though I wrote it before the question came in, this paragraph can serve as an answer to Todd, who asked in a comment to the last link roundup whether Beane wasn't truthful about Smith.)

Oh yeah, and Gomes is from Petaluma.

The Daily Dish's post on Gomes includes a mohawk. Oy.

Bullpen Banter updated their A's Top 15 to reflect the trades they've made since the last ranking. Jeff Reese and Al Skorupa disagree on Brad Peacock and Michael Choice, and of course down the list the names fly all over the place. Both put Parker-Cole as the top two, though.

Former Athletic Orlando Cabrera has decided to retire. He finishes his career having played for nine teams, cracking the 2000-hit barrier and stacking up about 20 WARP. He's not a Hall of Famer, and not even a Hall of Very Gooder, but he played almost 2000 games in his career, earned over $50 million in salary, and probably has a passel of great stories to tell his grandkids.

Here's Alex Remington at FanGraphs with a look at Cabrera's career.

Tyler Ladendorf, the infielder the A's acquired from the Twins for Cabrera, played most of last year at AA as a 23-year-old and hit .224/.306/.317, so, yeah, he's not going anywhere.

Tyson Ross's brother Joe is Marc Hulet's #9 Padres prospect at FanGraphs.

Batting Stance Guy has some ideas for new A's names after the move to San Jose. I favor "Nerds."

Me elsewhere: I wrote about Jack Cust's potential to form a historic duo with Carlos Lee at The Platoon Advantage. And do you read about TV? I blog a little about that, too. Here's me on the sorta new Syfy show "Lost Girl."

R.J. Anderson's latest Transaction Analysis at Baseball Prospectus includes the Seth Smith trade.

Here's the seventh episode of Tarp Talk the A's sabermetric podcast. I haven't listened yet (full disclosure), but I figured I'd link it and listen tomorrow.

I love this Dan Lependorf piece on small sample sizes and splits, as applied, of course, to Seth Smith. The gory details are omitted, so it's an entirely readable account of how we shouldn't jump to assume that Seth Smith should never even look at a lefty, much less face one. (Of course, his regressed splits, as Lependorf finds them, aren't pretty, so maybe he's still a platoon player, but it certainly narrows the gap.)

There's also the fact that Billy Beane, who's said Smith will be an every-day player, has scouts. Most of us aren't any good at recognizing in a player's swing mechanics signs of confirmation or denial of the idea that Smith can't hit lefties.

As usual, duh, this doesn't mean he will hit lefties, but it's worth giving him a chance.

Al Yellon's list of where every remaining free agent will end up has Conor Jackson coming to Oakland. I sigh at the total plausibility of this. Also Kosuke Fukudome, but I don't think both Jackson and Fukudome works unless one is on a minor-league deal (which his entirely possible). Josh Reddick's not going anywhere, is he?

For what it's worth, I agree with the commenter who thinks that Yellon has too many retirements on his list. I'd convert a bunch of those into "minor-league deal with a random team," though that doesn't really change things in terms of predicted impact.

Rob Neyer live-blogged Moneyball. I think my favorite part is this:

I hope you'll indulge me for a moment ... In the fall of 2002, I received an e-mail from John Henry, asking me for Bill James's phone number. Bill has always been a private sort of fellow, or at least that's how I think of him. So I e-mailed him, and asked if I could give Henry his phone number.

Bill's response: "Any time a billionaire asks for my number, give it to him."

Grant Brisbee has this at Baseball Nation asking why the A's are doing what they're doing. He notes that between the likely lineup and rotation Oakland has, they're not a weep-in-pity team. (And if we're honest with ourselves, prospects aren't being blocked, either. Sorry, Michael Taylor. I don't mean to hurt your feelings.) The draft position point, though, is a tough issue, and Brisbee points out a basic difference in apparent philosophy between the A's and Astros -- the A's apparently want to put a product on the field that will stand a fighting chance of winning a game here and there, while Houston wants the #1 overall pick. Money surely plays a big role in these decisions, and different values of present money vs. future and different ideas about how to sell the team you have to the fans you have and so on and so forth. If the A's want impact-quality 19-year-olds in their farm system, then they're building their major-league team the wrong way, but it's not clear that that's what they want.

Daniel Rathman at Baseball Prospectus doesn't know why the A's made this Seth Smith deal.

The arbitration-avoiding deals for Brandon McCarthy and Joey Devine are done, reports Alden Gonzalez. McCarthy will get four-and-a-quarter millions. Devine's figure is not in that article, but I think I saw on Twitter that he's under a million. On the 40/60/80 theory whereby a third-year arbitration salary tends to be about 80% of what you'd expect that quality of player to get on the free market, I think McCarthy's salary is reasonable given the injury risk and the possibility that last year's performance isn't what McCarthy will do going forward.

This isn't strictly an A's link, but it comes as a reaction to an A's trade (and other moves), so here's Marc Normandin's look at the Rockies' decisions about which pitchers to acquire, and why those decisions are questionable in light of what kind of pitchers you should look for to succeed at Coors.

I like Matt Kory's take on Moneyball at Over the Monster, which is typically witty and contains a photo of Montee Ball.

It's Chili Davis's birthday, and he's the A's hitting coach, so there's a profile by Alex Remington at Big League Stew. I did not realize that Davis was the very first Jamaica-born player to hit the majors.

Ex-A's pitching coach Rick Peterson is now the pitching development coordinator for the Brewers. It's a newly created job. I wonder if every team these days is doing biomechanical video analysis or if it's still a thing that Rick Peterson and maybe a handful of others are carting around with them from organization to organization.