Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane has built a reputation as a genius, thanks to his ability to continually make the playoffs with one of the lower payrolls in baseball. Now, that reputation is on the line.

In less than a week, Beane has dismantled most of what was arguably the best starting rotation in the American League, a pitching staff that kept the A’s atop the American League West and in the playoffs. Lefty Mark Mulder, who's 81 wins the last five years were tied for most in the AL, is gone to the St. Louis Cardinals three days after Tim Hudson was sent to the Atlanta Braves. Hudson just happened to be the other one with 81 wins.

If you’re a Braves or Cards fan, you love getting pitchers young talents like Hudson and Mulder. If you’re an A’s fan, you have to wonder what’s happening to your team.

Beane says the A’s will continue to contend, but that’s more a wish than a fact. Unless he’s certain that Mulder, who was 0-4 with a 7.27 ERA the last two months of the season, is damaged goods, there’s no reason to make these trades.

And if Mulder is damaged, then either the Cards are the fools for taking him, or Beane is guilty of trading in bad faith. If it’s the latter, he’s going to have trouble ever making a decent deal again.

I know the argument. The A’s have to save money. Their payroll had somehow managed to creep up to $59 million last year, 16th highest among the 32-team major leagues. At the same time, their attendance, which averaged 27,179, was 19th. Those totals aren’t great, but they aren’t awful. Given baseball’s revenue-sharing and luxury tax, it’s possible to make money with those numbers.

Of course, it’s possible to make more money by getting rid of two pitchers who made $9.5 million combined last year and replacing them with guys making the major league minimum — or close to it.

And if that’s all this is about — maximizing the profits of a gritty but underfunded franchise — then it’s really depressing. Because the A’s changes can’t be nearly as good next year without Mulder and Hudson.

The facts of life in Oakland are that the A’s are going to trim their payroll and they are going to somehow win, trading their top players as they approach free agency or simply saying goodbye at the end of their contracts. Then you wait for Beane to reload with terrific prospects that Beane is great at finding.

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But Mulder and Hudson weren’t going into the final years of their contracts. There was no reason for Beane to trade stars for prospects, no matter how good the prospects are.

Beane got talent in return for Mulder and Hudson. Reliever Kiko Calero is a quality pitcher. Danny Haren could be a top-line starter Daric Barton was a terrific catcher in A ball in the Cards organization.

For Hudson, Beane collected outfielder Charles Thomas and pitchers Juan Cruz and Dan Meyer. All have promise. None are proven.

And that’s the problem here. You don’t trade proven talent for unproven promise, not before you have to. When the pitchers enter their walk years is time enough to see what you can get for them. To do otherwise is to write off next season.

The object of the game is always to win now. It’s not just the Yankees to whom that applies. In fact, the mandate is more immediate, more pressing for teams like the A’s than it is for the Yanks.

New York can afford to reload every year. This year, they went out and got Carl Pavano and are working on Randy Johnson. George Steinbrenner sneers at the luxury tax, spending money as if he’s printing it in the back room.

But if you’re the A’s, you don’t have that luxury. When you get a group of players capable of winning, you keep them together as long as you can, because you don’t know when you’re going to get players like that again.

Look at Cleveland. The Indians had a great core of players and kept them together to dominate most of the 90s. They didn’t win a World Series, but they got there twice. And when the players got too expensive, then they went into sale mode and started to rebuild.

Beane seems to believe that he can rebuild and keep winning, and the way to do it is to make deals when they present themselves. In three days, he traded two stars and got six players back for them, including two starters, two relievers and two position players.

If three out of six do well, he may yet reclaim his genius label. But it’s hard to see how that’s going to happen in the AL West, where the Angels are a proven power, the Rangers are about to blossom and the Mariners are loading up on players to rejoin the chase.

With Mulder and Hudson to go along with Barry Zito, the A’s had hope. Now they have a future that may be nothing more than a mirage.

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