Will they be part of the Sac Fly ticket plan?  With airfare & accomodations?  ;)

they have to be making money by agreeing to this trip. They're sacrificing two sellouts at McAffee (surely a season opening series vs. Boston would result in sellouts) for this trip. I'm sure it is worth it to them financially.

The A's-Mariners games were scheduled for the evening, Tokyo local time.  The time difference from Tokyo to Oakland is something like 16 hours.  So, a 6 p.m. starting time in Tokyo is a 2 a.m. start in Oakland.  So either stay up extremely late or set a 2 a.m. alarm.  The start time would be 5 a.m. in Boston, and those of you in Europe could actually watch a game in the middle of the day.

I thought they were amazing against MLB this year and they still managed to win the AAA championship.

It would keep our regular players in tune for a regular start of the season, and let's face it - if the games are from 2am to 5am, who in the U.S. is really going to see it?

...get a discount for two missed games?

Like others have said, it comes down to money.  If it didn't, they could just as easily split the games... one home game each.

Tons of exposure via ESPN who will replay the crap out of this. Big time for Haren/Harden. It's also during Spring training, so if Billy wanted to last minute deal anyone... The team must be getting buku bucks for it. And they'll have a week to recover, and will not lose much because they play the Sawx the next week. Win win. Nice job.

I'll get to watch that game with all these Red Sox fans here in Boston at the wee hours of the morn.

Man that's gonna be a bad couple of days if we lose.

Consider:

Huge hype and exposure.  

Opportunity to showcase our young'(g)uns.

Direct flights from Tokyo to Vancouver when Harden twangs his elbow.

How often do you get to play in the Fukudome?    

So, presuming Haren and Harden (or Blanton) start the games there, will they start the other games once the regular season "starts" again? We could get two Haren starts before ever having to deal with a 3-5 starter.

Let the fans in Japan have their fun.

I thought this quote from Billy Beane was rather funny:

Is that where Cheap Trick did that live concert album?  

...for the A's to increase their exposure to the japanese market? At the cost of what, one friggin' home game? This isn't the NFL, one game is nothing for an MLB team.

Don't the teams that play the Japan starter usually start off slow, something the A's do without timezone help.  How is this good?  Do we need extra losses early because no one is awake?

over at JapanToday.com.   At least one A's fan in Japan has commented.  Oddly, according to this story, Nippon Professional Baseball says that the exact dates and venues won't be announced until mid-December.

While there are certainly going to be more people cheering for Boston (or for Matsuzaka and Okajima) I bet there will be a fair number of A's fans (I hope to be one of them, though I'm not sure), and I doubt Japanese fans would express any hostility to the A's or any other visiting team with no history.   I bet Swisher becomes a minor media star for the week.

Is anyone else worried about the effect that these additional thousands of miles of travel and shortened spring training schedule will have on the team? It seems Oakland is consistently among the league leaders on travel miles year after year, and this certainly isn't going to help...

I remember back in 2003 on the A's official site, there was a group of maybe seven fans or so(some Bay Area residents, some ex-pats in Japan) going to the A's/M's games. Obviously the games got cancelled.

It would be interesting to see if anybody from AN makes the trek out and to hear their stories.