This could fall under the category of “with friends like him, who needs enemies.” But Lew Wolff flatly rejects that suggestion.

For a dozen years, until last November, Wolff was the managing partner of the Oakland Athletics. In that position, he tried tirelessly to engineer the move of the Athletics from Oakland in the East Bay, where they are losing fans and money, to San Jose in the South Bay, where they could very likely have flourished financially and with a new fan base.

Wolff, however, never got the go-ahead from Commissioner Bud Selig, who was Wolff’s fraternity brother in college and had lured Wolff into baseball ownership. That’s where the friends-and-enemies idea comes in.

To move to San Jose, Wolff would have needed Selig to sell the other owners on why a move would have benefitted everybody, which it would have. Selig, however never said anything. In one of his most monumental silences, he said simply …

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The West Coast road trip immediately following the All-Star break should have provided the Cleveland Indians a soft and productive way to ease into the second half of the season. The Indians were scheduled to play a pair of three-game series with the Bay Area’s two woeful last-place teams.

The Indians, last season’s A.L. champions, were in first place in the American League Central with a 47-40 record, two and a half games in front of Minnesota and three games ahead of Kansas City. Oakland, the Indians’ first post-break opponent, had a 39-50 record, 21 games from first place in the A.L. West. The A’s Bay neighbor, San Francisco, had an even worse record, 34-56, 27 games from first in the National League West.

So what did the Indians do?

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When George Steinbrenner was suspended in the early 1990’s for paying two-bit gambler Howie Spira to give him derogatory information on Dave Winfield, one of the Yankees’ star players, with whom Steinbrenner was feuding, Commissioner Fay Vincent ordered the Yankees’ owner to have no contact with the Yankees. Steinbrenner, of course, could not abide by such an order. Not have any input into the operation of his team? Not tell his general manager what he could or should do? Ridiculous…outrageous.

So Steinbrenner regularly communicated with General Manager Gene Michael, and Michael regularly recorded in a little black book the dates and topics of their forbidden conversations.

Michael was no dummy. Intelligent, always thinking, he figured some day he might need the records of his conversations with Steinbrenner, if only to protect himself. Michael could have …

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