Bob Melvin, Beane extension, and more A's links

By Jason Wojciechowski on February 8, 2012 at 5:35 PM

I've set up a whole series of Google Alerts to make sure I'm catching A's stories from far and wide, so expect the links to get even a little crazier than they have been from here on out.

Here's a good first shot: Willie Muse at Connecticut College's student newspaper calls Moneyball one of the five most overrated movies of the year and uses the phrase "ground roll double," which I can only assume is intentional.

Here's the Bob Melvin FanFest interview transcript. My question was the last one -- if you read my Baseball Prospectus piece, though, you knew that already.

In yesterday's links post, I referred to Billy Beane's contract as practically a lifetime deal. Sometime after I posted, Rob Neyer ran an article at Baseball Nation asking whether Beane will be an Athletic forever. Neyer compares David Forst (and Jed Hoyer, for that matter) to Riker on Star Trek, which I think is just about the meanest thing someone could ever say about Forst.

Buster Olney writes ($$$) that the contract hardly guarantees anything, noting that Lew Wolff has been fine with Beane pursuing opportunities with other teams before, and that the Dodgers, at the very least, might be looking for a new operations team soon.

Daniel Rathman's piece at Baseball Prospectus this morning is also about Beane. Kevin Kaduk at Big League Stew also weighs in.

Cliff Corcoran says that Manny Ramirez wouldn't make no sense for the A's, but that the Orioles would be a better fit because the A's have young players who'd lose at-bats to Manny if he signed with them.

Keith Law's organizational rankings are up ($$$) and the A's come out ok -- ninth has to be considered an accomplishment when the team was, as Law says, "maybe bottom-five" in November.

Brett Anderson, you will not be surprised to learn, writes about food in New Orleans.

Kurt Suzuki will rep a new charity, NephCure, which works on kidney disease.

For now, it's just a tweet from Ray Ratto, but: