Early Offseason News Hits A's and Giants' Reputations Hard

This has been quite the week for Bay Area baseball – no Giancarlo Stanton, no Shohei Ohtani, no preferred ballpark site. But there is Yusmeiro Petit.
 
I can feel the air being power-sucked out of the room already.
 
Both the Giants and A's were playing at big things this week, only to find out that their reputations are nowhere close to what they imagine them to be. The Giants impress nobody inside baseball, and the A's impress nobody in academia – only a few years after both those statements were 180 degrees in opposition.
 
The Giants never really had a good shot at Ohtani, to be honest, but they thought they were players with Stanton and found out that there is something lower than a participation medal – and it's called the "I Wish You Hadn't Turned Up At All But Here You Are Anyway" ribbon. Unless he has a shocking change of heart, he will have rebuffed the Giants hard enough to leave a mark where it hurts the most.
 
Right in the reputation.
 
The A's, though, lost more because they found out even as the only professional team left in Oakland, their much advertised "roots" don't take in the sandy soil in and around Laney College. They announced that they wanted something expecting to hear gratitude and feel love and see wallets opening, and instead got a pretty aggressive "So the hell what?" from the people they thought they had impressed.
 
And they deserve the rebuke, because as the Warriors did by befriending San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and thinking he would do the heavy lifting for the Pier 30 and 32 site, they thought Peralta College chancellor Jowel Laguerre had the same clout.
 
And as it turns out, he didn't. None. The A's were told in no uncertain terms by the college and its administrators that they weren't even worth talking to, which isn't a slap in the face but a bag of auto parts to the nethers.
 
So now the Giants still have no home run hitters and a second two-way pitcher to supplement Madison Bumgarner, and the A's are still playing in the Coliseum – quite probably until all of us are long and safely dead, or until the big one hits and you can buy beachfront property in Yosemite.
 
By the way, there are 76 days until spring training. If I were the type who thought that date is important, I'd start drinking now.