Playoff expansion and Eric Chavez: A's links

By Jason Wojciechowski on March 2, 2012 at 7:35 PM

It has been a long time since A's links have been done. Or since any content at all has been generated. Blame spring training. Nothing is happening. I don't particularly care to respond to Miguel Tejada's desperate pleas to join the A's.

Oh, and I also refuse to post anything about things that happen in spring "games" unless they're injuries. If Ryan Cook breaks some bats? Don't care. If Josh Donaldson hits a long homer and makes an error? Don't care. To the extent that what happens in games is mentioned by decision-makers as relevant to those decisions, then I guess I'll have to. But the day-to-day is so beneath your attention, dear readers, that I refuse to pass it on.

By rights, I should not be linking to this Jane Lee story about how the A's will be paying attention to spring performance this year, but I guess I should.

Joseph Lopez misses Eric Chavez like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us, he's young enough to have emulated Chavez's batting stance in Little League. I went to college the same year Chavez played his first more-or-less-full season.

Jemile Weeks learned from Barry Larkin this off-season. They are semi-neighbors in Florida. I assume Jon Heyman also lives near both of them.

Yoenis Cespedes could/should be in camp by the end of the weekend. Given how long it's taken for him to get his visa, though, Jane Lee floats the notion that he might end up starting the year at AAA after all.

Just a reminder that Daric Barton isn't going to start throwing for another couple of weeks. In the new news realm, though, Barton got a cortisone shot in his shoulder. I don't know if this is meaningful.

Here's the A's spring training roster Sporcle, which I saw first at Athletics Nation.

FanGraphs added an implementation of Bojan Koprivica's catcher ball-blocking methodology to its base of stats. David Wishinsky puts them to use. Kurt Suzuki ranks well at blocking balls, as I think most fans' eyes would agree (he appears to me to be one of the more athletic catchers in the league, certainly, and his technique, to my untrained eye, seems sound), but not well enough to make a real impact on his overall value in terms of runs.