Idiots Write About Sports

If you are ever looking to achieve subterranean levels of popularity, follow this simple three-point plan:

1) Sign a contract for a lot of money.
2) Pitch like crap to start the season.
3) Once you start to pitch reasonably better, get stopped by police after allegedly driving at speeds in excess of 100mph smelling of liquor.

Esteban Loaiza, please collect your prize:

Loaiza, 34, was stopped Wednesday morning by the California Highway Patrol after he was observed at 2:40 a.m. driving his Ferrari in excess of 100 mph on Interstate 580 near San Leandro.

He was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after officers detected what the CHP statement called “a distinct odor of alcohol … on the driver’s breath.”

Loaiza, who failed several sobriety tests, was transported to North County Jail in Oakland, where he spent the night.

No matter how much happy talk his teammates want to dish out, this is not the sort of thing one easily forgets. Get caught in a roomful of hookers while free-basing the pineal glands of endangered lizards? Victimless crime. Operating a motor vehicle at a high-rate of speed while plasterd? Not so easy to overlook the potential for injury — or worse — there. Or to put it in more starkly personal terms: bad enough I have to watch you pitch. Now I gotta worry about you t-boning me on the Nimitz, too?

Indeed, the normally agreeable Ken Arneson has banished Loaiza to “the deepest levels of my doghouse” and offers this chilling command:

He’s going to have to not only play extremely well, but show show a healthy dose of genuine contrition and remorse, to have any chance of getting off my list of least-favorite Oakland Athletics players of all time.

Which, of course, raises the question that I posed to Ken in the comment section of his blog: just who exactly is his least favorite Oakland Athletic player of all time? (Answer: Ruben Sierra, a choice that I heartily endorse.) And that, in turn raises another question: who is my least favorite Oakland Athletic player of all time?

I have been fortunate that, in my time as an A’s fan, we haven’t had to put up with too many creeps and lowlifes on the team. Perusing Ken’s list, most are just bad players as opposed to bad citizens who you would feel kind of slimy about rooting for.

I’m a fan of the Detroit Red Wings, for example, and back in the ’90s, when the team was adding All-Stars at a prodigious clip, I often wondered how I would have reacted if the team announced that it had traded for Claude Lemieux, a grade-A horse’s ass responsible for so many blood-stained memories. Would I have renounced my allegiance and burned my jersey in protest? Probably not. But I not have been pleased.

Same thing with the A’s — what if they were to sign a creep like Frank Francisco? Or what if Jason Giambi ends up winding down his career here as part of the Great Repentance Tour of Aught-Nine? Expect to hear stony silence from my section of the bleachers if that goes down.

But I digress. We’re here to talk about my least favorite Athletic of all time. Like Ken, I’ll exclude people who earned my enmity after leaving Oakland. (Hey, Giambi — add another item to the list of Things You’ll Never Win.) I also can’t include people who just weren’t good players, a surprising stance to take since I’m the guy who acted like Jim Mecir’s last name had been legally changed to “Oh Shit!” since that’s what I said every time he came into a ballgame from 2003 onward. Few players have irritated me more than Eric Byrnes, but that was because he was a rotten player and not because he was prone to littering or unlikely to pay his fair share of taxes. (It also didn’t help that he was overly praised by people who think that hustling to catch a ball is more important than actually catching it.) I just can’t get too worked up over players unless they’re unabashed jerks.

And on that note, say hello to my most despised Athletic of all time — Arthur Lee Rhodes Jr.! Let his visage haunt you as it haunts me!

Arthur Rhodes helpfully holds up the baseball, just before serving it up to a batter who will mash it into orbit.

Brrrrrrrrrrrr. Now, let’s go down the list of grievances, shall we?

1) He pitched so poorly, the A’s had to trade for Octavio Dotel — and it was considered an improvement.

2) Despite sucking in every way imaginable, he continued to cash his paychecks.

3) When it was suggested that maybe blowing game after game was not really conducive to the team’s success, he threw himself a hissy-fit.

4) In order to get him (and Fragile Mark Redman) out of town as quickly as possible, the A’s had to take on Jason Kendall and his soul-killing contract.

On the plus side of the ledger, Arthur Rhodes is now someone else’s problem. And he was wise enough never to get arrested on a DUI charge during his time in the East Bay. So he has that going over Esteban.

While I realize there was no possible way you would be talking about Esteban Yan, I confess he was the first name to come to mind. Both are equally travelled, having played for seven teams each, but surely, the hate must be all the more for Loaiza's starting.

Chad Bradford... the bad back, the inconsistent sinker, the vacuous, Joe-Barry-Carroll-esque stare, the terrible baseball name Chad, the homeruns into the next county... but mostly because of that underhanded delivery. If you're going to throw like that, you better be the best reliever on the planet. And he wasn't even close.

Rob: I have only the fondest of memories of Esteban Yan pitching for the Angels and hope for his speedy return to a major league roster, particularly if it's a divisional rival of the A's.

Jimbo's Friend: See, I never had much of a problem with Brad Chadford. Yeah, he was pretty crummy at the end of his run with the team, but sic semper middle reliever, you know? What's more, at least he was a pleasant enough human being, unlike Arthur Rhodes who was terrible from beginning to end and just an ass to boot.

Post a comment