Ty Van Burkleo

First of all even though I can't stand the thought of Bob Geren being the A's manager, Ty Van Burkleo is even worse then Geren. I have yet to see any A's hitter make an adjustment at the plate. An example of this is Carlos Gonzalez he gets ahead in the count 2-0 and he sits on fastball but the pitcher throughs a a slider low and inside he nearly swings at it everytime and then the pitcher goes back to the same pitch and he swings at it again. No adjustment made by Gonzalez and it usually results into an out. They refuse to help Jack Cust with his swing they would rather see him swing and a miss then help him make more contact with the ball resulting in less strike outs, more balls put into play, more rbi opporutinities for Cust as well as the other hitters behind him, etc.....

I believe in one of the reasons why Carlos Gonzalez, Ryan Sweeney, Gregorio Petit when up, Wes Bankston, and Emil Brown in the first part of the season, Mike Sweeney, and Frank Thomas have hit well was because they didn't have Ty Van Burkleo in their heads and instructing them how to hit. Honestly, I do not know how he Van Burkleo still has a job. He didn't hit that well in the minors a life time .279 batting average and even worse a crappy .132 batting average with the California Angels and Colorado Rockies. Van Burkleo only played two years in the majors because he was awful. He's an awful hitting coach and he should be fired. The only reason why the players that I mentioned before are hitting well is because they had better instruction in the minors or on other major league teams. It's just disgusting watching the A's continue to struggle at the plate and strike out and rarely make contact with a pitch.

I'm also tired of wasted opportunities with runners on base. Especially when there are no outs and we could put up a few runs on the board. Particularly in yesterday's game we had Rajai Davis steal 2nd and scored on a single by Ryan Sweeney. Ryan Sweeney then steals second. Kurt Suzuki should have been bunting to get Sweeney over to third, but no they didn't do that they let him swing away and he ended up striking out in fact Mariano Rivera who was pitching at the time went on to strike out the two other batters in the inning. If the A's had tried to sacrafice and were succesfull with it it would have changed the complexion of that inning. The A's management needs to realize that they need to be a little more aggressive on the bases because we haven't been able to hit or score any runs. We have been at the top of the ERA in the AL pretty much for most of the season we should be rewarding our pitchers with runs.

I could care less about Beane and the future in 2011. Guess what? It's the 2008 season we are only 5 games back from a playoff berth there is no reason to give up the season in the middle of July. We need a hitting coach who actually knows that when you have applied for this job that you're actually supposed to help them not hinder them. For example with Andy Pettite pitching and trying to hit the outside corner most of the time the A's hitter should have been looking to the the ball the other way. The only player to do that was Mark Ellis and it got us 1st and third with 2 outs, but of course we couldn't capitalize on it.