FREE KRAUT!

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiinteresting. MLB promises to pay for spring special election. If it’s necessary. That’s … weird.

Interesting Beane interview by Kawakami. (His column based on it is utterly useless, and another example of PF/AM in the trad journo trade; also, while the interview itself is worth reading because Beane seemed to be wearing his emotions and opinions on his sleeve a lot more than he typically does, Kawakami hardly engages Beane [...]

Hunh. How did we miss this? FoS claims it was posted last Wednesday, but there’s no clear indication of date (either on the page or the source code, that I can see).
Is this new? If so, why now? This sure feels like a first-shoe-dropping sort of thing to me — prelude to … something. Lew [...]

Jesus fucking Christ, Lew, take the maximalist position, why doncha?
Here are the owners’ relative stances (just heard recently):
Wolff’s preferred position: Make the Bay Area a shared two-team market, with no county designations for individual teams. No compensation to the Giants.
Wolff’s fallback position: Minimal compensation to the Giants, but only after the move and measured relative [...]

So we recently had a picture of dice as part of our tradition of images-as-syllable jokes. I didn’t have anything better to do, and owed a grill, so I figured I’d check out that site and see what else it had to offer. Turns out the answer is plenty:
Something for fans of NACHO [...]

From Matt Artz in the CoCoTi: new Tesla-Toyota NUMMI deal doesn’t change anything, Fremont not happening:
Wolff told me today that Fremont isn’t an option for the A’s, because the team can’t finance a Fremont ballpark without the ability to sell entitlements to build the 3,150 housing units that were part of the original ballpark [...]

A lot of the discussion of getting a new ballpark is in the abstract, as the timing is always a long way off and the roundabout discussions of where it will be seem endless. Sure, most of us probably remember when the Big Phone opened, but back then the A’s were good and there wasn’t the turmoil going on regarding the stadium, which mitigated the envy for us A’s fans. Having the chance to see the brand new Target Field this past weekend put the A’s situation into a new perspective for me. It made me jealous of my brethren in Minnesota.

Ah, geez. Shea never disappoints, does he? I mean, I guess this tedious rehash of the attendance “issue” is serviceable enough, in an obligatory-base-touching/written-for-people-who-have-never-paid-attention-to-the-issue/J-school-identikit way, but, really, what’s in here that we haven’t heard a million times from every conceivable side (surprised there were no San Jose or Magowan quotes) over the last 5 years?
I’ll [...]