It's been seven years since the A's were a truly bad team, so I'm not sure how to deal with this, with looking for silver linings every day instead of basking in golden sunshine. Things seem backwards, upside-down, as if the dry season had flipped to winter and the rainy season was now summer.

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I wasn't really paying attention to the A's last couple of games, but sources tell me that the A's lost two consecutive games to some team called the Washington Generals, who, until they faced the A's, had lost 1,270 games in a row. Washington manager Red Klotz can now retire a happy man.

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The Florida Marlins must feel ripped off that they're the only NL East team that won't get to play the A's. I'm sure they, too, would like the A's help in launching a long winning streak of their own.

ESPN.com had a nice new story about Dontrelle Willis and his agent, an excerpt from a Jerry Crasnick book called "License to Deal". This sentence, though, threw me:

They broke down enough societal and generational barriers to bridge the gap from affluent Burlingame to hardscrabble west Alameda.

Hardscrabble?

hardscrabble adj. Of a bare living gained by great labor; "the sharecropper's hardscrabble life"; a marginal existence.

Makes us West Alamedans sound like dust bowl farmers suffering through a drought. And all this time, I thought I was living in a nice, middle-class neighborhood.

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The A's concluded their draft today. If they're lucky, one of those late round picks will follow in the footsteps of Dallas Braden, a 24th-round pick, who threw eight shutout innings Tuesday night for AA Midland. When your team is suffering through a bad year, you survive on any scrap of good news you can find.

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A rainstorm passed over Alameda tonight. The water pattered my roof, gurgled down the gutters, and melted away into the earth. I couldn't sleep.