It is with great anticipation that I await coverage of last night's A's/Angels on Fire Joe Morgan. Fans of FJM surely know where Ken Tremendous and Junior stand on the oft-uddered phrase "clogging the bases." And so I fully expect the most exciting moment of last night's game, Frank Thomas's first inning triple, to be the topic of a brief post.

I didn't catch much of Oakland's 14-2 shellacking of the Anaheim Angels (how this blog shall hereafter refer to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) last night. I tuned in during the 8th while driving to hear a flashback highlight: April 28, 2002. Tim Hudson shut out the White Sox on the Oakland mound while Eric Chavez went deep for the 8th time. The A's have 41 home runs as a team. They're 15-10.

Flash forward to 2008:

Hudson is long gone, Chavez too, in his own way, the A's on their way to 16-10.

Team home runs: 15. Twelfth in the American League.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the best record in the American League: your AL-leading offense and defense, your Oakland Athletics of Fremont.

All kidding aside, and if I ever get around to asking it, an interesting question emerges from this.

2002: the peak of the Moneyball era (and by era I refer to the period of MLB time in which sabermetric analysis used to evaluate player talent was almost exclusively limited to Billy Beane's front office), the A's are living and dying by the 3-run homer, slugging 205 home runs in total, on their way to 102 wins.

2007: same front office, same record, but the power is gone. Yes, it's early, but are we seeing the spring buds of a new small market efficiency model, in a new, post-steroid (don't cringe -- it's true), game? Many, if not most, Major League front offices employ executives and analysts undaunted by those statistics used on BaseballProspectus. "Moneyball" has been read and much-discussed. Evaluation of talent, and the salaries this talent commands, have changed, and a better product (and better competition) has emerged. These are all positive things. What has not changed is the market in which the Oakland A's play. Oakland's division opponents (Texas, Seattle, Anaheim) average $96 million payrolls. Oakland it just half that: $48 million.

The petri dish from which Michael Brown's 2003 "Moneyball" grew seems to have reemerged in a slightly different laboratory. New efficiency loopholes are still to be explored. It's the only way we can compete.

Lots of questions from here, obviously. But that's enough for tonight. A's win, 14-2. Celebrate!

Sidebar: in the 3rd inning of tonight's broadcast, Ray Fosse and Glen Kuiper (neither of which I'm a fan -- more on that later), are joined by Goose Gossage in the booth. Goose seems to be wearing an enormous orange pullover emblazened with "AutoTrader.com." Sporting an all-white handlebar mustache, obviously. He's talking about having not visited for sometime, but it's not clear exactly to where, or what, he's referring. I kid. Rambling about pitchcounts, now, and how they're "ridiculous." Okay, so it turns out the AutoTrader shirt is a charity thing -- raising money for baseball programs in inner city America. I retract. Carry on, Goose.