Symptom

By all accounts, Bob Geren is a nice guy. By all accounts he is a knowledgeable baseball man. He is neither overly-demonstrative, crude, overbearing, obsequious, sarcastic or vulgar. He seems to be the recipient of the prototypical middle management personality. A middle aged guy with hands on experience, loyalty, team player, works within the guidelines given him, and never ever tries to undermine his boss.  Yet today he was fired following three consecutive series sweeps. Thus adding a semi-colon to the run-on sentence this Oakland A's season has become.

And like a semicolon, it only gives temporary pause to a sentence that would otherwise have ended with a period. Geren's firing seems thus far, to be the only event of note in a listless season of  a listless franchise owned by a listless friend and former fraternity brother of the ever-oozy Bud Selig.  Even Geren's baseball card isn't worth a crap. Lew Wolff, in his seemingly never-ending attempt to morph into a real-life Rachel Phelps is the guy who tarps over entire sections of the multi-level cement casket on Interstate 880 built by the original Crypt Keeper, Al Davis. He claimed it will help him sell season tickets. Of course. Reduce capacity to accommodate increased demand. String Theory.

Its been 5 years counting this season and A's season ticket sales are an embarrassment to Major League Baseball. But that's what the luxury tax will do.  Enable second and third rate owners with net personal cash flow, as their number one priority to run a franchise into the ground in the vainglorious hope that his pal, the commissioner will somehow enable said third-rate owner to invalidate an existing contract with the San Francisco Giants so he can carpetbag his way out of town .

The A's Bay Area standing, under Wolf'f's stewardship, is as low as at anytime during Jackass Finley's reign of self-serving attention whoring. Days whose low points were marked by his efforts to sell Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson for a carton of adult diapers.

And so the A's have apparently bottomed out with Lew Wolff, who like Frank and Jamie McCourt, is/were close personal friends of Bud Selig, along with Jeff Loiria in Miami, Jerry Reinsdorf in Chicago, the Wilpon's in New Yoirk, and David Glass in Kansas City, who paid 1/3 less than a competitor for the franchise by the way. 

It is no accident that those franchises are amongst the worst and least trusted by fans in MLB.  But a dissertation on the Selig embarrassment will wait for another day. For today is the day, his pal Lew Wolff and his sycophantic stooge GM Billy Beane sacked Bob Geren.  A PR move like any other sacking of a field-manager; whose sole purpose is to deflect attention away from those at the top of the food chain; the owner and upper management.  All field managers are human shields for incompetent owners and upper management. They know that going in. Most will tolerate it. A few won't. (Dusty Baker, Earl Weaver, come to mind).

The A's still scout young talent reasonably well, but overall they are horrible on the field, and have been horrible for a long time, and they will continue to be horrible for as long as the shopping mall Grinch holds onto the franchise in an effort to leverage a real-estate deal that gives him even more free millions to pocket. Its not that he doesn't already reap millions from jet-set hostelries like the Fairmonts,  Four-Seasons and a dozen other luxury hotels.

Now of course ownership is going to point at the players when the next manager fails too. The players are only as good as they are. There are no really good players in Oakland, young starting pitching aside. No manager or media shill can make them to be anything other than what they are. A collection of MLB Scout camp left-overs, a couple of over the hill celebrity players and some young arms. Thats it. Yet Lew Wolff will make millions this year even if nobody shows up and they play to empty houses every night and every day for the rest of the season, because that's what revenue-sharing does. It enables the marginally crooked, the disingenuous, the incompetents, and the overarching greed of civilian owners to continue to plunder the public and ticket buying fans.

Geren is just the symptom. He is being replaced by yet another organizational yes-man, knowledgeable baseball dude, and nice guy, former Giants backup catcher and fired Diamondback manager Bob Melvin. Like Geren he's pretty good at looking stoic in the dugout and post-game pressers, when his untalented and under performing collection of ballplayers get the snot beat out of them on a regular basis.  And he will no-doubt be fired soon enough from his "Interim Manager" status, so I'm going to spend zero-time providing background on him. Elsewhere in the interwebs if you really care to know about him, is where you will find "information" on Bob Melvin

What the hell ever.  At least, pre-Selig and the anti-social CBA designed to protect big agents and their few superstars,  and the cable-company monopoly, when a team flopped and people stayed away in droves, and the team lost sponsors, the owner paid a price and eventually sold off the club because he lost his ass. To wit: Finley, Stoneham, and Lurie.

But like the rest of the welfare bums on Wall Street and K-Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, they have legislated for themselves a printing press that prints money.  And its called television and cable and the general public's apathy toward what really causes a bad team to be bad. And just when I think I will be bothered by any of it, I say to myself:

"San Francisco Giants World Series Champions".  It has a great ring to it.