Jane Lee has Bob Melvin talking about the A's lineup for the rest of the year:

Including Monday's contest against the Angels, 13 of Oakland's 16 final games are against clubs fighting for playoff spots, and Melvin feels somewhat obligated to write out a credible lineup for such contests, rather than just continually playing his September callups.

This is crap. I know I'm not an MLB manager. I'm not in a front office. I've never been closer to the field than about fifteen rows away. But if there's some unwritten rule that you have to "try" against teams that are still in the race for the sake of those teams' feelings, then that page of the unwritten rule book needs to be invisibly torn out and tossed into a magically nonexistent fire.

There's just no goddamn sense to it. Why would the Rangers care who the A's have starting? Why would the Angels care? Both teams get to beat up on the A's scrubs because guess what? The entire A's roster are scrubs. So the Rangers get David DeJesus and the Angels get Michael Taylor. Neither one of them is very good!

For a bunch of athletes that like to spout cliches like, "We just have to play our own game" and "We can't worry about what the other team is doing," there sure is a lot of worrying about what the other team is doing. The Angels can mind their business. The Rangers can mind their business. And Bob Melvin can nut the fuck up and do what's best for the franchise instead of worrying that he's going to make Mike Scioscia pitch a hissy fit.