With the first week of spring training out of the way, Ken Griffey Junior returned home to his former stomping grounds while the Orioles locked up the face of their franchise through 2013. All that, and more, in this week’s edition of Lost in Transactions.

Mets! Yankees! Madoff! Stanford! Johnny Damon, earning $13 million this season, cannot pay his bills. Xavier Nady, earning $6.55 million, cannot purchase an apartment in New York. The Stanford Financial Group scandal extends to Major League Baseball. The issues facing Damon and Nady — both New York Yankees outfielders and both clients of agent Scott […]

Ballpark Village, we hardly knew ye: Oakland Athletics officials today asked the City of Fremont to halt the planning process required to build a new stadium and move the team there, saying they want to reconsider their options. The Fremont city clerk’s office issued a notice today saying the A’s have asked the city to […]

Yesterday Neyer noted that big heads should roll in Washington as a result of the Esmailyn González fiasco. Today Tom Boswell amps up the pressure on the biggest of the heads: Bleak humor about the Nats now bounces all around baseball. But this case, as Kasten says ominously, “will have big repercussions.” At one level, […]

The Royals signing of Jose Guillen stands as one of the worst deals of the past few years. Guillen must know that himself, because he’s trying to save the club money in other ways: Royals outfielder José Guillen expects to return to full-time drills, perhaps by this weekend, after easing the pain in his right […]

Four perennial losing organizations and the steps they’ve taken to get on the right track for this season.

The week of Feb. 15 featured a number of notable events in baseball history. Richard looks back at several.

Joel Pinero is not happy: Starting pitcher Joel Piñeiro convened a news conference Wednesday morning to announce he was “heartbroken” and would not play for Team Puerto Rico in the upcoming World Baseball Classic after Puerto Rico’s manager, Cardinals third-base coach Jose Oquendo, informed him he was not in the projected three-man rotation. “I was […]

Remember those headlines in the AJC the other day talking about how Griffey was coming to Atlanta? Yeah, not so much: A little more than nine years to the day after he left, Ken Griffey Jr. is back with the Mariners. The Seattle P-I learned Wednesday afternoon that Griffey, after a brief flirtation with the […]

You guys are probably sick of me railing against the Marlins’ stadium deal by now. I’ll stop railing when they stop giving me things to rail against: If the devil is indeed the details, then the devil casts an awfully long shadow in the construction agreement between Miami-Dade County and the Florida Marlins for a […]