Oakland Athletics

The A's reinstated Hiro Nakajima from the 15-day disabled list Thursday and optioned the rookie shortstop to Triple-A Sacramento.

Boasting a low payroll and enjoying continued success, the A's certainly have reason to be the object of other teams' envy. This season, you can add the pitching staff to the list. More specifically, it's Oakland's sensational bullpen that warrants jealousy.

The Oakland Athletics activated shortstop Hiroyuki Nakajima from the 15-day disabled list Thursday and optioned him to Triple-A Sacramento. Read more Hiroyuki Nakajima news

In business, inventory management is crucial. If there are too many widgets on the shelves, you are hosed. All your money is trapped in unsold widgets instead of things like advertising or new widget development. If there are too few widgets on the shelf, you're still hosed. Your customers will buy their widgets from your competition and many buyers won't come back. The A's have two types of inventory to manage, the players on the field and the seats that surround the field. Since there are plenty of people on this website better-suited to assess the players' performance, I won't delve into the subject of players as inventory, as impersonal as that sounds. (I will make this observation, though: In addition to being a great method for evaluating field performance, sabermetrics is a great way to manage player inventory.) What I worry about is all those empty seats. From the A's sales perspective (and now, apparently, the Raiders') the Coliseum simply has too many seats, too much inventory. Prior to the Great Tarp Experiment, the capacity of the Coliseum, with Mt. Davis, was in the 50,000-seat range, not counting luxury boxes and club seats. That capacity was required by the NFL. Multiply 50,000 times 81 home games and you end up with an inventory of more than 4 million seats. Yikes! That's one helluva lot of tickets to sell. Even the almighty Giants, who were bested by only Philadelphia and the Yankees in 2012 attendance, couldn't sell four million tickets. The A's have a big inventory problem. The number of available seats far exceeds the A's ability to sell those seats. Having an empty seat instead of money in the bank from the sale of that seat is bad enough. But it's actually much worse. The value of a seat, as opposed to a widget, decays rapidly. Once a game begins, the worth of the unsold seats is zero. You can't sell them at a discount in Eastern Europe, either. Having too many available seats crushes your future cash flow because you won't be able to raise ticket prices. Beyond that, excess capacity makes it almost impossible to draw new audiences in a competitive entertainment market. The Social Psychology In promoting the live gate, you must sell the primary attraction, of course. Without that, you might as well be selling widgets. But you must also sell the communal experience of live attendance. Just look at the adorable, Bernie-leaning, bacon-eating, Balfour-loving nutjobs in the right field bleachers. Yeah, they come for the A's, but they also come for each other. The fact that they are there, concentrated above right field, adds value to their experience. They feed off each other's energy and wackiness. They are connected. In live attendance, familiarity breeds, not contempt, but repeat ticket sales. The A's would like nothing better than to replicate the right-field bleacher experience throughout the stadium. (Actually, in the playoffs last season, they did. And wasn't that nice!) But, most days, the Coliseum is just too damn big. So the A's decided, if they couldn't sell all those seats, they had to make them disappear! Thus, the Great Tarp Experiment. Let's face it, the tarps could have been worse. Instead of the A's name and logo on a green background, the tarps might have featured ad signage for Bob's Muffler Boutique and Gabinetti's Italian Dim Sum Bistro. But the A's didn't go to the tarps for the miniscule, direct ad revenue they might have gleaned. (I believe the idea was to make the upper deck fade away rather than draw attention to it.) I have heard some suggest the A's did it to save money on ushers and security for the upper deck. Although saving money is rarely a bad idea, the A's were not being cheap. Installing those tarps probably cost a lot more than a couple of ushers. Beyond a long-term capacity reduction, I'm convinced the A's Great Tarp Experiment was prompted by something more benign: A genuine desire to enhance the value of the live experience for the fans. And the A's d

A's fans Shelby Cardoza ans Priscilla Moreno are the latest contestants attempting to win cash in the latest edition of "Bucks on the Pond."

Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports Jarrod Parker and the Oakland Athletics didn’t come out with a victory on Wednesday afternoon against the Texas Rangers, but the pitcher did have a second consecutive solid outing. The A’s dropped the contest 3-1, taking two of three at the Ballpark in Arlington. Parker gave up three runs in the first inning (on home runs from Adrian Beltre and David Murphy), but settled down after that and left after seven innings with no further damage. Parker’s record is now 2-6, which isn’t ideal. However, he has been strong enough to go at least seven innings in his last two starts, after being unable to do that in any of the eight starts before that stretch. Heading into 2013, the A’s were relying on Parker to be the ace of the staff (since he’s generally healthier than the oft-injured Brett Anderson), but a handful of ineffective starts in April seemed to cast a shadow of doubt over those expectations. The most puzzling aspect of his struggles was the fact that his velocity wasn’t suffering — he still hit the low to mid-90s with his fastball. The problem seemed to have to do with his location, as he left many pitches up, which has perhaps resulted in the nine home runs he’s allowed thus far over nine starts. Despite taking the loss on Wednesday, Parker definitely looked like he did last season, when his stellar pitching propelled the A’s into the playoffs and earned him two ALDS starts opposite the Detroit Tigers and Justin Verlander. Hopefully, Parker builds upon these recent quality starts and string a few more of them consecutively — the A’s pitching staff could use the boost. Adrian Garro is an Oakland Athletics writer for RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter and/or add him to your network on Google.

In for John Hickey, who I envision right now behind the wheel of a giant moving van somewhere around Grants Pass, Ore. … OK, flush this one. Best part of Wednesday’s 3-1 A’s loss? It only took 2 hours, 22 minutes, the shortest game of the year at Rangers Ballpark. It leaves me the rest [...]

If there were a Ten Commandments of Baseball, then one of them would be: Thou shalt always drive in the runner from 3rd with fewer than two outs. It's one of the fundamental things that good teams do and bad teams struggle with. You don't always need to mash homers to score runs; sometimes, it only takes a slow grounder to short or a routine fly ball to the outfield in a given situation. Oakland stranded a combined 26 baserunners in the first two games of this series in Texas, but they managed to win both contests. That magic did not continue this afternoon, as they wasted chance after chance to cash in on gift-wrapped scoring opportunities. This was a game ripe for the taking, and Oakland left it on the table. After the 1st inning, it didn't appear that this one would come down to a couple of missed opportunities. Jarrod Parker, who has settled down in May after a rough start to the season, was in full April form for the first four batters of the afternoon. Elvis Andrus singled sharply through the hole on the left side, David Murphy homered to the 2nd deck in right, Lance Berkman flew out, and Adrian Beltre hit a 600-foot homer to dead center. Panic! Send Parker to Sacramento! No, release him! He's terrible! Bring up Sonny Gray! Convert Cespedes to a starting pitcher! Luckily, baseball games last longer than one inning. After serving up bombs to Murphy and Beltre on a pair of plump, juicy, elevated fastballs, Parker settled down and faced two batters over the minimum through the 7th inning. After giving up hits to three of the first four batters, he allowed only three hits and a walk the rest of the way and benefited from a couple of double plays. His final line: 7 innings, 3 runs, 6 hits, 1 walk, 5 strikeouts. That is a quality start, and it's a win more often than not. Parker pitched a good game. Unfortunately, that particular quality start is only a win if the hitters contribute. The Rangers, who are missing Matt Harrison, Colby Lewis, and Alexi Ogando from their rotation, turned to a guy named R Wolf for a spot start. No, it wasn't Randy Wolf, but rather a relief pitcher named Ross Wolf who last appeared in the Majors in 2010 as a member of the Athletics. A logical person would assume that facing an unknown reliever for 5 innings would result in a smorgasbord of offense, but A's fans know better. No one gets baffled by unknown pitchers like the Oakland Athletics. Someone should really invent a device that can record a pitcher so that hitters can familiarize themselves with him before facing him for the first time. We can call it "videotape." Patent pending. Cy Wolf wasted no time in embarrassing Oakland's lineup. He was perfect the first time through the order, retiring nine straight batters in the first three innings. Granted, Coco Crisp and Josh Donaldson each smashed the ball, but BABIP The Vengeful Baseball Deity placed both hits directly in Ranger gloves. Elvis Andrus also flashed some leather (which would be one of the themes of the day), ranging ridiculously far to his right to retire Cespedes on a ball that most shortstops couldn't have reached with a lacrosse stick. The second time through the order went much better for the A's. Coco Crisp led off the 4th with a single, and Cespedes hit an absolute laser into the left field corner for a double. With runners on 2nd and 3rd, Brandon Moss executed the only piece of successful situational hitting that the A's would see all night, lofting a lazy fly ball to center for a sacrifice fly. The score was 3-1 Rangers, and neither team would score again for the rest of the day. The next three innings were an exercise in absolute torture for A's fans. This game actually violated the 8th Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and I have filed a grievance with both the league and the Supreme Court. Wolf walked Seth Smith to lead off the 5th, and Derek Norris followed with a double down the right-field line. Oakland had runners on 2nd and 3rd with nobod

Righty Jarrod Parker surrendered two homers in the first inning, and that was the difference in the A's 3-1 loss to the Rangers at the Ballpark at Arlington on Wednesday afternoon that snapped Oakland's five-game winning streak.

Lefty Erik Bedard will try to end the Astros' six-game losing streak against the A's when Houston plays host to Tommy Milone and Oakland for the start of a three-game set on Friday night at Minute Maid Park.