A’s Show Why They Aren’t Ready to Panic

For the young Oakland Athletics, beginning defense of their American League West title, some of the swagger has turned to stagger. The A’s arrived in Anaheim Monday night having lost their last seven games on a 1-8 home stand. Unable to put their pitching and hitting together, they were more unbalanced than the new schedule and already seven games behind the division-leading Seattle Mariners with a 2-10 record.

“Maybe a change of scenery will be what the doctor ordered,” Manager Art Howe said before the opener of a three-game series with the Angels and 13-game trip. “We can’t play any worse than we did on the home stand.”

The change of scenery was just the prescription.

An assortment of bloop hits befuddled the Angel defense in a two-run second inning and the A’s went on to a 6-3 victory.

In mid-April, the A’s need only remember last August, when they also trailed the Mariners by seven games before rallying to win the West.

Now, however, they are expected to win, or as Johnny Damon, the new leadoff man, was saying at his locker, “We need to snap out of this very soon or this clubhouse will look very different.”

Damon didn’t mean the A’s would be taking a hammer to the walls in frustration but that it’s never too early for the roster to be remodeled.

“If we keep playing as badly as we have been, that’s about the only thing [management] can do,” he said. “We have five or six pending free agents. They can either lock them up or get rid of them for prospects.”

Damon is one of the pending free agents. So are Jason Giambi, the AL’s most valuable player; starter Gil Heredia, and closer Jason Isringhausen.

The small-market A’s aren’t going to make an irrational trade after only a dozen or so games, but a prolonged struggle could rekindle the fire under Howe, who got only a year’s extension after the division title, further evidence he has never had the total support of General Manager Billy Beane.

“If Art is not here, the free agents won’t be back either,” Damon said. “Art brings so much stability. The guys love him. He’s not playing badly, we are.”

The Animal House A’s feasted in spring training. Now?

* Touted young starters Tim Hudson and Barry Zito have given up 32 hits and 22 earned runs in 33 2/3 innings, and the veteran Heredia is 0-3 with a 7.88 earned-run average.

* Middle relievers Jim Mecir, T.J. Mathews and Jeff Tam have given up 33 hits and 18 earned runs in 20 1/3 innings, unable to keep the A’s in the game.

* Giambi is back at it, batting .400-plus, and both Terrence Long and Ramon Hernandez are over .300, but rookie second baseman Jose Ortiz, the catalytic Damon--never known to start the season strongly--and Giambi’s brother Jeremy are all below the .200 Mendoza line.

The A’s did score eight runs in each of their last two losses to the Texas Rangers at home, but “we just haven’t put the total package together yet,” Howe said. “The effort is there and the preparation is there, but at some point we find a way to disintegrate. I mean, the mental mistakes, the situational hitting, it’s just bad baseball. The only thing we’re consistently doing well is grounding into double plays. We lead the league in that.”

Veterans Kevin Appier, Randy Velarde, Matt Stairs and Ben Grieve are gone from a young team that is now even younger, but the A’s have too much talent for the struggle to continue, although even Howe said he was eager to see how the A’s responded to their early stumble.

A solid starting effort by Mark Mulder provided the foundation against the Angels and fulfilled the pregame hope of team leader Giambi that “our pitchers have to start pitching a lot better.”

The MVP is a mentor to the younger A’s the way Mark McGwire was a mentor to him. Giambi said he keeps reassuring his less-experienced teammates that they’ll be fine, that statistics fluctuate so wildly early in the season that they should always look at the glass as half full.

“A .200 average can go to .400 in one night, and a young team can win a few in a row just as easily as it has lost a few,” Giambi said. “Our potential is unlimited. I still think we’re a World Series-caliber team that can only benefit from the experience of last year.”

Giambi also believes the unbalanced schedule, with an emphasis on intra-division games, provides the A’s with a chance to make up ground just as fast as it has lost that ground.

The A’s did it last year with a balanced schedule, as did the San Francisco Giants in winning the National League West.

“The Giants started 4-14 last year, and that’s what we’re looking at,” said Damon, a student of Bay Area history since his arrival from the Kansas City Royals. “Sometimes you’re allowed a bad start. If we can finish this month 12-15 and then go 15-12 in each of the other months, we should be in very good shape.”

Forestalling any premature changes in the clubhouse, or manager’s office.