A’s Owner Interview Part II: Bud and Lew, Frat Bros

Lew Wolff doesn’t mind giving some insight into what the Oakland A’s team of the future will be like. Yesterday, in part one, we addressed some of the potential impacts of moving a mini-stadium (32,000 seats) twenty miles down the road to Fremont. Analyzing some of Wolff’s word’s further show that these aren’t going to be your grandpa’s Athletics:

It Takes a Village – Wolff calls his new $1.8 billion dollar, not a stadium, but a “baseball village.” The plan is to build in the surrounding 200-acre area 3,000 housing units, shopping malls, offices and many other facilities that drunken A’s fans could care less about. My family in St. Louis said this was the plan for the new Busch stadium, with emphasis on the “St. Louis Ballpark Village.” When the city agreed on the new stadium, the housing units were supposed to be completed on or around the opening of the new stadium. Well, as of April 2008 (LAST MONTH), construction has not even begun.

Basically, owners and developers liquor up their respective dates (the city) with promises of love and compassion (gentrifying the surrounding area), but in reality they’re just going to use them to get the one thing that’s always on their minds (a new ballpark).

I’ll believe it when I see this supposed Utopian baseball society. Then again, the amount of gentrifying yuppies in San Jose, especially when compared to St. Louis, is astounding so it might actually get done.

Frat Brothers Forever! – “’Listen, I think one of the two partners in Oakland might want to sell. Would you be interested?’ I said sure. And that’s how I got involved.” You just read the story of how hard it was to buy the Oakland A’s. Bud and Lew are old frat brothers and apparently had this conversation at a baseball game over some beers. No big deal, its just another Tuesday. Not only does this show me how filthy rich Wolff is, it shows me that I should have joined a fraternity, if not solely for the business connections.

When Mark Cuban put in a bid for the Cubs last year, Bud Selig and the rest of the owners association told him to cram it with walnuts. The reason? Imagine a bidding war between Mark Cuban and the Steinbrenners. A-Rods contract would have been no less than a Kabillion dollars over 490 years.

If Bud and the Owners Association gave him the go, we know that Wolff plays ball (pun intended). He even said if he were commissioner, he would instate a soft salary cap. And with Billy Beane at the helm, they should be a relatively responsible team even if they do become a large market team. It’s rumored that every thousand that Billy Beane spends on a player over $100,000 results in an hour of self-flagellation.

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems – Giving the GM and team president a long-term contract and ownership equity are great ideas in principle, but I don’t want the rest of the league getting any ideas. This will only work on a team like the A’s and a GMs like Bill Beane. Imagine if Ned Colletti (Dodgers) and Brian Sabean (Giants) got long-term contracts. It would be a whole team filled with Juan Pierres, Andruw Jones’, Barry Zitos, Old Barry Bonds’, and Jason Schmidts: all old, past the peak of their careers and grossly overpaid.

Side note: Seriously though. I could run a baseball team better than those clowns if I were a drunken baby on the end of a three-week long bender.

But all joking aside, there can be conflicts of interest, collusion and all sorts of other scary business tactics that shouldn’t be in the same sentence as baseball. Watch your cornhole for any hostile takeovers Lew.

Perez “Lew” Hilton – Lew should start a gossip column with juicy tid-bits like this, “…There is a team now who’s spending a lot of money and the general manager seems to be getting away with it because the team may get sold in a few years.” Any guesses on what team he’s talking about?

- Burns at ChatterBalks.com