Walk-Off
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Posts posted by Walk-Off
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On one hand, I think that the A's ownership's lack of progress on both a new permanent home ballpark in the Las Vegas area and securing a post-2024 interim venue is fomenting plenty of leverage for the Oakland and Alameda County governments. On the other hand, I am concerned that Oakland and AlCo will end up overplaying their hand as long as their negotiators insist upon more or less a Cleveland deal -- i.e. a stipulation that if and when the A's relocate, the A's leave behind their intellectual property and history in Oakland and MLB guarantees that one of its next expansion teams be in Oakland.
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How high is the chance that the Cubs and fans thereof (especially Cubs fans in high places in the Chicago city and/or Cook County and/or Illinois state governments) will fight hard against government funding for a new ballpark for the White Sox? Unless I am mistaken, Tom Ricketts and his family tried and failed to extract government funds for the "1060 Project" to renovate Wrigley Field and instead ended up spending their own money on the renovation. Therefore, I can imagine that the Cubbies and many of their fans would be especially livid over the Pale Hose extracting any (let alone a lot of) taxpayer dollars to build a new home field in the South Loop or even renovate their existing venue on 35th Street.
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As I understand it, the City of Las Vegas proper does not include the Tropicana site (or at least the majority of the whole Las Vegas Strip, for that matter), Allegiant Stadium, or T-Mobile Arena; all of those properties are in an unincorporated part of Clark County, Nevada. Thus, I suspect that the Las Vegas mayor's recent comment about the A's and their current ballpark quest stems ultimately from a rivalry with and/or jealousy toward unincorporated Clark County, and I doubt that she would express a wish that the A's work something out in Oakland if the team were targeting an at least equally problematic site that happened to be within the Las Vegas city limits.
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56 minutes ago, McCall said:
Yeah, which makes sense as a host for the A's, but not the "expansion team with the A's on hiatus" team. Otherwise, it's an expansion team that may be gone in a few years, rather than an established team where it's already known that they'll be in another city after that time.
To be fair and to be clear, my idea is that an MLB expansion team starting up during a hiatus of the A's would keep playing -- and, preferably, keep playing in its original geographic area -- well after a relaunch of the A's as a Las Vegas club and the debut of another expansion franchise that together bring MLB up to 32 teams. In short, I am proposing a two-step, asymmetrical expansion of MLB.
I realize that my overarching idea is complex. Then again, John Fisher, his underlings, and the MLB establishment have been entertaining an increasingly complex relocation of the A's, so, in that sense, what I am proposing would be all too fitting.
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When John Fisher and other A's officials visited the Salt Lake City area recently, what they were at least rumored to explore was the A's playing temporarily not at Smith's Ballpark, the Bees' current home, but rather at the presently-under-constuction future home of the Bees in one of SLC's southern suburbs.
What I was thinking, then, was that this expedited expansion MLB team would be awarded to Big League Utah -- which seems to be the best-capitalized of the groups vying publicly for an MLB team in a currently MLB-free area (in other words, more flush with cash than the Portland Diamond Project or the Music City Baseball group in Nashville) -- and would play its first few seasons at that suburban facility intended originally for the Bees while a permanent home for the team in SLC's Power District undergoes an expedited construction.
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I would argue that John Fisher and his allies across both the A's organization and MLB in general have themselves been creating problems in search of solutions, and thus forcing "gymnastic" ideas to be put into play, ever since Fisher et al. decided last spring to bail on Howard Terminal and instead go full speed ahead on what has become an increasingly convoluted effort to move the A's to the Las Vegas market.
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For several months now, I have been thinking that the A's might very well suspend operations between their final season in Oakland and whenever a new ballpark for them in the Las Vegas area is open. Playing a few more seasons in Oakland is likely to come with too many strings attached for the A's and/or MLB to accept. Crashing at Oracle Park for a few years might constrain the Giants too much. Going straight to the Aviators' ballpark for the interim seasons risks giving off the worst possible first impression of the A's to people in the Las Vegas market. Finally, playing temporarily at a minor-league venue that is in neither the Bay Area nor Southern Nevada (such as in Sacramento or Salt Lake City) comes with a high possibility of the locals being reluctant to support what would be a fly-by-night enterprise in their area.
As for how the MLBPA could be sold on letting the A's go on hiatus for a few years, I think that the answer lies in MLB staying at 30 teams by granting a single expansion franchise that would launch right when the A's start their hiatus. MLB could put the A's players through a dispersal draft open to all existing MLB clubs in addition to holding an expansion draft to stock the new team. With regard to the minor-league affiliates of the A's, either the expansion team could inherit the A's farm system outright or MLB could order or at least allow a reshuffling of minor-league team affiliations. Finally, once the A's are ready to start life anew as a Las Vegas team, then MLB can grow to 32 clubs by having another expansion franchise debut alongside the revival and relocation of the A's.
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Apparently, the White Sox have considered building a ballpark in Chicago's South Loop area at least twice before (and under at least two different ownerships).
Both links below are from SB Nation's South Side Sox blog.
South Loop Sox? (November 9, 2012)
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So far in this thread, I have noticed that if an airline belongs to Star Alliance, SkyTeam, or Oneworld, the logo for that alliance can be usually found on the same parts of the uniform as the league logo on a typical professional gridiron football team's uniform or the conference logo on a typical US college football team's uniform.
Personally, I find that small touch to be a very nice flourish of detail.
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As far as I know, January 15, 2024 -- the supposed deadline for the A's to have a firm deal on a new ballpark in order to remain a revenue sharing recipient, according to the current collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association -- came and went with neither the commissioner's office nor the union ruling one way or another on whether the A's had met that criterion.
Meanwhile ...
Los Angeles Times: Who's not funding push for Nevada vote on A's stadium funds? Nevadans
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Ballpark Digest: Goodbye Chowdahheads, hello New England Knockouts
The Frontier League's new club in Brockton, Massachusetts has changed nicknames before the team has played a single game. The new identity pays tribute to Brockton's boxing heritage, which includes being the hometown of professional boxing champions Rocky Marciano and Marvelous Marvin Hagler.
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So far this month, two tentative agreements on MLB venues have hit new snags.
Ballpark Digest: Orioles lease falls apart; is team in play?
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The Tennessean: Why Nashville mayor Freddie O'Connell met with White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf
This meeting happened yesterday (December 5, 2023), the next-to-last day of the 2023 MLB Winter Meetings, which were held in Nashville.
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ESPN.com: Oakland-area fans start Ballers, an independent baseball team
The Pioneer League's Oakland Ballers, or Oakland B's for short, are set to begin play in 2024 (thus competing directly with the A's for at least one season) at the on-campus baseball field of Laney College -- a site across the street from one of the places where the A's tried to build a new ballpark before their ultimately aborted pursuit of a venue at Howard Terminal.
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On 11/18/2023 at 8:52 PM, SFGiants58 said:
Blame Horace Stoneham for only claiming San Francisco and San Mateo counties, when he should’ve claimed the whole Bay Area region (North to Napa, the East Bay, and Santa Clara County). The A’s could’ve done what the Angels did and pay a fee to share all the counties of the region.
Had Horace Stoneham been both willing and able to claim the whole Bay Area for the Giants, I suspect that Charlie Finley, one of the ... shall we say ... thriftiest MLB team owners of his day, would not have dared to make the extra payment that would have been needed in that case to move the A's from Kansas City to Oakland, and thus would either have had the A's stay in KC or have kept looking for somewhere else to put the A's. For that matter, I cannot think of anyone who had the means to own an MLB team back then and would have been willing to shell out a special indemnity to the Giants just to move an existing MLB club to Oakland or secure an MLB expansion franchise for Oakland.
On 11/18/2023 at 7:13 PM, FiddySicks said:It’s been a real wild experience seeing A’s fans get so mad at the Giants like this whole mess was their fault.
My impression is that while A's fans who either just wanted their team to play practically anywhere in the Bay Area or outright favored a relocation to somewhere in the South Bay are understandably angry at the Giants over the territorial rights issue, many -- if not most -- of the #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam types have seemed to be Oakland-first-and-only provincialists who would oppose a relocation to the South Bay every bit as much as they scorn the current effort to shift the franchise to the Las Vegas area. As far as I can tell, the people in that latter group either do not care about the territorial rights situation at all or actually approve of the Giants' claim to the South Bay so as to minimize alternatives to Oakland for the A's.
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As I understand it, Oregon State and Washington State want to keep a semblance of the Pac alive so as to preserve certain NCAA-endowed rights and revenue streams. In particular, both schools are eager to retain their current conference's NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament credits.
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1 hour ago, the admiral said:
The Bay Area territory issue never made sense to me. The Dodgers and Angels have the same territory. So do the Cubs and White Sox. The White Sox almost moved to the near western suburbs and would have been, though farther from Wrigley itself, closer to the Cubs' suburban base than to the Sox' own base. The A's shouldn't have been in the position to sell San Jose to the Giants because it should have been both of theirs all along. What a stupid situation.
On one hand, I have been able to understand MLB's Bay Area territorial rights policy and situation in that the Giants and the A's had always played in separate municipalities and separate counties in that region -- whereas the Cubs and the White Sox have long coexisted within both the City of Chicago and Cook County, the MLB Angels started off playing alongside the Dodgers within both the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, and the Yankees and the Mets have coexisted (and, before 1958, the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers coexisted) within New York City, whose five boroughs each double as counties. On the other hand, San Francisco and Oakland have long shared a federally defined Metropolitan Statistical Area, and those two cities and San José are all inside both a common federally defined Combined Statistical Area and a common Nielsen-defined television Designated Market Area. So, in that sense, having the Giants and the A's enjoy territorial rights to all of the same locales across the Bay Area would have been the fairer and more just policy all along.
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USA Today: It's official: Oakland Athletics' move to Las Vegas unanimously approved by MLB owners
This article by USA Today writer Bob Nightengale gives a good in-depth view on the vote and a few of the remaining issues that surround the relocation.
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So this version of the AFL will launch with a Nashville Kats team and a Georgia Force team, huh? I can remember when the original AFL's original Nashville Kats moved to Atlanta and became the first version of the Georgia Force.
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MLB Stadium Saga: Oakland/Tampa Bay/Southside
in Sports In General
Posted
A "recruiter's error" would have been all too easy for Bud Selig to make. Lest we forget, Rob Manfred was the right-hand man of Selig -- who was himself an incompetent, corrupt, cronyistic abomination of a commissioner. Furthermore, Manfred was essentially hand-picked by Selig to be MLB's current commissioner; there were two other candidates (one of whom was backed by similarly incompetent and corrupt Jerry Reinsdorf), but favoritism by Selig seemed to be what swayed enough MLB team owners to pick Manfred.
As for an example of Selig's cronyism, an apparently key reason why John Fisher is the present principal owner of the A's -- and why the future of the A's is in such turmoil right now -- is because one of Fisher's co-investors in the A's, Lew Wolff, was in the same fraternity at the same university at the same time as Selig.