So go ahead, Billy Beane, do it again. Dance, man. Show us your trades. Pardon us while you whip this out -- another hidden gem in the farm system, that is.

	Billy Beane has his work cut out for him in keeping the A's competitive.

Discover somebody. Deal for somebody whom others figure is either washed up or never good enough in the first place to achieve washed-up status, and somehow make that player work for your franchise. Get a great season at an unexpected position -- first base, say.

Make your Oakland team competitive, full in the knowledge that you won't be hanging on to your top talent for long -- that when it really takes an ownership commitment to make it work in the long run, it'll be over faster than you can say "no-trade clause."

You work for two men who wouldn't have taken an extra dollar bill out of their pockets in the Jason Giambi deal if it were on fire, who labored for months to achieve the desired result of appearing to finish second to the Yankees in the Giambi sweeps, if not in life itself.

You work for two men, Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann, who never budged off their spring-training offer to Giambi of $91 million over six years, not even when it became apparent that the Yankees were going to dangle $120 million over seven. You work for them knowing that there is not a name you could put in Giambi's stead -- not Tim Hudson, not Barry Zito, not Mark Mulder or Eric Chavez or Miguel Tejada or Jermaine Dye or anyone -- that would prompt any stronger action from the owners than the one you just witnessed.

You work full in the knowledge that your team is going to get picked off, talent by talent, season by season, by whatever franchise happens to come up fat in the wallet.

So go ahead, Mr. Beane. Make it sing.

The full measure of Beane's work in Oakland has to be this: Nobody dismissed the A's on Thursday, not even with a near two-time MVP walking out the door and into the Bronx. Stunning, given the financial odds. People are lining up, in fact, to compare the Oakland model with the Atlanta Braves' model of old, in which the Braves continually moved position players through the organization while remaining highly competitive because of their great core pitching staff.

And one difference, of course, aside from the fact that the A's have not yet won anything, is that the Braves had the financial wherewithal to hang on to Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, to acquire and keep Greg Maddux. The Braves found the nucleus of pitching and never let it blow apart. Only time, age and injury could do that.

When Billy Beane reports to the office each day as the Oakland general manager, he's lucky if he feels certain the office is still there. He lives and works amid rumors that the franchise will be sold, that it will be moved, that it will go broke -- your basic, not-sure-if-we-have-jobs-tomorrow type stuff.

Most of it is overblown, and some of it is the standard small-market caterwauling. But the rest is real. Losing Giambi over the owners' refusal to include a no-trade clause until it's too late is real. Wondering how long your creation can stand is real.

Under Beane, the A's have been a playoff entry while subsisting on a comparative budget of four Glue-Stix and a bag of candy corn from last Halloween. Hudson, Mulder and Zito were gifts of the Oakland farm system, which is absolutely the right way to do things -- assuming the franchise hangs on to its gifts.

To be Billy Beane is to operate on the bare fringes of that kind of life, to work the margins knowing that the loss of a star talent can be a day away -- and any day, now that you mention it. Some of it is baseball's dopey, wildly skewed money system. Some of it is the lamentable Schott-Hofmann axis.

And all of it, taken together, means Billy Beane still has to dance.

So go ahead, Mr. Beane, light it up. Yank out another one of those one-season patch jobs -- David Justice, say, with the Mets picking up a portion of the tab. Shuffle closers on the fly, with Billy Koch coming and Jason Isringhausen going.

Ratchet up. Hunker down. Do whatever it is, cliche-wise, that the teams operating on the cheap do.

And then get straight and find another one. Find another Chavez, another Tejada. Go snag a Johnny Damon for a year, a Jermaine Dye for a stretch run. Walk up to the manager, Art Howe, and tell him the truth: He's going to have to make it work this way, because there just ain't no other way in which it will work.

Make it good, the roster. It has the shelf-life of a peeled banana, but you know that already. Maybe, in some perverse way, the fact that it won't last is what makes the challenge, in which case you are already rich beyond your wildest imagination.

Because the hits just keep on showing up. Fortunately for the A's, so do you.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.