First of all, I'm ready to stab myself in the eye every time I have to see someone they only hire "A" players. This is getting tiresome and unbelievable - I don't know of any startup that has nothing but "A-player type work" to do. Almost every plausible startup has some work that will be comfortably addressed by a range of abilities and the idea that you're going to stuff your startup full of absolute super-stars (and do well as a result) is just posturing.
I am also not entirely sure that someone whose references are, I dunno, busy doing actual work or "on holiday" deserves to be penalized with respect to someone whose references are all hanging around in their office with nothing to do but promote the living shit out of each other in some kind of mutual admiration society.
Speaking from experience, I have seen many such cliques of utterly mediocre, self-serving people who would unhesitatingly tell happy stories of how wonderful everyone in their clique was to anyone who asked - even if a more conventional response from further up the management chain would have given a very tepid review of the actual performance of said people.
Finally, if you're going to contact a bunch of people out of the blue, adding self-promoting line about your blog is not appropriate. Under the signature line, maybe, but putting it the body text is a dick move.