According to Billy Beane, his wife Tara recently asked him a baseball question. “Did you really trade Mulder and Hudson?” Mrs. Beane asked the Oakland Athletics’ general manager. Told that indeed he had, Tara Beane asked a follow-up question: “Is this Groundhog Day?”

Ouch. In the span of less than three weeks last month, Beane traded his team’s two best starting pitchers, Gio Gonzalez and Trevor Cahill, and its closer, Andrew Bailey. In a 48-hour span in December 2004 Beane traded two of his three best starters, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder. Two years later the A’s let Barry Zito, their remaining best starter, leave as a free agent.

Beane is being blistered by fans and news media for his latest trades, but he shouldn’t be their target of scorn. Question those trades all you want – and they are easily questioned – but Beane is doing what he feels is necessary to keep the Athletics afloat so they can live another day and some day again compete in the American League West.

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If you have read this story here before, kindly indulge me and read it again because it has a new, current relevance.

When the Boston Red Sox were in the process of being sold in 2001, John Henry, then the owner of the Florida Marlins, joined forces with Tom Werner, former owner of the San Diego Padres, and Larry Lucchino, a veteran, highly regarded executive, who had served as president of the Baltimore Orioles and the Padres.

All interested buyers of the Red Sox, they merged their efforts at the suggestion of Commissioner Bud Selig. As soon as I heard that they were making a joint effort to secure the team, I wrote in The New York Times that their group had become the leading candidate.

The next day a financial columnist for the Boston Herald scoffed at the story. “Who’s Murray Chass?” he wrote. “How does he know who the leading candidate is?”

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A week before the end of last year, after the New York Mets had made themselves conspicuously absent from the procurement of competitive players, I imagined and wrote about a sign that was posted outside the main entrance to Citi Field:

CLOSED FOR BUSINESS – WILL REOPEN APRIL 2012

“It’s not really there,” I wrote of the imaginary sign, “but in the interest of full disclosure and truth in advertising, it should be.”

The headline on the column read: “LOST IN THE QUEENS DESERT”

A year later, the Mets remain lost in the wasteland that is the Queens desert, and the way things look they may be doomed to wander in it for 40 years.

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