FanHouse Billy Beane

Footprints in the Snow is FanHouse's look at the paths to be forged by MLB teams this winter as they look ahead to 2010.

Depending on your perspective, the rebuilding plan general manager Billy Beane started after the 2007 season has either worked well or has stalled out. The A's have filled up their organization with young prospects, and they had the makings of a very good young pitching staff last year. However, they still managed to win only 75 games -- the exact same total as the year before -- because their everyday lineup is still in flux.

The only position player who has established himself as the long-term answer at his position is catcher Kurt Suzuki. Otherwise, players like Ryan Sweeney, Cliff Pennington and Rajai Davis have played just well enough to have jobs going into spring training, but not well enough to be considered established.

The good news is the A's gave their young pitchers plenty of opportunity to learn in 2009. They started a pitcher 25 or younger in 147 of their games, most in the majors, and just about all of them showed flashes (or more) of brilliance.

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OAKLAND -- The A's rebuilding plan may appear to be progressing quickly with the team's hot streak, but don't expect GM Billy Beane to make any big splashes on marquee players this winter to fill out the picture.

He tried that last winter. Didn't work.

Only after the A's got rid of Matt Holliday, Jason Giambi and Orlando Cabrera, essentially handing the wheel to the young players, did the team start to win. So the youth movement will continue.

"We'd look to add some guys, but we're going to be very disciplined," Beane told FanHouse. "We're trying to build something. We're not going to go crazy in the offseason."

It's been rumored for about a day now, but the Colorado Rockies have made it official by announcing the signing of Jason Giambi to a minor-league contract on Monday. Giambi will report to the Rockies Triple-A affiliate in Colorado Springs where he'll be joined by Russ Ortiz, who also signed a minor-league deal with Colorado on Monday.

Giambi started the season with the Oakland Athletics and hit a robust .193 with 11 home runs and 40 RBI before being released by the Athletics on Aug. 7, when Billy Beane said the team wanted to give their younger players a chance. Now it seems the Rockies are hoping that the mile high air of Denver can restore some pop to Giambi's bat.

After signing a free agent deal with the Oakland A's prior to the start of the 2009 season, Jason Giambi has endured a rough season. It just got a bit worse, as Giambi has been released by the A's. He had been on the disabled list with a quad injury since June 20, before which he had compiled a league-worst -- among qualifiers -- .193 batting average.

Giambi, 38, has 407 career home runs and a lifetime .282 batting average. In his eight seasons with the A's, Giambi put up numbers as solid as anyone in Oakland franchise history.

OAKLAND -- That Jason Giambi went on the disabled list on Monday was no great shock. Giambi is 38 years old, having played in the field more than he figured he would, so coming up with a sore quad was predictable.

The question that went unanswered, largely because it can't be answered now, is whether Giambi's career is over. In the literal sense, it almost certainly isn't. It's only a strained quad, and it's still July, so you would think that at some point Giambi will be activated and play again.

But is his career, as Jason Giambi over?

It's a baseball podcast. The math is easy, right? BaseCast. Let's rock.

While the entire baseball world waits on the Blue Jays and Roy Halladay heading toward the July 31 trade deadline, the Oakland A's possess a pretty intriguing chip in their own right in slugging left fielder Matt Holliday.

Will general manager Billy Beane decide to move him? What type of package could the A's expect in return for him? And would moving to pennant race get his bat going again? FanHouse's Jeff Fletcher joined me to discuss all those things, and to break down the AL West race in the latest BaseCast.

Listen in after the jump.

Weeks after the dramatic last-minute shelving of the Moneyball movie, Sony Pictures has unshelved it. The movie is back on again, this time with Aaron Sorkin writing the screenplay. Brad Pitt is still expected to play Billy Beane.

That probably means we'll get all sorts of great scenes with Beane and Paul DePodesta talking in way-too-smart-for-real-life dialogue as they hurriedly walk from place to place. Sorkin, right, is the writer responsible for The West Wing and Sports Night and films A Few Good Men and The American President.

He's also working right now on a movie about ... Facebook.

Seriously.

Although the big movie studios have all balked at putting the best-selling baseball book 'Moneyball' on the silver screen, one of the versions of a screenplay for the movie has surfaced on Hollywood Elsewhere. (EDIT: The link to the actual script seems to have been removed.)

I just finished reading through the whole thing and it actually does stick relatively close to the story of the book. Sure, there are some changes -- like making Billy Beane a bachelor and having him hook up with a waitress (p. 20) -- but for the most part it's a story of how he built the 2002 A's into a winner on a shoestring budget after losing three big-time free agents, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen.

Billy Beane's public position has always been that the A's were happy to keep Matt Holliday until the end of the season, even if they weren't contending, because he could get the draft picks as compensation if Holliday signed elsewhere.

Don't believe that.

Beane has to make that his public position. He has to convince his fellow GMs that he is happy to keep Holliday, or else he has no trade leverage.

That was a dubious position from Day 1, but now it's looking even more questionable. As we near the season's halfway point, Holliday is still having an unspectacular year, and there is a growing possibility, as pointed out by Buster Olney, that the A's might not be able to get those draft picks anyway.

OAKLAND -- The future has arrived a little early for the A's pitching staff.

A team that looked awful as recently as a few weeks ago is suddenly on a roll, having won six games in a row, largely on the strength of the youngest rotation in the majors.

"It's extremely exciting, not just as a player, but as a fan of the game, to watch what these young guys are doing, " 25-year-old lefty Dallas Braden, the senior member of the group, told FanHouse.

And that was before 22-year-old Vin Mazzaro, the most recent addition to the rotation, pitched 7 1/3 scoreless innings on Sunday. Mazzaro, who pitched 6 1/3 innings to beat the White Sox on Tuesday, is the first pitcher in Oakland history to start his career with consecutive scoreless starts.