Adam Rosales! It's Adam Rosales!

Image by Keith Allison

Rosales might want to pretend that 2011 never happened. After a breakout 2010 (in a sense) that saw him hit well above the league average (.280 TAv) and provide some value that I don't know if we've quantified very well yet in playing all over the field (all four infield positions plus 27 2/3 innings in left field), Rosales lost about 1/3 of 2012 following surgery for a stress fracture in his ankle and spent 40 games in Sacramento. He thus wound up with just 68 plate appearances on the major-league squad, and he ... well. His batting average starts with a zero. His slugging, if you round it up, starts with a two, but you have to round it up a little more heavily than we're used to doing.

He didn't do anything in his few plate appearances is what I'm telling you. He did do a weird thing, which is have 1/3 of his hits go for homers. The problem is that he only had six hits, so this isn't exactly latter-day Mark McGwire we're talking about. Maybe if he'd quit doing this so much:

That was his first big-league homer, and, as you know if you're an A's fan or a baseball fan or basically a human being, he's done the very same thing for every homer thereafter. Watching him motor around the bases like that, it seems like he has good speed, but he's stolen all of four bases in his career (which now totals basically a full season of action, 643 PAs), so he's not really applying that speed in-game. Or, well, he's doing it in-game, but he's not doing it while the ball is in play.

Rosales is still on the squad, having apparently signed an arbitration-avoiding contract for $600k in December. I'm not sure what his option situation is. He seems pretty clearly to have used options in 2009 and 2011, when he was on the 40-man roster and spent 20+ days in the minor leagues on optional assignment. Here's the part I don't know: Rosales had his contract purchased by the Reds in August of 2008. He came to the majors upon said purchase and spent the rest of the year there. He thus did not spend 20 days in the minors after the contract was purchased, but he did spend 20 days there if you count the entirety of 2008. My guess, and it's really no more than that because this is a blog and it's 9:30 and what do you want me to do, call the A's?, is that he has one option remaining because he did not use one in 2008 -- prior to having his contract purchased, he was in the minors, but not on optional assignment, and from August, 2008 until the end of that season, he was not optioned back out to AAA. Thus, only 2009 and 2011 featured burned options, and the A's don't have to worry about losing Rosales if they decide they want to run with Eric Sogard as their utility man at any point this year.

I've hardly talked about 2011 in this piece, so how about a factoid! Adam Rosales hit into four double plays in 68 trips to the plate. Jemile Weeks hit into three double plays in 437 trips. FACTOID.