It's been nearly a year since I moved from Oakland, but thanks to the Internet, the Oakland A's team, radio broadcasts, fans, and beat reporters still feel like the "local" group to me.

As we approach trading season, a favorite topic of speculation among baseball junkies nationally is to try to guess where Kansas City's star outfielder Carlos Beltran is going to end up. Here in Oakland ("here"), the perennially favorite topic of speculation is what sort of spectacular trade A's general manager Billy Beane will pull off.

The theory I like best is one that has been mentioned in passing in the local ("local") media but as far as I know hasn't been suggested by anyone nationally. That might mean that locals who follow the team closely know something that big-picture observers like Peter Gammons et al don't. Or it might instead mean that the local fans are readier to suggest any hare-brained trade no matter how implausible, and the national guys know enough to ignore them. I've certainly heard plenty of ridiculous predictions from local fans and commentators, but this one intrigues me.

The prediction is that Carlos Beltran ends up as an Atlanta Brave. Here's the reasoning: Several teams are angling to get Beltran from the Royals, each trying to offer the most attractive bait. But what the Royals most want to obtain right now is a large collection of inexpensive prospects with a high potential upside who are ready to start in the major leagues effective immediately. The organization that possesses that commodity in the greatest abundance is the Oakland Athletics, which, as usual, has a dozen players in AAA and even AA who could well start on some other major-league team.

But Oakland doesn't want Carlos Beltran. He's a terrible fit here. Sure, he's a great player and would be an upgrade over whomever he replaces, but outfield is not a position where Oakland really needs another player. More important, the A's simply don't have the money to pay Beltran's salary -- certainly not next year, when he's a free agent, and possibly not even this year. But that doesn't mean that Beane won't trade for Beltran anyway, then shop him around to some other team willing to pay big for him. Beane is famous for such "arbitrage" trades, in which he matches the biggest seller with the biggest buyer and pockets a tidy profit for his efforts.

Up to this point, the national media is with me. Even those who hadn't already thought it out so far got the point when Kansas City's GM paid a visit to Sacramento to watch Oakland's triple-A team play. The question is which team will be the third party in the transaction. I say it will be Atlanta, because Atlanta has two things which Billy Beane wants: money and John Smoltz.

The conventional wisdom about the trade season is that at some point in the season each team decides whether it's a "buyer" or a "seller". If you think your team has a shot at the playoffs, you spend some money or some prospects in order to get a hot player who will help you win right now. If you know your team isn't going to make it, you trade away your hot players to someone who wants them more, in order to invest in the future. Possibly, if you're on the bubble, you sit out the trade round this year and stand pat with what you've got.

By that wisdom, this trade makes no sense. If Atlanta is not a "buyer", they aren't going to make a play for Beltran, especially when it requires outbidding other buyers who are hungrier. On the other hand, it Atlanta is still going for the playoffs, they wouldn't give up Smoltz.

There's something to that, of course, and that's what makes this prediction a long shot. Still, I would suggest that in this respect Atlanta simply is not a normal team. There are a couple of teams in baseball which are never really out of contention and never really go into "rebuilding" mode, and the Atlanta Braves are one of them.

This year it looks likely that come the trading deadline, Atlanta will be on the bubble -- not a leading contender for the playoffs, but not entirely out of it either. In the short term, swapping Smoltz for Beltran leaves them no worse off than they were. In the long term, it makes a lot of sense. Even if they don't make the playoffs this year, the Braves have every expectation of being in contention next year and for years to come. They can expect Beltran to be useful well into the future, and they've got the budget to sign him for a multi-year contract. Smoltz, on the other hand, wants to be a starter again, and if he stays in Atlanta that could be a problem.

Beane, on the other hand, doesn't care what Smoltz does next year; he only wants him as the A's closer for this season, after which he'll be released to the market just as so many other A's mid-season acquisitions have been (eg, Ray Durham, Carlos Guillen). There's really only one hole in the A's team right now, but it's a gaping one. The A's desperately need relief pitching. The entire bullpen ranges from struggling to god-awful. Billy Beane's impressive streak of manufacturing a new star closer out of someone else's dross (eg, Billy Koch, Keith Foulke) has been snapped. This year it was to be former Seattle set-up man Arthur Rhodes, but Rhodes has been bad as a closer and no one else in the pen has been any better.

So the A's want a closer, but there aren't very many out there who will be available, and the few who are will be expensive. The possibility of trading for Smoltz is an unusual situation, where Beane might be able to finagle a deal that other teams couldn't offer. And Atlanta has enough money that it might be arranged so that the A's don't have to pick up Smoltz's entire salary.

Beane wants to make this work, and to that end, he'll look for ways to make Atlanta and Kansas City happy. I could list several minor leaguers in the Oakland system that the Royals might be interested in, but most of them will be unfamiliar names. The ones that aren't are those who were mentioned in Moneyball as part of the 2002 draft: pitcher Joe Blanton, and 3B Mark Teahen.

Teahen is the one who was characterized in the book as possibly being "the next Jason Giambi". He was only recently promoted to AAA where he's playing behind Sacramento's regular 3B Adam Morrissey. Morrissey is generally viewed as prime trading material, a solid player stuck in triple A because of a superstar player in the majors in front of him (Eric Chavez) and another hot prospect coming up behind him (Teahen). In a similar position is Sacramento's starting catcher Mike Rose, who could easily be starting in the major leagues except that Oakland already has two catchers they're happy with. Since the Royals are looking for both a third-baseman and a catcher, it's a good guess that the core of a trade would be Rose along with Morrissey or Teahen.

There was some speculation that one of the latter would be brought up to Oakland today, as one of our relief pitchers went on the DL. We've been short-handed in the infield due to injuries. Chavez's broken hand will keep him out for another three or four weeks. In the meantime, 3B has been covered by Mark McLemore, an aging veteran utility man who can't comfortably play two days in a row, and Esteban German, a rookie who is also the backup for SS and 2B and didn't start playing 3B until this year's spring training. As it turns out, the call-up was neither of Sacramento's 3Bs but rather their starting 2B, Ramon Castro, who presumably will now be the back-up for 2B and SS while German settles in to play 3B for a while.

One other point on which the national media and the local media seem to be in disagreement is Barry Zito's future. The national media is abuzz with rumors that Zito will be traded, whereas the local media thinks the idea is absurd. The national media's logic seems to be: (1) Oakland has starting pitching talent to spare but has pressing needs elsewhere; (2) Oakland can't afford to keep all three of the "big three" pitchers; and (3) of the the three, Zito is one who seems to be in decline, so he's the one to unload.

All of this falls apart on closer examination. Oakland has a long history of loading up on starting pitching. They've had three good starters for a long time, but that's never stopped them from going after more in the off-season, nor tilting their draft choices heavily toward starting pitching. Zito's contract doesn't run out until the end of the 2006 season. Until then, at the rate we're paying him he's a bargain even if he is in decline. (And if he really does decline, then he won't be so expensive to re-sign as a free agent, will he?)

The key to Oakland A's trading is that Beane likes to sell high and buy low. That is, he'll seek to obtain players who he feels are underrated, and trade away players who are overrated, regardless of their absolute value. For example, catcher Ramon Hernandez was traded away in the off-season not because the A's didn't like him, but because a better-than-usual season combined with some publicity at the All-Star Game lifted Hernandez's perceived value above his actual value, so Beane took advantage of the opportunity to move him for a good value. (Half of that value was CF Mark Kotsay; the other half was getting rid of Terrence Long. Aside from a bad personal relationship with the team, Long had an expensive contract which paid him much more than he is worth. The trade wires will tell you that the A's gave up Hernandez plus Long in exchange for Kotsay, but in fact Long was a net negative for either team, albeit less of a negative for San Diego.)

But I digress. My point is that it makes sense to trade Zito only is he is overpriced in the one market that counts: other general managers. Zito is, in fact, very overrated right now in the market that doesn't matter: the general public. Casual fans remember his recent Cy Young award and his star personality, and think of him as an equal member of the "big three". They probably don't realize, as Oakland fans do, that while the other big two are doing fine, Zito is having a bad year so far, and as a result he is arguably the fifth best starting pitcher on the Oakland team -- and I say "arguably" only because one might argue that reliever Justin Duchscherer should be counted as a starting pitcher, making Zito the sixth best.

But while the casual fan might not know this, the other general managers do. Whether Zito is truly overvalued or undervalued right now depends on what one expects of him next. If he's just going through a slump right now and he'll get himself together and pull out of it, then his bad numbers this year make him underrated for the future. If the League has figured out his curveball, his arm is starting to wear out, and recent bad outings are the first signs of an early flame-out to his career, then he is overrated for the future.

Zito may well be the one of the three that Oakland doesn't keep, but I don't think he's washed up yet. More important, the A's don't think so either. That's why they won't trade him yet. At least not while he still has two years of low salary left on his contract.

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