Got a few emails of late asking when we’ll start regular updates of the blog again, so I figured I’d drop by and discuss. 

It’s tough to really do much updating about a low-A short season team around this time of the year. The team isn’t pushing out press releases, the players are only playing in Venezuela and Hawaii, if at all, and aside from a little movement in the Rule V draft, there’s not much to tell on the personnel change front.

And there’s one other thing that’s keeping me from the keyboard of late - the news that the Oakland A’s might be considering taking on the narcissistic criminal fraud that is Barry Lamar Bonds for season 2008.

To put this in terms impossible to confuse, if Barry Bonds wears Oakland green in 2008, this blog will not cover A’s games ever again. I’ll buy myself a Mariners jersey, and start learning the names of Everett Aquasox players.

Not that we’ll stop covering the Vancouver Canadians (or whatever incarnation they may end up as in 2008 - go Capilanos!) - we’ll totally go wall-to-wall on the C’s as we always have, but once the players leave the friendly confines of Little Mountain, we’ll be following them and only them - not the system they play for.

I don’t make this threat easily - I love the A’s with a passion - but part of the reason I love the team is because of the way they RUN the team. I see Billy Beane as being a smart guy willing to use technology and outside the box thinking and business sense to get ahead, but also as someone who has a sense of moral and ethical fortitude, which leads him to bring in people who a reasonable person can not just support as a player, but like as a person.

Nick Swisher, for mine, is what’s great about the A’s. Milton Bradley, for mine, was not.

And Barry Bonds, for mine, is Milton Bradley with anything remotely likable stripped away and replaced with poison, bile, ego and complete vacuum where his character should be.

History will not be kind to the 80’s/90’s A’s, who absolutely rode to glory on the back of steroids, ego and more steroids, but I’ve always justified my passion for the team by saying "that was a different time - a time when I didn’t know the A’s from a hole in the ground - and that isn’t today’s A’s."

If they repeat that loathsome time, for the sake of a few extra tickets sold to casual Giants fans who, collectively, have willingly held Barry’s pecker as he peed all over the record books for the last several years, I’ll have nothing to do with it.

Life is too short to spend it watching someone you hate.

UPDATE: In season 2006, Kane County Cougars catcher Raul Padron hit 2 home runs in the Oakland system. In 2007, for the Stockton Ports, he hit 13.

Today, he was handed a 50-game suspension for steroid use.

Previously, 2003 Vancouver Canadians catcher, David Castillo, has been suspended THREE TIMES for steroid use, while 2004 NWL MVP, Javier Herrera, got nabbed once.

Does Oakland still have a steroid problem? Perhaps, but you can’t really fault them for a couple of minor leaguers doing dumb things to get to the top. If they bring in Barry Bonds, however, "Does Oakland have a steroid problem" becomes a statement, rather than a question.