Welcome to the Rotowire Fantasy Baseball podcast. I'm your host James Anderson. We're brought to you by Underdog Fantasy and Fan Tracks. And my guest this week is the great Melissa Lockard, senior editor and writer over at The Athletic. Melissa is an expert of the Oakland Athletics.

And I always like having Melissa on, even if I wish she had a more talented team to be covering.

But Melissa, first of all, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on.

I always appreciate being here, even if the subject is a little bit rough at times. What's that been like for you? What's it been like

kind of just these last few years? Is it tough to kind of find stuff to kind of write about and

to get excited about? Have you been able to kind of still find some stuff that makes it interesting?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been covering this team a long time.

And so this cycle has sort of repeated itself.

I think this is probably the third iteration of sort of a tear down and then rebuild back up again that we've gone through.

It's the same front office, enough for like basically the entire 20 years. So I think when you think about it

that way, it's almost like, okay, I know what's coming next, you know, and there are things. And

you know, the good thing about baseball is there are so many levels of development that there's always

something to write about, about every organization.

And so I think that's never been hard.

But, you know, I think the bigger thing with it right now is less about what the product on

the field is, is more to do with where the team is going to be.

I think that's where the anxiety for pretty much everyone that follows this team is more

focused on than really how the team is going to play.

So that's probably the biggest difference from the other couple of times we've gone through this.

What's the latest on that situation with the ballpark?

You know, they're very opaque about it.

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