I sat down with Billy Beane before Friday's game against the Orioles to discuss the present state of the A's and the team's future. Here is our Q&A:

Beane: You don't have to worry about nailing me (with my questions). I've been doing this a long time. I've been nailed. I've been praised.

Cohn: Are you emotionally detached from that sort of thing?

Beane: No. I just know it's part of the business - given the choice (he laughs). You may remember an article you wrote on Sandy one of his last years. You went after Sandy pretty hard. I'm sure you praised him during his tenure here.

Cohn: I think he's a brilliant guy. He's a tough and fair leader and he makes hard decisions. And I respect that.

Beane: He was a great mentor. Still is.

Cohn: In spring training you seemed optimistic. Is this season going as you expected it to and how do you feel about it?

Beane: Perfectly fair question. Once we left Arizona we lost our opening-day starter and we lost our closer. And since then we've lost our third baseman, we lost second baseman, we lost our backup third baseman and blah blah blah and on and on. I think there was a hope and an expectation we would have better health than last year. That hasn't happened. And it's impacted us and to say otherwise I don't think would be honest with the situation. Certainly I can say it because I live it. We haven't fielded the team we anticipated. Unfortunately that's been the case the last few years. That being said the most important thing for us this year is to start to develop some people that are going to be here a long time. The only way we're going to be successful, the only way we've ever been successful with this franchise - and this goes back to the 80s teams - is developing a group of young players. The 80s had the McGwires, the Cansecos, the Walt Weisses and then they were added to, three Rookies of the Year. The same thing happened in the 90s the Hudsons, the Mulders, the Zitos, Tejada and Chavez. Once those guys were established then we added players to create a very good team. For us we need to recreate a young foundation in this marketplace to sustain any success. What I'm happy with now as we sit here is I think we're making a lot of progress in probably the most difficult and the most important thing for any baseball team and particularly our baseball team, which is developing a starting staff. We have five rookies basically. Dallas isn't technically a rookie but I don't know if he's even got a year of service time in. And we've got the youngest rotation in the big leagues. As we've gone through the first two months of the season I think they're starting to show themselves pretty well. That I'm happy with. But I'm not happy with the injuries. Any time you're in last nobody's happy regardless of the reason you're there, no one's happy.

Cohn: Have you scaled down your expectations for this season? Let me give some context. I interviewed Macha this spring and afterward he said, "I think the A's are going to come in first. That's a really good team over there."

Beane: It's a different team now than then. I think Kenny was probably seeing the same thing. If you put Chavez at third. If you have Garciaparra floating around playing first, playing third as depth. You have Ellis who's out for almost five weeks now, Duchscherer who was an All Star pitcher the last two years. Devine your closer. If you get those guys back in the mix there's no question you have a different viewpoint. I think that's what Kenny was looking at. It's what we were looking at too. That being said one of the reasons we need to recreate a core is some of the injuries we've had the last few years and the ones we've had this year are the same guys. Quite frankly doing this job long enough, the greatest predictor of future health is somebody's past health. If you have an injury history you're likely to have an injury future. That's just the way it is. We weren't going to be able to out in Eric's case and find another gold-glove third baseman who hits home runs. It's not that easy to find. The optimism was based on the idea those guys would be on the field. They're not. We've been forced to sort of make changes on the fly.

Cohn: I assume you have to reevaluate Eric Chavez and next year he may not be part of the core of this team.

Beane: Eric's realistic. I'm realistic. Obviously we'd like to have him back. He's in the last year of his contract next year. Given the past few years I think we have to be somewhat realistic about going forward, what we're going to do with that position. To just go on and hope for another year probably isn't a great business plan.

Cohn: I understand what you're doing with your pitching. I believe in it. What about the other eight guys? Would I assume Nomar is hurt and we may not see him? And Giambi?

Beane: Jason's got one year. Duke's a free agent. Cabrera's on a one-year deal. Ellis has got two years and an option. Sweeney's a young guy. Jack, this is his third year. I'm just going around the diamond. Cunningham's obviously a rookie. Travis Buck is only a second year. There's a few guys whose contracts expire at the end of the year but there's still quite a few young guys. We always with a young team want to have some veteran presence around. Those individual questions I'll probably better answer at the end of the year. If your team is young and homegrown that's cost effective for this market. That's difficult to do but it's the ultimate goal. The past history in Oakland, the 80s teams really took off when those young guys came up and established the base and the same thing in the 90s and the early part of this decade.

Cohn: Do you have players in your minor-league system who can come up? Are you confident in them?

Beane: We have a good system. It's just now starting to mature. We've got some position players. One of the kids we got in the Blanton deal last year along with Outman, Adrian Cardenas is hitting .386. He's an infielder, second baseman. There may be a time we'll consider him at third because he's such a good hitter with a real good throwing arm. And Jamile Weeks so we do have some kids coming. Other objective sources, the Baseball Americas and people who evaluate, last year we were evaluated as one of the top five systems in the game. We need to keep adding to that. Our farm system had become pretty depleted over the last decade. We put everything we had into the major-league team trying to stay successful and we had not been as conscious of reinvesting at the minor-league level the way a small-market team has to. You're kind of choosing and we wanted to take advantage of the group of players we had here.

Cohn: If the season continues more or less like this and you're not going to be a contender in the division, do you at a certain point make a decision -- I need to play younger people and not older people? As a result, Holliday is expendable. Maybe Jason is expendable. At a certain point do we say I tried it's not going to work, I want to play Aaron Cunningham.

Beane: Normally had I not known you as long as I've been here, and if you were an out-of-town reporter asking me that, I'd say it's really a waste of time to speculate on that question. But I will answer it for you. It's really not simple. I'll take Matt because he's the highest profile guy we got. People are going to ask that question from this point going forward. Obviously you want to win as many games and you're always trying to compete and you're always trying to win the division no matter what your chances are. But as I said earlier for us it's really important to develop these young pitchers and part of that development process is having guys around them that give them a better chance of succeeding. Matt certainly fits into that category. Now from a future standpoint going forward because that's part of your question - "OK that's great but you worry about four or five years down the road not just these next few months." In Matt's case, at the end of the season he's going to be a high-profile free agent, we would receive two first-round picks for Matt if he goes somewhere else. (Note: It's a little more complicated than this.) Those are really valuable to a club like ours. So there would have to be a lot for us to be inspired to do something with him. We like the value of having him here. Having him out there when a Brett Anderson takes the mound and he's in Chicago and you've got Giambi in the lineup and you've got Holliday in the lineup there's a sense of comfort for a young pitcher. I do think that's important. Just to leave a kid who's got two months in the major leagues completely naked with a whole group of players behind him who are also developing that makes it really difficult. All that will go into our thinking as we go forward. It's almost like a poker game. Your cards are in or your cards are out. It's just not black and white. There's this assumption you're going to trade players because you want younger players but the younger players you may get in return may not be as valuable as the two first-round picks. I say first-round pick, it's just a term. Let me attach something tangible to it. Eric Chavez was a first-round pick for us, Mulder was a first-round pick for us, Zito was a first-round pick for us. If you go around the diamond with some of the players we built our team around, McGwire was a first-round pick, Walt Weiss was a first-round pick. The foundation of small-market teams really comes from that first-round pick. Receiving two of them that's a pretty big hurdle for someone to jump as far as trying to acquire him (Holliday).

Cohn: You always seem to me lighthearted and vivacious.

Beane: I'm not always lighthearted.

Cohn: Do you go through periods where you think this season didn't work out and I'm angry at myself?

Beane: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Listen, I'm responsible for the entire organization and in some respects the success of the organization probably lies on my shoulders more than anybody, which means there are people who work from the top to the bottom of this organization that are somewhat reliant upon me making good decisions. I'm every bit as competitive as I always was. I've been doing this job long enough to realize there are cycles. I've been through all the cycles, up down, up down. In some respects it is part of our market. Everyone's tired of hearing this is part of the market. I'll say it. I'll leave it at that. I choose the challenges of this market and I am aware we are going to have good moments if we do our job right and there's going to be trying times. If I hadn't gone through it, it would be more difficult. But I know the cycles. I know you're going to make mistakes but we're not going to let those mistakes paralyze us into not doing something. Having done this job long enough, great times never last and bad times never last. The best thing you can do is maintain that balance in your decision making. If you made bad decisions examine why you made them and try and correct them. I love this job a ton. I love the challenges. There's times you go gosh, if some teams have injuries they just go out and get (players), they have four or five guys. But winning here is incredibly satisfying beyond the fact that you're doing it with less and I get to live here. I love living here. Living in the Bay Area there is perspective and when you walk into Starbucks whether you've had a good game or a bad game there is some perspective with the people. There are some markets - I have friends who are in bigger baseball markets - it's not that easy to go out. You're either the greatest guy in the town or the worst guy.

Cohn: I have emails from people who say Billy prefers to stay in Oakland because there's less pressure.

Beane: No. No. Believe me, pressure is self-induced. People say when you stay in a small market you don't want the pressure of having more money. Listen, when you run a major-league sports franchise people on a daily basis don't get up and say, "It's OK they lost because their payroll's only X." It doesn't happen. The expectation level in every market is the same. So I don't buy that.

Cohn: When you say you are not always vivacious, when things don't go well do you sit at home with the blinds drawn?

Beane: No. I don't take my job home. It's a learned thing. I don't talk about work at home unless I have to because of a phone call. I rarely take phone calls at night. I've learned to separate the two. You know, I want to live a long time. If anything my wife gets into it at home and sometimes I say, "Let's talk about the Niners."

Cohn: Do you expect your team to be significantly better next year?

Beane: That's a tough question to answer. It's not like I'm avoiding the question. The most enjoyable part of this job is when you're getting better, your young players are making progress, you can see that progress and you know you've got the next few years ahead of you. I want us to have progress that's not just tangible to me. I want it so that every fan goes wow. So that everyone can say that. I can't answer that because I don't know but I look at the Chicago series. These are things you hold onto. You throw essentially four rookies in Chicago with a team that was playing great going into their home park and you pitch the way we did, that gets you excited. When you see that you start, OK, when they handle themselves the way they did that's the fun part of the job. Mulder was a 5 ERA guy his first year. Certainly mid 5's (5.44) and the next year you saw this huge jump. When that starts to happen that's when you can start projecting. If anything I think we're making progress with that. Look at our past, for us to be successful our pitching needs to come from within. It has to from a cost standpoint and even from an injury standpoint. Younger pitchers by and large are going to stay healthier and we can afford them in this market for a block of time. The fact that we've got five very good young starting pitchers, we think, puts us more than 50 percent of the way there.

Cohn: Is Bob Geren the manager for this team going forward?

Beane: Until a manager is given players that are good enough to consistently win it's hard to hold them responsible. Ultimately that's my responsibility - to give him good players. Quite frankly for Bob we haven't done that. The idea that we can slash the payroll, trade the best players and expect him to perform at an ALCS level is not completely fair. We had a team in spring training but he's never really had that team. He and the staff will be more responsible when we feel like we've given him players or he has players in the field that are good enough to win. To read my column on Beane click here.