nick's notes....

it's way late at the moment, and it's a week day - and i'm just now getting home from the sweat shop. so when we play baseball, there shouldn't be any complaining about the jerseys. b/c there was some serious sweat that went into the making of the jerseys. and since i just read REEGMAN's blog, and i saw he had a question regarding the elephant emblem for the A's....so i feel it my responsibilty to inform as quickly as possible. it dates back over a hundred years, to the early times of the american league's exhistence. since the Athletics are one of the original teams of the american league (which came into existence in the year 1900), they were representing the american league in the world series vs the giants (members of the national league) back in 1902. well, the nl was a much older league than the al with much better players and thought much higher of themselves (similar to the nfl compared to the afl when the afl first came into being - until the jets beat the colts in the superbowl). and so before the world series john mcgraw (manager of the giants) dismissed the A's with contempt, calling them "The White Elephants" (white elephant refering to department stores which would hold white elephant sales at the time - which would be sales when they are just getting rid of their junk which they no longer have room for, his metaphor for which the american league was in his eyes) - this led to Connie Mack (manager of the A's) to come up with the idea of presenting gifts of small white elephants for the giants when the A's were introduced for game 1 of the world series vs mcgraw's giants. and then the elephant was adopted as the team insignia and they put the elephant patch on their uniforms. the A's then went on to defeat the giants - just as they always do (note: the season series this year in which the A's won 4 of 6, or more importantly the last time the giants were in the world series before being given the boot in a four game sweep - note how the A's have won 4 world series titles since moving to Oakland in '68 while the giants have zero in a much longer history (almost twice as long) in san francisco). but the A's didn't always use the elephant as their insignia....when the team moved to Oakland under the ownership of Charlie Finley in '68 they used the donkey as their insignia b/c team owner Finley had a pet donkey named Charlie O, and so he rode into the town of Oakland on his donkey and changed the team insignia to the donkey. along with the donkey insignia the A's did other things differently such as the innovation of the white baseball shoes and colorful jerseys, they even used gold colored bases before the rules committee banned this inovation. so i hope that this informs u enough. if not i'd be glad to further clarify and elucidate more for u.