Cross-posted at Athletics Nation...

As Oakland A's fans, we've grown accustomed to change. For us to assume we could pull a Rip Van Winkle and immediately fell asleep at the conclusion of one season, only to arise on Opening Day, and expect to see the same roster in both games, would be beyond naive. Despite this, into my twentieth year as an A's fan, I am still struck by the amount of turnover we see on an annual basis, and how as fans, we accept it and hold onto those familiar faces left behind who represent hope for the green and gold.

Yesterday, we saw Kirk Saarloos shipped out of town, in exchange for a prospect and more hope. Most of us saw Saarloos as a nice to have, flexible commodity who could both start and come out of the bullpen, but none of us really saw having him on the roster as defining the team, or see that his leaving marks the death-knell of the 2007 season. Simply put, we can take it. We trust the team's ownership has a plan.

Beyond the loss of Los Kirk, one must take only a superficial glance at last year's Oakland A's statistical leaderboard to recognize how a few winter months can change a team. The A's best hitter by average, hits and doubles (Jay Payton at .296 with 165 hits, 32 doubles) is now playing in Baltimore. The A's best slugger by home runs and RBIs (Frank Thomas) is now playing in Toronto. On the mound, the A's also lost fan favorite Barry Zito, who led in ERA and was tied for the lead in wins with Joe Blanton at 16. That guy is pitching you know where at you know what park for you know which team. Meanwhile, off the field, the team lost their manager and third base coach, and announced intentions to move out of Oakland.

What an uneventful few months? No?

Yet, we persevere. To me, this largely stems from the knowledge that we have seen such change, and we will see it again. We were dealt body blows when we saw Hudson and Mulder leave only days apart. When I was much younger, I was shocked that the team dealt Canseco in mid-game. I've fought reality and hoped the team could keep others, like McGwire, Giambi and Tejada, largely in vain. And when those changes happen, we grumble, and move on, bruised but not beaten.

All that has me thinking - how would I react if the A's next press release said that Blanton was on his way out of town? Would I be okay with that? What if instead of Blanton, it was Haren? Or Harden? What if instead, we saw Eric Chavez or Nick Swisher shipped out of town? What if it was all of them? Would I still believe in the plan? Have the A's got us fooled by making incremental changes regularly so we don't see the full scope? I have a feeling that we haven't seen the end of the changes in this off-season. I don't think that taking on Piazza and Durazo and Embree is the master plan.

The question is, are you ready for what might be the next shoe to drop, and what player's leaving would just tear you up?

On the other hand, at least we didn't get Darin Erstad...

Recent Stats Corner Features:

• Why the Kings Won: Selective Shooting
  
• Kings Drawn and 3rd Quartered
  
• Suckitude Doesn't Compute
  
• Losing the Close Ones
  

Playing the role of sports stats geek for Sactown Royalty this NBA season has been a lot of fun, as it lets me combine my inner nerddom with my fanatacism for sports. Over the months, as we Kings fans have lamented the team's various issues, we can see trends. Oddly enough, by keeping a running database game by game, we're finding our hunches are often correct. Tonight, we exposed an unknown fact - that the Kings win more than 4 of every 5 games in which they make more 3-point baskets than their opponent. Yet, when they don't win that single stat, they tend to lose more often - to the tune of 6 out of 7 times.

It's rare a stat like this will show such a disparity in wins and losses. But don't believe me. Talk to Stats Corner. (Or Download the Database)

It took the better part of 2-3 months to migrate all 643 posts from RapidWeaver to Google's Blogger engine, but once I saw the end in sight tonight, it didn't really matter how late I had to stay up, or how much other work I needed to be doing - so after hundreds of "Command C, Command V" routines, I am happy to report that the migration is complete.

As a result of the move, the new site look and feel should have been imported, with a very familiar side bar. The old RSS feed should also be working and load from the same URL.

Comments from the last year are no longer tied to their equivalent posts. You can see them as running in parallel, as the original site is still hard coded to its original URLs. New comments to all posts will stick on the new engine. We will also be watching Feedblitz closely to see if that process is working well, though I expect we will learn that on Thursday morning.

With it being nearly 2 a.m. now, I can rest peacefully, knowing that this big undertaking, for now, is over. Find bugs? Let me know.

We've been posting regularly to the blog on louisgray.com for just over a year now, using Real Mac Software's RapidWeaver engine. As recounted a few times here, the application worked great initially, but has slogged down, no thanks to my frequent writing. After investigating a number of solutions, we finally settled on Google's Blogger engine, which will enable us to match a similar look and feel to what readers have grown accustomed, will enable Web-based posting at any time from any computer, and should handle the migration of RSS feeds without too many issues.

See: RapidWeaver Application Just Isn't Scaling and Slowly Migrating to Web-based Blogger Engine

Yet, RapidWeaver continues to be my undoing. The application does not offer the ability to export to a standard format recognized by Google's Blogger or Six Apart's TypePad or WordPress. We looked everywhere. As a result, over the last few months, while maintaining the site here, we've been playing the copy/paste game of the more than 600 posts, including recreation of thousands and thousands of URL hyperlinks, to catch the Blogger site up to date. Every time we catch an archived movie on TiVo, we're copying and pasting, and adding the URL tags... over and over and over. It's enough to give me carpal tunnel - not that it's actually happened yet.

Starting with January 9, 2006, when the site debuted, we've migrated all posts through October 26, 2006, meaning we're "only" about three months behind. Once we close the gap, you'll know it, and I'll be very pleased. I won't be stuck in a proprietary application engine that stalls out my computer every time I post. I won't have to sit on stories while at the office as much. And as Google believes in standards in a big way, I can import/export out of Blogger if I ever get sick of them as well. It's sure to happen some day.

So, hang tight, and understand that we're working on moving us forward. To watch the new site's progress, or just to relive the old posts as if they were new again, go to the test site.