WASHINGTON GROUP BACKS OUT

In further efforts to keep up with large ranch quotas, MLB offers its latest installment of bullshit.

Get your prying bar out because it's time to read between the lines. The A's, or any other team, (besides the Expos) will not be sold in the current market. Check the stock market. Nobody is buying.

MLB will not allow a run on the market when they stand to inherit a fast fortune.

The owners shelled out about $5 million each for MLB to buy the Expos form Jeff Loria last year. In the next few months, MLB is going to sell the Expos and rights to move the Expos to Washington for $500 million to $600 million to an outside group. In case you are part of the math challenged crowd, the owners are going to triple their investment in less than a year.

MLB would never let another franchise move the team to Washington DC because of the revenue cache it holds. Imagine the politicians and celebrity clout that they would have on national TV. The DC area is MLB's territory.

This is the umpteenth time that the A's have nearly been sold and moved since Schott and Hoffman took over.

Let me say this, Schott and Hoffman are experienced business men who both dealt in real estate and development. That's how they made their money.

If they discuss their team with an interested group figures are drawn up, numbers discussed and an offer is made by an interested party, it does not mean that they are selling.

It certainly doesn't mean they are moving. Any report to the contrary is bad journalism and smells like a leak from Bud Selig's office in his sanctimonious method of creating fan disinterest and hatred.

In order for a sale to go through, it would have to be voted on by the owners. And they are all arguing amongst themselves right now, too busy aiming their BLANKING contest away from their own feet.

It's sort of like owning a home. People can make offers all damn day, but until you put a sign in the front yard an announce your home is for sale, it's really not for sale.

Last year the reports came in around the time the Jason Giambi negotiations were hitting a wall. It was rumored that the Mandalay Bay people (the hotel/casino in Vegas) were going to but the A's. As it turns out, the Mandalay Group wanted to but the Angels and had a personal relationship with Steve Schott and were just getting an idea how baseball is run and some of the ins and outs of baseball.

SIDE: If your industry is run so shadily and underhandedly that people from Vegas don't want any part of it, something is wrong.

Remember how the Giambi deal went? Giambi and his agent were so worried that the A's would be sold and broken up, he instituted a 'no-trade' deal breaking clause. Which was stupid from a logical and strategic sense. Jason was set to be a 10-5 guy in two years, anyway. After 2003, he could veto any trade he wanted to. Jason already had a limited trade clause in the original offer, yet, he and his agent offered the deal-breaker clause. Further, Jason went to the Yankees which helped Bud Selig's case that baseball is out of whack.

Schott and Hoffman have had reports that they were selling their team each time a new and/or crucial vote came up for the new ballpark study in Oakland and toward the end of a fiscal quarter. They are basically looking at outside interests to set the value of their investment. Usually, baseball has its own set of rules set by Selig to determine franchise values. If you believe those numbers, you have parties waiting to sell your Enron and K Mart stock. It's business.

It's normal.

What's not normal are the press leaks that keep people in the Bay Area in a perpetual loop away from the ticket window on game days.