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One of the great things about Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone (and we assume that there is more than one, given that he is an elected official who has never done time) is his persistent refusal to admit that he has a diploma from the School Of You're Kidding, Right? at the University of Way Don't Get It.

After all, he's been trying different kinds of dog-and-pony shows over the last 14 years to get the good people of Santa Clara County to build a major-league baseball stadium, and he trotted out a new one Friday -- a petition drive to ask baseball owners to free San Jose from the territorial rights of the Giants.

It just makes you want to drive over to Ol' Lar's office, ask him out for a beer, drain one with him, and then hit him across the skull with the empty stein.

If Stone wants a baseball team, he won't need a petition, or a downtown rally, or to dress farm animals in baseball uniforms, or any of the other sideshow nonsense that makes people wonder if that stein-as-a-hat plan doesn't have some real merit.

All he needs is $400 million. With $400 million, he can have it all, and with $500 million, he can cover both building costs, land expropriation, and all the extraneous under-the-table greasings it takes to get a project like this done.

Without it, what he has, in the terminology of the construction business, is a metric ton of squat.

Stone must know this -- he's gotten his hat blocked twice already at the taxpayer shakedown stage, which is how Bob Lurie was eventually chastened into selling the Giants to Old Gluepockets and The Revolving Investor Hamster Wheel.

But since this is the cheap publicity part, something that costs essentially nothing, this is the part that Stone and his fellow Santa Clara politicos, glad-handers, big-talkers and miscellaneous sycophants can do easily.

Actually, we may be a little tough on the politicos, glad-handers, big- talkers and miscellaneous sycophants. We haven't heard of them all.

But let's play percentages and say if they are involved in city government, business associations and the legal profession, the likelihood of corporate brigandry and civic weaselry is fairly high. After all, those attributes have always been highly prized in San Francisco, and San Jose has always cast its envious eye northward, while denying it all the way.

But back to the subject -- not that groining public and business officials isn't its own reward, if only for the cardiovascular benefits.

So these self-important hyenas -- er, sorry, the executive committee of Baseball San Jose, of which Stone is the most hyperactive -- are working on petitions instead of rolling up their sleeves, pulling out their pipe wrenches and muscling the corporates. They're thinking that public support for a stadium bond measure that has the same chance of passing as Jessica Simpson has of being named a tenured faculty member at Stanford is the way to go, and that a petition is the way to jump-start the process.

God, it's so stupid it makes your hair bleed.

So we're back where we started. If Larry Stone and all the other little wizards, elves and photocopier repairmen involved with Baseball San Jose want this done, all they need to do is bring the cash. Now. And never mind what they might have heard from Baseball Commissioner And Stadium Extortionist Bud Selig, and never mind what Peter Magowan says about territorial rights, and never mind what overmedicated civic boosters with laptops tell them about how San Jose's perilously low self-esteem demands a baseball team.

Cash. Now. Because cash beats everything. This is baseball, after all.

To succeed with this, they come up with half a billion with no strings attached, they tell Selig they're ready to damn the zoning laws and break ground, and then they will watch an evaporation of the territorial rights issue with the alacrity of butter on a hot brick. Either Selig will say how much it will take to buy Magowan's eager complicity (probably less than anyone thinks, knowing Magowan), or he will meet with his other owner friends to stab Magowan right between the third and fourth thoracic vertebrae.

This is baseball, after all.

Once that's done, Steve Schott, who has never met free money he couldn't cast a covetous eye toward, will crawl down all 40 miles of freshly-resurfaced Interstate 880 on the hottest day of the year wearing only his shorts, a fez and a fully loaded entertainment center.

And Oakland? Left to deal with Al Davis, unprotected and powerless. They'll be lucky if all he does is colonize Piedmont.

On the other hand, there's this. If Baseball San Jose doesn't get the money, Stone's second and only other option is shutting the hell up.

This may strike the committee as blasphemy, but Santa Clara County is already sufficiently big-league without major league baseball. Having the A's will not enhance that, and not having them does not diminish that. It's a nice option, sure, but Vancouver doesn't have major league baseball and it's a hell of a town. Los Angeles doesn't have pro football, and it's ... well, never mind.

But the point is made. Santa Clara County must be shown it really needs the A's and the stadium that comes with it. Then it must be given both for free (which is the only way Name This Stadium Park was built, by the way, no matter what the Giants' publicity acrobats say), because the voters are just looking for a fresh new way to tie the ballot to the business end of a one- wood and drive it straight up someone's exposed nostrils.

So never mind the petitions, and bake sales, and donations at the junior prom, and all the other lightweight silliness. Raise, and bring, half a billion dollars, or take a double portion of Option B. It's as pure and simple as that.