Courtesy of Fire Joe Morgan, we learned that the Oakland City Council has passed a resolution this week that re-names a portion of Coliseum Way after Joe Morgan. The segment of the street affected is the stretch that runs from Hegenberger Road to 66th Avenue -- or as anyone familiar with that neck of the woods will realize, the service road that bisects the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Complex.

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Thoughts? Well, I think that's an appropriate honor for the spiritual leader of the 1984 Oakland Athletics. The Pythagorean winning percentage had the '84 A's pegged as a 75-87 team, but scrappy second baseman Joe Morgan said, "No sir, not on my watch," and willed that team to a 77-85 record.

Presumably, the statue commemorating Bill Caudill's selection to the All Star team that season will be voted upon at a future meeting.

The Fire Joe Morgan folks were initially aghast that the man who has inspired so much outraged blogging would receive the honor of having a thoroughfare in a major metropolitan city named after him. But if they realized that the road in question runs past the A's home park, I feel that they would savor the situational irony. After all, when Billy Beane drives into work each day to read print-outs from the massive wall-sized computer that makes all of Oakland's scouting decisions so that Beane can devote all his free time to writing the follow-up to his best-seller Moneyball and destroying the game of baseball, he will do so by driving down Joe Morgan Way. That realization alone probably frosts Joe Morgan's cookies. And if the A's really wanted to get his goat, they could rename all the entrances and exits onto the street, giving them names like VORP Avenue or OBP Lane or Boulevard of Stats Not Scouts. If we play our cards right on this, we could probably make Joe Morgan's head explode.