September 20: Birth of the Rickey Rally?

In Cleveland, Rickey gets four steals after reaching on walks: two in the
sixth and two in the seventh. Both times he scores on sac flies by Canseco.
I realize it’s easy to go on and on about Henderson’s ability to create runs by himself, but still, four steals within two innings does make an
impression. The [...]

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Mark McGwire’s 1989

At the end of the ‘89 season David Bush, an S.F. Chronicle writer, wrote up a summary of Mark McGwire’s season. What’s at least somewhat interesting about this story, aside from the picture of one slice of McGwire’s ballplaying days, is how it reflects the current attitude toward sabermetrics-type analysis by McGwire, La Russa, and [...]

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The A’s and Giants Clinch Their Divisions

It happened on September 27, 1989. The Chronicle reported:
The Bay Area’s baseball dream – a World Series between San Francisco and Oakland – moved a huge step closer to reality last night when both the Giants and the A’s clinched the championship of their divisions. The A’s won the American League’s Western Division title at [...]

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Rickey Henderson Coming Back to Oakland

Rickey said this about being traded from the Yankees to the A’s on June 22: “It was in my best interest to approve the deal. Oakland was the only place I would accept a trade. My wife wanted to be in Oakland, but I wanted to stay in New York.
”I felt it was time. There [...]

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Kevin Mitchell

Mitch wasn’t quite a one-year wonder, but at this point it seems like he was, and yes, it was a wonderful 1989 season. Read some of the Chronicle’s game story for a 7-6 win over the Braves in Fulton County Stadium on June 2:
Kevin Mitchell hit the longest ball of the evening, but the biggest [...]

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1-900-234-JOSE

I don’t know how many people remember 1-900-234-JOSE, but it’s obvious now that Jose Canseco was probably the first pioneer in the effort by pro sports players to forget the media and talk directly to fans with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. The difference is that Canseco actually made money from his communications: it cost [...]

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$150 for Jose Canseco’s Dirty Socks

It was a sign of the escalation of the baseball card and memorabilia bubble in early September 1989 when the San Francisco Chronicle sent Steve Rubinstein to the All-American Sports Memorabilia Show at the Moscone Center and he came back with this report:
A pair of dirty socks was selling for $150 in San Francisco last [...]

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Bill Dawley, Part II

Dawley joined Brian Snyder in helping fill out the Oakland bullpen in later June and early July of ‘89, when Eckersley was still out with an injury and Greg Cadaret and Eric Plunk were with the Yankees.  Certainly his best performance of the season was a 4 1/3rd inning outing on June 23 against Toronto: [...]

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Jose Canseco’s Wrist

The ‘89 A’s were the least powerful team of the A’s dynasty, and the injury to Canseco’s wrist that kept him out for the first half of the season was much of the reason why. On March 8, David Bush of the Chronicle described Jim Abbott’s spring debut and the last at-bat Canseco had before [...]

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June 28

You could credit it to the loss of Eckersley, the prolonged absence of Canseco, maybe even the knee injury Walt Weiss was still suffering from, maybe even something else, but June was a dismal month for the A’s: a 13-14 record. They bottomed out this day, in the Twin Cities, by managing no runs on [...]

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