Night Owl Cards

This fine night card is a definite candidate for the night card binder, for a lot of reasons. One of them is that Sean Doolittle is that very rare case in an Oakland A's uniform: He's managed to stay with the team for five years. I don't know how he's escaped the spinning revolving trade door outside the A's front office. I might be wrong, but I think he and Eric Sogard have lasted the longest from the current team, and Sogard has been disabled the whole year. (Coco Crisp was there for six years before he was traded to the Indians last month). Why here Doolittle is in the 2013 set after his first season with Oakland. I thought I'd do a little experiment and see where the rest of the A's from this set are. Brett Anderson: With the Dodgers (disabled) Other teams since the A's: Rockies Grant Balfour: Retired Other teams since the A's: Rays Bartolo Colon: Mets Other teams since the A's: none Ryan Cook: Mariner...

You've got to hand it to the Oakland A's. They're a small-market team, easy to ignore, and currently in last place. Yet they have produced three -- maybe four -- of the most memorable teams of the last 50 years. There were the dynastic Swingin' A's, winners of three straight World Series in the '70s. There were the Bash Brothers of the late '80s, appearing in three more World Series. And there were the Moneyball A's of the early 2000s, who changed how everyone views baseball. Throw in the BillyBall days of the early '80s and that's quite a bit of history packed into one green-and-gold team. Also, the A's have managed to pull off something that no other major league team has been able to do as successfully or for as long a period of time. I'm referring to their gloriously brief nickname. You can cite the Seattle Mariners being called the "M's" here and there, and particularly the Orioles being called the "O'...