my theory is that the local media will pretty much always come out against a trade in which the local team gives up stars for prospects.  

these "sportswriters" have the intelligence, long term memory, and vision of the average baseball fan, meaning none at all.  

no athlete matters unless he's a big name star: regularly mentioned on sportscenter or drafted in the first two rounds of fantasy leagues.  
and there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to take into account whether or not a player is injury prone, about to go into decline, already over the hill, or if a similar player is available for much cheaper (hey, it's not their money).  

this works out for them on multiple levels:

first, the average joe sixpack fan will agree with their take on the trades, which means love mail probably outnumbers hate mail 10 to 1.  

second, it's a far better story to declare that the a's are going to finish in last place, beane has gone crazy, and the ownership = charles finley than to try to explain (using actual statistics and arguments that require baseball knowledge) why a trade may not be such a bad thing in the long term.  

third, why would they want to write stories about a bunch of no-name players.  it's not going to sell as many papers as columns on slugger giambi, energetic tejada, tough hudson, laid back guy mulder, eccentric rocker zito, etc.  
and it would be a lot more work to have to actually learn about new players.
also, the national media's not going to care what ray ratto has to say this week about keith ginter.

fourth, there's not enough information to determine whether trades such as these work out for a few years, and by then, nobody will remember some old article they wrote about it years ago.

finally, if the media is wrong, it's not like they lose their jobs.  if beane listens to them and the average fan, and the team ends up in the cellar from 2006-2010 instead of only being uncompetitive for one year, he's the one who could be out of a job.  
and why would the sportswriters care, even that is a great story for them: the collapse of billy beane.

i'm not sure if they're a bunch of whores who are only interested in tabloid headlines that sell papers or if they actually have no baseball knowledge whatsoever.  after all, did they get their jobs as sportswrites because they know something about sports or because they went to journalism school?  
they don't seem to be familiar with concepts such as win shares and VORP. heck, even WHIP or K/9 innings.  even their take on beane's philosophy is simplistic: he likes on base percentage.  

blogs like this are part of a new free market media (as opposed to the big media oligarchy) that is available to almost everyone (with a computer).  at least people are held accountable for what they write here and readers can leave feedback in public.  i know the first place i come to when something happens with the a's is this blog, and that's the reason the old media will eventually die.

i'm really starting to get sick of this nonsense.  i don't know what we can really do about it, except maybe do what s.a.m. has already started to do with this diary: keep a record of all the articles that have been written about this deal.  
we shouldn't forget what these sportswriters had to say about our a's at this critical juncture, and we shouldn't let them forget it either.

finally, some fairly decent stories:

Time to put trust in Beane
Trades of Hudson, Mulder hardly a fire sale
John Schlegel
http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/news/mlb_perspectives.jsp?ymd=20041219&content_id=924089&v key=perspectives&fext=.jsp

Breaking up is hard to do
Bob Klapisch
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=klapisch_bob&id=1950110

Beane says the future is bright
GM: Fans will be pleased with new trade acquisitions
Mychael Urban
http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/oak/news/oak_news.jsp?ymd=20041220&content_id=924430 &vkey=news_oak&fext=.jsp

reaction from local sportswriters: "finally beane gets the a's the 'big outfield bat' the team has sorely needed!"

"...we really regret having to trade Mark (which they absolutely do not regret at all) but those are the conditions that prevail (yeah, when you're squeezing those quarters so hard that George Washington wishes Cornwallis had shown a little more gumption)."

Whaaa?? It's like he just chooses words randomly, with no sense of context and 2nd grader's understanding of metaphor.

It makes me miss Glenn Dickey. He would actually state an opinion on a relevant issue and then support it with facts and astute observations. Genius!

Nor does using sabermetrics make any of us more intelligent than a writer who fails to use sabermetrics.  It's a tool, but it shouldn't be necessary to support your argument.  The best arguments in support of the Hudson/Mulder trades I've read in the last few days have not relied on VORP or win/shares.  You don't need that.  If you're talking to someone else who speaks that language, great, but if you're talking to an audience that includes casual fans, you'd better limit yourselves to tools that people can understand.  You can mock their lack of understanding of sabermetrics, but then you're just a small island of snobs, unappreciated by the non-sabermetric-knowing publiic.  And then I like how people go on and on about how we've corned the market on "intellectual rigor" here at AN, and then support their arguments by pointing out that Ray Ratto is a fatass.

And yet, I'm caught up in the issue, for whatever reason.  So we have Schott, and we have BB.  And Schott sets the amount he's willing to spend, and BB allocates it.  And BB has made a name for himself by working with strict limitations, so he can spend HALF what the Red Sox spend and a THIRD of what the Yanks spend.  

He's made so much of a name for himself doing that, that you almost start to think that he prefers it that way, that he LIKES being held around $60 mill., that he particularly likes telling people about the risks he's taking with these trades, turning the status quo on its head, et cetera.  

That's the argument the "lazy hacks" are making--not that BB's not good at using a dollar, but that he's all-too-willing to agree to a low payroll ceiling, and Schott's all-too-willing to give him one, in hopes that BB will be that much more of a genius if the A's win, and Schott will make a handsome profit in the meantime.  

And the criticism is way off-base if the A's profits are just enough to pay everybody what they need, but his criticism is right on target if Schott's taking home eight figures by himself--if he can afford it, he needs to spend some moneyh on this team, for even you Moneyballers wouldn't argue that it helps to have a higher payroll.  Would you?  

I think it will mean a little bit more when we do. ;)

Beane has never done something that seemed this radical, trading Mulder and Hudson is not the same as losing players to free agency... the benefit of the doubt is removed from the home team.  Whereas in free agency negotiations, we never are sure enough what the terms really are, AND the player who leaves always can be painted as greedy for 'putting money first', in trades it does fall all on the GM.

When Grieve was traded, Damon came in return.  When Ramon was traded, Kotsay came in return. When Koch was traded, Foulke came in return.  This time we received a package of players for All-Stars, of course it seems startling compared to what Beane has done in the past, so the narrative becomes that the A's are blowing up the team, or are too cheap to compete.  

None of this takes into account where the A's are in their success cycle, that the market seems to be drastically over-valuing starting pitching this off season... not to mention that the expected win difference between a #3 starter and a #2 is not that much, upgrading a position player from below average to above average is worth more than doing the same for a starter.  It's not surprising that this is subtle stuff.

But for me the real question that sportswriters SHOULD be able to focus on is whether it is worth it to go for broke one more season, knowing that the downside is probably an expensive and not good team for a couple years OR whether you pull the plug when you can and keep having a veteran/youth mix that has much less chance of cratering for three or four seasons.  

When I read the Kevin Goldstein chat at BA about the A's prospects, what struck me was that after Blanton, the A's didn't have anyone that they could reliably project to be a decent major league starter:  they have some possibilities, but no one that has crossed the threshold to being able to penciled in to the major league team.  The A's were looking at a post big three of Harden, Blanton, and three question marks without projectable answers...

The money situation makes acquiring guys via free agency difficult or impossible, but these trades happened not so much because of that as because it became clear that if Hudson and Mulder left via free agency, receiving draft picks for them would not have provided the next wave of pitching help in time.  Billy has been walking the razor's edge for five years now, adding and subtracting pieces to win now. He is now easing off from doing that, trading 5-7 wins this year for 5-7 wins the next three or four years.  That is the story here, but it's the lack of SABR principles among sportswriters that believe that subtracting Mulder and Hudson means subtracting their win totals from the team.  They think Billy traded away 15-30 TEAM wins, this is where some "elitist" stat-geek type people really do know better.

Now on the business.

I thought rooting for the underdog is embeded deep into the American Psyche, they why we have movies like the Bad News Bears, Miracle, Cool Runnings and even the horrible, horrible Mighty Ducks franchise.

We Americans always love an underdog story, and that is your Oakland Athletics.  We play with the the overspending Evil Empries, we spend a third of the Yankees and put out a similar product, albeit with less flair.

How come the media just blasts Beane and the A's for doing exactly what they should be doing, Underdog stuff.

I wonder how they're going to eat crow when the A's do their 2nd half run and make a damn good shot at the playoffs.

My predictions:

A's will miss playoffs in '05 (but not by much)

World Series Champs '06 (just let me dream)