This could fall under the category of “with friends like him, who needs enemies.” But Lew Wolff flatly rejects that suggestion.

For a dozen years, until last November, Wolff was the managing partner of the Oakland Athletics. In that position, he tried tirelessly to engineer the move of the Athletics from Oakland in the East Bay, where they are losing fans and money, to San Jose in the South Bay, where they could very likely have flourished financially and with a new fan base.

Wolff, however, never got the go-ahead from Commissioner Bud Selig, who was Wolff’s fraternity brother in college and had lured Wolff into baseball ownership. That’s where the friends-and-enemies idea comes in.

To move to San Jose, Wolff would have needed Selig to sell the other owners on why a move would have benefitted everybody, which it would have. Selig, however never said anything. In one of his most monumental silences, he said simply, “We’re studying it, and there’s a lot more studying to do.”

If Selig had wanted to be honest and candid, which he had trouble being, he would have said San Jose is in Santa Clara County, which is in the San Francisco Giants territory, and if I allowed the A’s to move to San Jose, the Giants will sue me and I don’t want to be sued.

Selig, I think, could have won that lawsuit, but that’s another part of the A’s story. Wolff explained the team’s recent history.

“We didn’t have a path to change the territory so Bud didn’t do anything wrong in that regard,” he said on the telephone last Saturday. “No matter how things got to where they are, our eyes were open. We tried to do something in Oakland within our territory. We tried to see if baseball would adjust the territories and came to the conclusion that they didn’t want to.”

Baseball – Selig – didn’t want to because he feared a change would provoke a lawsuit by the San Francisco Giants over the status of San Jose, the town to which Wolff wanted to relocate the Athletics.

Wolff wasn’t around when San Jose came in to the Giants’ territory, but he has read the documents that facilitated it.

Years ago, when the Giants were trying to secure public funds for a park to replace Candlestick, they were getting nowhere and wanted to use Santa Clara as part of their strategy. That is, produce the funds, or we’ll move to Santa Clara.

The problem with that threat was Santa Clara was in a shared territory. The Giants and the A’s shared it, and neither team could do anything in or with the territory without the other’s approval. The Giants asked, and the A’s didn’t say no. Walter Haas Jr., the A’s owner, was one of those rare owners who acted in Major League Baseball’s best interest. What would be good for M.L.B., Haas felt, would be good for the A’s and the rest of the teams.

Haas’s willingness to let the Giants use Santa Clara, getting nothing in return, has not been equaled by the Giants’ refusal to allow the A’s to use San Jose. The Giants’ position: San Jose is in Santa Clara County, and Santa Clara County is in our territory.

They even refuse to acknowledge getting Santa Clara Country as a result of Haas’s goodwill. A former Giants’ managing partner once told me the Haas story was an urban legend. The current managing partner refuses to discuss the issue.

“So now where do we stand?” Wolff asked, then answered, “I sold most of my interest to my partner.”

That would be John Fisher, at 55 the youngest of three sons of the founders of the Gap clothing chain. Forbes estimates his worth at $2.7 billion. Part of that value went to Wolff for 24 percent of the A’s, leaving Wolff with 1 percent as chairman emeritus.

“We’re committed to stay in Oakland in a new ball park,” said Wolff, a real estate developer, whose major frustration was his inability to get a new playing site but could still say, “I don’t hold any angst or grudge to Bud or anybody because we got into baseball because of Bud No. 1. No. 2 we got a team that’s worth four times or five times what we paid for it.

“I think I owe so much more to Bud for getting me exposed to you and so many more people that I consider him a deep and dear friend. I think friend issues get blown out of proportion.

“We have a shot now. My partner, who is a really good guy, has an idea that he’s pursuing in Oakland. I get the idea that we’re going to remain in Oakland. I think we came to that conclusion several years ago.

“I don’t walk around saying baseball didn’t do what we wanted to. Had the Giants said it’s good for everybody to do this that would have been fine, but they didn’t.”

Wolff, who will be 82 years old in December, said 12 years as managing partner was enough. “John Fisher, my partner, anything he does he does with the highest quality. It’s a little slower than I would have liked, but we’re fully committed to having a top-notch small venue, under 35,000 seats.”

Besides settling on the area in Oakland where the new park will rise, the A’s last week signaled their intent to stay in Oakland by signing a lease for approximately 40,000 square feet of office space in Jack London Square, a premier downtown location.

Moving the team’s offices from Oakland-Alameda County Stadium in January will provide employees with a breath of fresh air in a move away from the antiquated stadium.

The move and the plans to build a new park give A’s fans the best news they have had since the team’s “Moneyball” days. Those days are long gone, and Billy Beane, the A’s chief baseball executive, said several years ago they had changed their approach.

The book by Michael Lewis, which was published in June 2003, became very popular and subsequently became a movie. I didn’t care for the book and never saw the movie because it glorified Beane while another general manager, Terry Ryan, was doing similar things and having similar success in Minnesota with the same small payrolls as the A’s but was ignored.

The A’s were successful the first few seasons after the book was published, but soon afterward stumbled on hard times, struggling through losing seasons. They are there again, struggling to avoid their third consecutive last-place finish in the American League West.

CARLOS NOT BEING MANNY

The Carlos Beltran Foundation announced during the weekend that Jessica and Carlos Beltran were donating $1 million to relief efforts in their native Puerto Rico following the recent devastating hurricane there.

“Carlos and I are committed to helping the people of Puerto Rico in rebuilding their lives, their homes and our beautiful country,” Jessica Beltran said in a news release.

The Beltrans, of course, are not the only baseball-related people making such contributions, but their remarks and their effort reminded me of Manny Ramirez when he was earning $20 million a year with the Boston Red Sox.

Ramirez was a graduate of George Washington High School in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and his high school baseball coach, Steve Mandl, was hoping his former star player might give the school $10,000 to help buy new uniforms and equipment to replace the worn out uniforms and equipment, but nothing came from Manny.

When the Red Sox were in New York to play the Yankees, I asked Ramirez about it. He refused to talk about it or the coach. When I asked his agent about it, Jeff Moorad said Ramirez would do something. I am not aware that he ever did anything.

Some might see a difference between contributions for hurricane relief and baseball uniforms. But there’s also a two-zero difference between $10,000 and $1,000,000.

RACES? WHAT RACES?

What a disappointingly dull ending to the season. The Nationals, the Dodgers, the Indians and the Astros had division championships locked up weeks, if not months ago. The Cubs and the Red Sox took some extra time but still entered this last week with at least a 5-game lead with 7 games to play.

Six teams, three in each league, have at least 90 wins. Only one wild card remains to be claimed. The only excitement we could hope for was to see which teams has the most wins to claim home field advantage now that the Bud Selig Memorial All-Star game farce has been blessedly tucked away in Rob Manfred’s back pocket.

You think pace of game, speaking of Manfred, is dull? How about pace of win column? What are we supposed to do, count the number of home runs that are hit this week and add them to the record number that have already been hit?

Should we spend the last week debating the reasons for the record number of home runs that have been hit? Is it batters elevating their swings to lift the baseballs over the fence? Is it the raised seams on the balls? Or maybe it’s the lowered seams. Are steroids back in a formula that testers can’t spot in their labs?

Or maybe we should just read a good book or listen to Beethoven or Dvorak?

The post-season starts next week. It won’t be long.

The West Coast road trip immediately following the All-Star break should have provided the Cleveland Indians a soft and productive way to ease into the second half of the season. The Indians were scheduled to play a pair of three-game series with the Bay Area’s two woeful last-place teams.

The Indians, last season’s A.L. champions, were in first place in the American League Central with a 47-40 record, two and a half games in front of Minnesota and three games ahead of Kansas City. Oakland, the Indians’ first post-break opponent, had a 39-50 record, 21 games from first place in the A.L. West. The A’s Bay neighbor, San Francisco, had an even worse record, 34-56, 27 games from first in the National League West.

So what did the Indians do? The A’s swept their series, and the Giants won two of three. As the Indians staggered home, their division lead had shrunk to half a game.

Home, however, was apparently just what the Indians needed. Playing seven games at Progressive Field against the Blue Jays, the Reds and the Angels, Cleveland won all seven, then won the first two on their next trip to Chicago.

As it turned out, that nine-game winning streak was a prelude to the remarkable A.L. record 22-game winning streak the Indians compiled from Aug. 24 through Sept. 14, 22 wins in 22 days, and on the last day the streak was alive the Indians had a 13 ½-game lead. Or as that old baseball adage proclaims, a win a day keeps the contenders away.

When the streak ended last Friday, with a 4-3 loss to Kansas City, the only longer winning streak belonged to the 1916 New York Giants, who won 26 in a row with a tied game mixed in without affecting the winning streak, according to Elias Sports Bureau.

I’m not sure I agree that the 1-1 tie, which was the outcome of a game shortened to eight innings by rain, should be discounted as if it weren’t played. The Giants didn’t lose the game, but they didn’t win it either. If it were considered as a game that ended the Giants’ winning streak because it wasn’t a win, the Giants would have had winning streaks of 12 and 14 games, both impressive but neither a record.

Perhaps in judging the Giants’ record winning streak two other factors should be considered:

• All 26 games were Giants’ home games, played at the Polo Grounds; advantage Giants.
• Of the 26 games the Giants won, 18 were played as parts of doubleheaders, including the makeup of the rain-shortened game with Pittsburgh; disadvantage Giants.

Playing at home for so many games within a month was clearly beneficial to the Giants. In their 26 winning games, the Giants played Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. With all teams in those days, east of the Mississippi, the travel was not unduly arduous. Playing at home, though for basically the last month of the season was a good deal for the Giants.

Playing nine doubleheaders in three weeks is a difficult chore no matter where the games are played and even if John McGraw is the manager. Doubleheaders in those days meant playing the second game 20 or 30 minutes after completion of the first. Day-night doubleheaders and twilight-night doubleheaders were not on the schedule because night games had yet to appear on schedules because parks didn’t have lights.

The Giants, to their credit, did not let the doubleheaders affect them. At the same time, the Giants did not win the National League pennant. They finished fourth, eight games behind the Brooklyn Robins.

As for the winning streaks, the best perspective I have seen comes from a former writer for this web site. Writing for The Ringer, Zach Kram wrote:

“Cleveland’s baseball team has won 22 games in 22 days. Its football team has won 22 games since September 2011—a span of 94 games, 13 starting quarterbacks, and four head coaches.”

Here’ another perspective. The 22 victories the Indians gained in the streak are 55 percent of the 40 victories the Mets gained in the entire season of 1962, their first.

Finally, the American League has had only two other double-digit winning streaks this season. Houston won 11 in a row, Texas 10. In the National League, the Dodgers have won 11 and 10 in a row, but the Diamondbacks own the longest winning streak, 13 games.

The Indians won their 22^nd straight in dramatic fashion and nearly duplicated it the next night for No. 23.

Thursday night:

The Indians are in the bottom of the ninth, losing to the Royals, 2-1. Kelvin Herrera, the Kansas City closer, is pitching. With one out, Tyler Naquin bats for Brandon Guyer and singles to left. Francisco Mejia bats for Yan Gomes and forces Naquin at second. Erik Gonzalez runs for Mejia, and this becomes Terry Francona’s most critical move.

Francisco Lindor, with two strikes, slugs a fly ball off the left field wall for a double and Gonzalez races home with the tying run.

The Royals don’t score in the 10^th, and Brandon Maurer comes in to pitch for Kansas City. Jose Ramirez doubles to right-center. Edwin Encarnacion walks. Jay Bruce lines a double to right field, sending Ramirez home with the winning run. The Indians’ streak is now a league record 22.

Friday night:

The Indians are in the bottom of the ninth, losing to the Royals, 4-3. Mike Minor is pitching for the Royals, and Diaz leads off with a single to right. Gomes strikes out. Mejia bats for Allen and strikes out. Lindor, with two strikes, swings and misses for strike three.

The winning streak is no longer.

Except the Indians beat the Royals Saturday night, 8-4, clinching the A.L. Central crown and starting another winning streak.

MANFRED NEEDS WRITING LESSON

Rob Manfred, the baseball commissioner, made a good decision when he opted to go to law school. Among other vocations, he probably wouldn’t have made it in journalism.

Manfred issued a statement last week announcing that he was fining the Boston Red Sox an undisclosed amount for violating the rule that prohibits teams from using electronics to steal opposing teams’ signs.

The Yankees had filed a complaint with Manfred’s office, and he said in his statement that his investigators found evidence to support the accusation.

Once the Red Sox were unmasked as cheaters, they filed a complaint against the Yankees, saying they had used a YES television camera to steal signs from the Red Sox.

In his statement, though, Manfred buried the Yankees’ part in the dueling schemes. Saying the Red Sox charge lacked confirming evidence, Manfred said he was levying a lesser fine on the Yankees for some other obscure misdemeanor.

Instead of having a news release written by his capable public relations staff, he issued his statement and buried his decision on the Red Sox complaint. A sentence or two high up in his statement saying what he decided on that matter would have been far better than what he wrote. Next time Manfred should let his communications aides do the communicating for him.

JUDGE POSES PROBLEM FOR YANKEES

Will the Yankees let Aaron Judge have a chance to break the major league strikeout record? He broke the Yankees’ record Saturday when Chris Tillman of Baltimore struck him out in the fifth inning. It was Judge’s 196^th strikeout of the season and broke a tie with Curtis Granderson.

Judge has 14 games remaining in the season to eclipse the major league record of 223 set by Mark Reynolds with Arizona in 2005. If opposing pitchers give Judge a chance to strike out by not walking him, an average of two strikeouts a game could put his name in The Elias Book of Baseball Records.

The Yankees would prefer that not happen to the rookie outfielder, but as long as they’re chasing the Red Sox for the American League East title, they’re not going to bench him so he can’t strike out.

All of this, of course, sounds bizarre. You bench a guy so he can’t break the strikeout record, but you want him in the lineup so he can help you overtake the Red Sox. That’s the kind of season it has been for Judge and the Yankees.

He leads the majors in strikeouts, but he also leads the league in home runs, walks and on-base and slugging percentages.

Judge would not want to sit and miss games for any reason, but he wouldn’t let a strikeout record sit him down. He is the prototype of today’s hitter, hitting home runs but also striking out frequently.

Judge had 196 strikeouts going into Sunday’s game. Babe Ruth never struck out 100 times in a season. His career highs were 93 and 90.

Reggie Jackson is the all-time strikeout king with 2,596 in his career, but never struck out 200 times in a season. His single-season high was 171, which he reached in his first full season in the majors.

Actually, opposing pitchers may take care of the Judge problem for the Yankees. They just keep walking him. He’s nowhere near the walk record.

When George Steinbrenner was suspended in the early 1990’s for paying two-bit gambler Howie Spira to give him derogatory information on Dave Winfield, one of the Yankees’ star players, with whom Steinbrenner was feuding, Commissioner Fay Vincent ordered the Yankees’ owner to have no contact with the Yankees. Steinbrenner, of course, could not abide by such an order. Not have any input into the operation of his team? Not tell his general manager what he could or should do? Ridiculous…outrageous.

So Steinbrenner regularly communicated with General Manager Gene Michael, and Michael regularly recorded in a little black book the dates and topics of their forbidden conversations.

Michael was no dummy. Intelligent, always thinking, he figured some day he might need the records of his conversations with Steinbrenner, if only to protect himself. Michael could have seriously damaged, if not destroyed, Steinbrenner’s post-suspension future in baseball.

Michael, however, let the book lie in a desk drawer, unused and never disclosed to Vincent or anyone else. Steinbrenner had been too good to Michael in his post-playing career, and he wasn’t going to do anything that would hurt his benefactor.

Vincent said last week he had heard mention of a book but added, “We were never able to get it.”

“Stick,” as he was known for his slim frame, not his bat (he was a .229 hitter with 15 home runs in his 10-year career) spent the next 15 years working for the Yankees and being well paid for his duties, continuing to work for them until he died last week at the age of 79.

Player, coach, scout, adviser, minor league manager, major league manager, general manager, Michael did it all for the Yankees in nearly half a century with them. In making a contribution more critical than most people have made to their teams, Michael changed the culture that Steinbrenner had established, and the change led to five World Series championships and two other World Series appearances.

Steinbrenner, who thought he knew more about baseball than he did, made a habit of trading young players for high-priced veterans. During his suspension, Michael held onto young players who, he felt, had promise. Had Steinbrenner been on the scene, he might have traded Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada.

In fact, Steinbrenner once talked to Bob Watson, Michael’s successor as general manager, about trading Jeter for a veteran shortstop, Felix Fermin, who, as it turned out, played 11 games for the Cubs in his last season, the same season Jeter began his Hall-of-Fame career.

“George talked to Watson about Fermin,” Michael told me, “but he never would have gotten to that.”

That is, Michael wouldn’t have let him, just as he insisted over the owner’s strenuous objection in 1995 that he had to trade for David Cone, reversing the new approach and giving up young players. Three days before the non-waiver trading deadline, Steinbrenner relented and agreed to make the trade.

For Cone, a veteran pitcher, the Yankees gave the Blue Jays three young players – pitcher Marty Janzen, who went on to have a 6-7 record in two years for the Blue Jays, and two players who never played in the majors. It was an example of Michael’s baseball intelligence and instincts.

Cone, meanwhile, compiled a 9-2 record in 13 starts for the Yankees, helping them get to the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, and won a post-season game. In 1998 Cone led the league with 20 wins.

A shrewd poker player who in his post-playing days was always ready for a game on the road, Michael also learned how to play Steinbrenner.

“I remember there were times I played it down to George,” Michael related, referring to his desire to keep young players, “saying we should keep these guys and give them a chance to fail for us. I think I taught George patience. It wasn’t easy, but he learned.”

“He was tough,” Michael added, “but I learned if you went at him twice, three times for sure you had him.” He meant that was the way to dissuade Steinbrenner from wanting to trade a player.

A pivotal moment occurred, Michael said, when Steinbrenner returned from his suspension at the start of spring training in 1993.

“He came back and he knew the team had improved,” Michael said. “We added players along the way who were important. We made some moves. As it went on, George became more appreciative. He wasn’t as stubborn as he had been earlier in his career. When Joe Torre came along he had it easy.”

To his credit, Michael didn’t claim credit for the arrival of the core four.

“I didn’t sign any of those guys,” he said but conceded, “I think I had something to do with keeping them. We traded some young players, but we kept the right ones.”

Michael wasn’t always in a position of command with the Yankees. When he was a shortstop with the team in the first half of the 1970s, he was supposed to be the starting shortstop, but the Yankees kept giving his job away to a younger player.

One year Frank Baker arrived in the Yankees’ spring training camp in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and was told he would be the starting shortstop. When the exhibition schedule started, it seemed that Baker booted or threw away every grounder that opposing batters hit to him. When the season began, Michael was back at the position.

Michael was very good at the position and added a touch that other shortstops didn’t have in their repertoire. He occasionally pulled the hidden-ball trick on unsuspecting runners at second base.

He would have the baseball snugly tucked in his glove and say something to the runner like, “Excuse me, but the base isn’t right.” The runner would oblige Michael and step off the base, and Michael would tag him. The umpire, alerted beforehand to the scheme, would call the runner out.

This is not a trick an infielder could pull too often. Word gets around. Michael estimated he did it five times.

Michael himself was the victim of a trick, or to be more precise, a prank. This happened in 1973, Steinbrenner’s first year of ownership.

The game at Yankee Stadium was about to begin, and the Yankees emerged from the dugout. As the players ran onto the field, Michael put his glove on his left hand. Instantly, though, he threw the glove off and into the air. Steinbrenner was in his seat next to the dugout and, unfortunately for Michael, had an eyewitness view of the unusual and outrageous display.

Michael, it seemed, had a phobia about slimy and creepy creatures. When he slipped his hand into his glove, he felt what he thought was one of those creatures and panicked. He had to get rid of it fast.

As it turned out, the offending object in his glove was not a slimy or creepy creature but an uncooked hot dog put there by a teammate who knew of his phobia. Steinbrenner, not knowing who the player was, wrote down his uniform number on an envelope and later gave it to Manager Ralph Houk with orders to discipline the offender.

Some years later Hal Lanier, an infield teammate of Michael’s, confessed to having committed the slimy deed.

That incident might have been the funniest incident in Michael’s career. The worst was probably his defense of Steve Howe in 1992 when he joined Buck Showalter, then the manager, and Jack Lawn, the team’s vice president, to support the relief pitcher’s grievance against his record seventh drug-and-alcohol suspension.

Richard Moss, Howe’s agent, came up with a brilliantly clever defense for Howe and he won the grievance and was reinstated, but the only reason the Yankees’ officials supported Howe was he was having an especially good season for them and they didn’t want to lose him.

He was a seven-time loser and didn’t deserve another chance. He had already had more chances than any other suspended player has ever had. But that didn’t stop Michael and the others from fighting for him. Steinbrenner was serving his suspension but told Vincent he should do whatever he wanted with Howe.

Despite his close relationship with Steinbrenner, Michael wasn’t immune from the owner’s ax. Although the Yankees finished in first place in the first half of the strike-split 1981 season, assuring them of a place in the playoffs, the team was having a poor second half and Steinbrenner was constantly badgering Michael.

Fed up, Michael said publicly in the last week of August Steinbrenner should get off his back or fire him. Ten days later Steinbrenner fired him.

However, as he often did in these situations, Steinbrenner was prepared to offer Michael another job, only Michael wouldn’t take or return the owner’s calls.

When they finally talked, Michael said Steinbrenner said to him, “Why do you want to be down on the field (as manager) being second-guessed when you can come sit upstairs with the second-guessers?”

Michael loved telling that story. At the same time, the baseball people who came in contact with Michael had great respect and admiration for him.

Omar Minaya for one.

“We always talked about talent,” said Minaya, a former general manager, who is now with the Players Association. “He was always about the athletes. He grew up in the Pirates system. Stick had the Pirates’ mentality.We talked about talent and the value of talent and the separation of talent.”

Sandy Johnson is retired but worked for various organizations, including the Mets.

“Stick and I broke in with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization in 1959,” Johnson said from his home in Maryland. “We were both infielders. Stick was a great defensive shortstop. We never played on the same team, but we spent a lot of springs together and we got to know each other pretty good.

“You might not see Stick for three, four, five years, but when you would see Stick he was the same guy as he was in 1959 when we were young minor leaguers together. He was always that same guy, whether he was the manager, general manager or whatever. He reverted back to the time when we were young minor leaguers together. He loved to talk about the guys we played with. He remembered everybody. He was a helluva guy, always the same.

“He was a great baseball guy, always wanted to talk baseball, talk strategy, talk theory.”

Johnson recalled something else about Michael. “He drove the bus one year in the minors,” he said. “It was in Hobbs, New Mexico. He got extra money by driving the bus. I think he was pitching in Hobbs one year because he had a great arm and then he went back to playing shortstop. He had a great arm. He had a quick release and really had great carry on the ball. That’s one thing that stood out about Stick.”

Something entirely different stuck out in Lee MacPhail’s mind about Michael, who played for the Yankees when MacPhail was Steinbrenner’s first general manager: the creative contract negotiations he used to conduct for himself.

“If I ever needed a contract,” MacPhail once said, “I would hire Michael to negotiate it.”