* The Oakland "Baby A’s" are on a tear right now, and as a Vancouver Canadians fan, I can’t help but point out to all MLB fans I know in the area that half the team that just kicked the ass of both Toronto and Cleveland, played at Nat Bailey Stadium in the last handful of years while in-the-know pundits decried the team as being ‘low level’.
Isn’t it time for Vancouver’s sporting press to talk about the C’s alumni who are just killing it upstairs, and maybe add that this next year’s C’s team will likely be doing the same in 2010, so, like, go see them play while they’re here?

* The recent success of the Baby A’s has not only got people talking (best record in the AL? Seriously?), but they’ve also got the front office in Oaktown making a few changes to how the season will roll. When the team was expected to go maybe .500 on the year, Oakland picked up a Rule V pitcher in Fernando Hernandez. Today, Oakland decided Fernando was taking up a roster spot, and designated him for assignment… which for a Rule V guy, basically means you go back where you came from. Last season, the A’s carried Jay Marshall all season to keep a hold of him, but when you’re sitting up top of the standings, ‘the now’ starts to carry more weight.

* Andy Dunn’s tour of the Toronto sports media was a nice bit of moving and shaking, leading to spots on Mike Landsberg’s Off The Record on TSN and Bob McCowan’s TheFan radio show (which is shown late at night on Sportsnet). But I can’t help but notice that both the team, and Canadian baseball in general, seemed to get incredibly short shrift from Dunn’s interviewers wherever he landed.
On McCowan’s show, the questions seemed to be more about Dunn himself, and how on earth he could bring himself to work in short season ball after being involved in the Major Leagues (Dunn made it clear he’s more interested in who he works with than where he’s working, not that McCowan was in a mood to accept that), while OTR barely registered there was a non-hockey guy in the room.

* Speaking of the press, news came out this week that TEAM1040 is now the highest rating station in Vancouver radio. Which, considering the crappy state of Vancouver radio (please, enough with the god damned Dido, Mariah Carey, and Nickelback already) is kind of like being the hottest stud in the Chess Club. Trust me, I’ve lived in cities all across North America, and outside of Cincinnati, there’s just not a market in North America that features as much redundancy on the radio as this one.
What’s funny about this news is that, when the city’s second all-sports station, MOJO Radio, was killed a few years back, the excuse given was that Vancouver has "a limited appetite for the all-sports format." I guess the latest ratings show that it wasn’t Vancouver’s appetite that was the problem - it was the crap that MOJO was serving. It should be noted that, at the time of MOJO’s end, TEAM1040 had a 1.4 market share. It’s now a 12. Nice work, but if anyone in Vancouver did something like Seattle’s TheEnd, I’m convinced they’d get a 15 share inside a week.
Disclaimer: My own radio show, Fellini is King, airs Thursday nights from 8pm-10pm on CJSF 90.1FM. And our market share makes MOJO look like Oprah.

* In other media news, B.C.’s newspaper of record, The Vancouver Sun, has a new employee. And that’s a real coup because he’s one of the better minds in the business; a first rate writer, an incredible editor, and a dude with a real nose for what’s important. My next shift is Saturday.

* The Ottawa Lynx are no more (although there’s rumblings of indie league ball coming to Ottawa), with the last Canadian AAA team having been sold, renamed the Iron Pigs, and moved to the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. How are they doing? Well, they just won a game. Their first. Their record stands at 1-11.
Somewhere in Ottawa, 900 people are laughing.

* Sean Doolittle is popping in High-A ball. He’s hitting .326, knocked three dingers out of the park (after hitting a handful more in spring training), and his OPS is 1.037. The Doc’s season highlight to date was the April 10 game against Modesto in which he drilled two over the fence on the way to a 2-4 night with three runs scored, 5 RBIs, and a walk. Dude’s playing MVP 2008 out there.

* Victoria’s own Rich Harden is back on the DL… Duh. Shouldn’t his surname be ‘Soften’ instead of Harden? Or is it his vertebrae that are hardening? Take it from me, that cat is going to retire as the best pitcher in baseball… at age 28.

* Until he went into a 1-13 slump recently, 2004 Vancouver Canadians catcher, Kurt Suzuki, was hitting .414 for the Oakland A’s. Sure, small sample size and all, but even after his mini-slump hit, he’s still hitting .310.

* Speaking of 2004 C’s players, Vancouver shortstop Gregorio Petit [seen right] has been moving up the system hard and fast. As Scout.com points out, he’s a whisker away from Oakland’s major league roster, now that he’s entered the 40-man list.

* Not much more to report on the Benny Winslow story. Regular readers will recall that Vancouver’s favorite Rudy was given a job coaching hitters for the A’s minor league system - a job that he took from Vancouver to Kane County. But something went wrong this past month, and Benny stormed out of spring training without telling anyone what was up. He’s since been replaced by Haas Pratt.
Well, I did some digging around, and even people who were at spring training when it happened are in the dark about what’s going on. I’m told that Benny’s wife, former Vancouver Canadians press honcho, Leanne Cass, was having some sort of trouble getting a US visa (though I haven’t been able to confirm that, so take it with a grain), and, at spring training, Benny wasn’t happy about something so he left, and hasn’t been heard from since. I even called his home number and left a message, but nobody is getting back.
Bottom line, he’s no longer an Oakland A, so with that, I guess we’ll just let Benny be.

* Spoke to Scot Drucker via email recently, who was recently released by the A’s at spring training, just as he ended his injury rehab. Druck’s always the happiest guy on the block, so he’s got no hard feelings about the A’s at all, but he did most certainly regret that he was let go the day he was supposed to pitch against Joe Blanton. According to Druck, one day he was slated to go against Kentucky Joe, then he was scratched late without explanation, then the next day he wasn’t listed on any roster. And then he was gone.
But he’s not looking on that as a negative - in Drucker’s view, the A’s did more than their job in making sure he was healthy, rehabbed, and looked after through his season-ending injury, so that he’d be in good shape to look for another team when he came back. And when I spoke to him, he was suggesting that he might just go ahead and do that, because he’s convinced his arm is stronger now than when he hurt it.
And the Air Jordan collection lives on.

* With the exception of a doubleheader in which the UBC Thunderbirds were swept by Concordia-Portland, the ‘other tenant’ of Nat Bailey Stadium has been cranking out victories at an alarming rate of late. The Birds went 3-1 in a four-game series against Corban over the last Friday/Saturday, and they put the stomp to the College of Idaho before that, sweeping a Sunday double-header on March 30.
What does it all mean? It means that 13-7 UBC is running second only to perennial divisional (and national) powerhouse, Lewis-Clark State (18-0), in Region I divisional standings. And since whoever comes out of the year with thie best record (and isn’t named L-C State) will be hosting the division finals (L-C already host the nationals), that means UBC is two games up on what is generally seen as the only possible seasonal honor for the rest of the division.
Besides all that - if you’ve never been to a UBC game at Nat Bailey Stadium, the 25th-27th of this month is your chance to do it. You’ll see three games against Lewis-Clark State over three days, it’s inexpensive, and the aluminum bats make nice ‘ping’ noises when they hit home runs.