Why should anybody give blind faith to an organization? A true fan doesn’t jump on the latest trendy winning team, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a true fan calling out the team for being idiots when they make idiotic moves. (General comment, not specific to the current situation)

Now getting specific… Yes, we have a plan. I’m so excited. It’s going to work out great. Just like the last plan… oh wait, that didn’t work out so well. For all the planning and supposedly doing it “right”, here we are with a major league team with a not much better record than the Giants. Yes, I’m so excited.

revenue sharing part.

i was drunk and it slipped out…i don’t use “we” either

How is a link about factual investments uninformed? Heck, when it came time for the trade deadline all the guys that were rumored to be getting sent off where basically just getting plucked from the top of payroll.

that monkeyball is actaully defending the ownership group? The winds of change are in the air..

(here’s where you correct me and explain how its all a part of a bigger, diabolical scheme to move the team out of state, raise ticket prices, and destroy the A’s franchise along with all their fans)

do you live in, that signing FA’s make the team WORSE? If Wolff wants to go in the Angel’s press box and says he envies them, or wants to model the franchise after them he better realize that involves spending some money. This offseason there are plenty of guys out there who could help this team, sign them for four or five years and they will be here to help out when the good young pitching comes into its own. You could go with the sure thing proven major leaguers or you can cross your fingers and hope that the A’s excellent hitting coaches will somehow develop the current prospects to be better than any thing else they’ve touched.

I’m not going to list any particular names since “Oh I’m so much smarter and shrewder than you, my opinion is fact” members will come out disagreeing with any player i deem semi-descent or attainable. Either way, for the open minded ones, heres a list, keep in mind, some of these guys have team options.

Unnecessary harshness, 15 yards. And as a fan of Christmas cartoons, I want to visit the Wal-Mart Isle of Misfit FAs.

This thread is hardly the exemplar of nuanced discussion, but there’s other ways a franchise could “prove it cares” than to waste money on bad FA signings. Right now we’re watching a team whose future may be bright (or maybe not, as events develop), but whose present on the big league field is miserable. You’ve often remarked on the insignificance of a couple million payroll dollars here or there. OK, so, there’s your answer…ownership could spend a little more on a more entertaining short term product without harming its future. They’ve chosen not to. That’s probably the shrewdest bottom-line move, espcially given their willingness to piss off the current in-game fan base, but it ain’t exactly proving they care in the eyes of many fans.

I stayed out of the other meta-thread (historically not the scenes of my finest moments), so I’ll say my piece here: it’s easy for clever folks to make cartoony trollish foils from central casting look bad. But it’s not endorsing trolling to observe that the standard of reply has taken a turn towards the derisive around here lately.

Let’s take the Jack Cust example. I also have some questions about his value, and whether the holy grail of his OBP is worth as much on the actual playing field as it is on paper. I think that’s a question for reasonable discussion and disagreement. But because it’s often posed from a paleolithic anti-stats perspective (and often by posters with a proven trollish history), that reasonable discussion never takes place. Instead, ridicule ensues, usually starting with a genuinely clever remark from someone like yourself, but then descending quickly as others pile on, then Trolly McCusth8r lashes out predictably, and so on.

Poorly informed ideas should be labled as such. There’s still a value, though, to an educational rather than a dismissive reply, if not to Trolly than to the larger reading audience who really wants to learn, of whom I number myself one.