The 2008 pre-season (or 2007 post-season, I guess) was a time of change for the Oakland A’s. Call it an organizational epiphany if you will, but using the DL 22 times in a single season seemed to make it abundantly clear to the A’s that, though they had achieved great things for next to no money for many seasons running, they had more recently been traveling a road that should perhaps be left less traveled; the road of ‘finding value in the injury prone’.

The theory was, at least as far as I can deduce, that if you grab guys who have a crappy health record, you get them cheaper, and they bring a potentially high upside… if they can stay on the field long enough to finish a game.

Ryne Tacker is a good example of this tactic in action. Tacker was a solid college pitcher, his low-90’s fastball having taken the Rice Owls to the 2007 NCAA College World Series, while registering a 9-1 regular season record. But a year earlier, Tacker’s elbow blew out and he missed the entire season.

Result? Nobody wanted him at draft time, even after a rock solid senior year.

Nobody except the A’s, that is. They took him in the 34th round.

Tacker may well prove to be as nifty a grab as Jeff Gray (32nd round ‘04, currently in AAA) or Dallas Braden (24th round ‘04, currently on the ML roster), or Mike Piazza (62nd round ‘88 for the Dodgers, soon to be Hall of Famer). Or he might end up a complete bust. But he came cheap, and thus he fit the ‘old’ A’s needs.

The 2007 Oakland Athletics major league season changed all that. With kids called up from AA to fill in at the MLB level all season long, clearly it was time for the A’s to reinvent the wheel, and that they have, with a rash of changes to the way things are done at the front office level that has ramifications all the way down to short-season ball.

How will those changes affect the Vancouver Canadians? Here’s my take.

1) More foreign players: We’re kind of used to seeing a large Dominican and Venezuelan contingent at Nat Bailey Stadium, especially before the bonus babies sign their deals, but the origins of the early season NDFA contingent is about to get more varied. The A’s have stated they’ll be looking more to Asia and Australia, which is a good thing, because I’m kind of sick of seeing all the good young Aussie, Japanese, Dutch and Korean prospects turning out for the Eugene Emeralds and Everett Aquasox.

2) Less upward movement: For the last few seasons, and especially so last year, the C’s could guarantee that many of their best players would be booted upstairs after three weeks, and all of them would be gone by season’s end. The reason? Injuries at the top.

As of now, however, the A’s have opted to load up on new young players with far less frailty than the targets of old, and with some 30+ more players in the system than there were at the end of ‘07, any injury issues will be far easier to cover without domino promotions across the organization.

3) Better draftees: The A’s have been notorious for picking draftees who they can get cheap (see Powell, Landon) because they’re college seniors, have poor injury records, are ‘above average’ in all areas rather than ‘excellent’ in some (see Pennington, Cliff), or have off-field issues that keep other teams from taking a chance (see Brown, Corey). That’s said to be changing from this year, with the A’s not exactly pledging to abandon slot money bonus offers, while making it clear that they’re going to be looking for guys they want, rather than guys they can afford who might - just might - step up and dominate… but likely won’t.

As a result, we’re likely to see fewer situations like the Vancouver catching mire from last season, where Dusty Napoleon, Julio Rivera, and Dante Love shared responsibilities behind the plate, beating each other up for plate time, with none of the three getting enough of a chance to actually develop. Rather, we’ll likely see one genuine blue-chipper and one ‘hopeful’ backup.

4) Better Latin players: The A’s have been running their farms in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela for some time now, but they readily admit that they were looking for value, rather than excellence. That meant smaller offers than other ML teams were making for stars-to-be, which leads to lost stars-to-be, and more AAAA-max minor leaguers. Will this mean more Javier Herrera’s and Gregorio Petit’s, and less Frank Martinez’s and Carlos Arrieche’s? Time will tell.

5) More aggressive base-running: Forget station-to-station; Athletics manager Bob Geren has made it clear he wants players going from first to third whenever possible, and even sometimes when not, and though the last several seasons at the short-season level has seen a distinct organizational movement towards more genuine base-stealers (Michael ‘Runway’ Richard and Jermaine ‘J-Train’ Mitchell being great examples of that shift), this could be the year that the A’s go all out for Rickey Henderson-like base-runners in the draft.

6) Less picks after the 32nd round: The system is packed. Guys with high potential, like Dangerous Bradley Davis, are being cut adrift left and right. That means the kids the A’s pick in this coming draft will be guys they think have a genuine chance of moving up fast and competing hard. Expect to see more high school phenoms that they can park in Arizona for a season, more college players with multiple tools, and more pitchers with nasty stuff. It used to be that the A’s could find a place for the guys with a snowball’s chance in Hell to try their luck for a few seasons… those days are gone. If there are late picks to be made, they’ll be on unlikely signings (young kids who’ve indicated they want to stay in college) or draft-and-follows.

7) Smarter players: I’m not talking GPA freaks, I’m talking guys that know their ball. The A’s have stated that they’re looking to new programs that work on eye-strengthening, mental training, and game awareness. In previous seasons, a kid like Matt Sulentic or Justin Sellers, who have astonishing talent but a teenager’s mind, would be brought aboard and ‘worked on’ for a few years. That would mean position shifting, extended time in rookie ball, and the occasional behavior-alteration (read: discipline) session.

The A’s clearly won’t abandon ultra-talented kids who need developmental time (that would be the opposite extreme from former thinking), but they’ll definitely be looking to take more guys who they can hone (like Nick Blasi or Jermaine Mitchell), rather than guys who need ‘catch up’ time.

Of course, I could be wrong on all this, but putting together all the info that the A’s farm honchos have been putting out there this off-season, it would seem to me that this coming Vancouver Canadians season could be unlike those that came before.

Looking forward to it.