Walk-Off

The Mercury News: A’s relocation: Teachers union to file lawsuit that could stop public funds for Vegas stadium

On 11/9/2023 at 8:47 AM, DustDevil61 said:

Are we sure Tepper’s not trying to pull some kind of Major League situation here? I wouldn’t entirely be surprised if we found out he’s been on the phone with San Antonio, San Diego, or St. Louis groups for a while now.

On 11/9/2023 at 2:23 PM, throwuascenario said:

I've seen that theory before though and never understood the logic. Why couldn't he still move the team if they were good? There's nothing in the lease about low attendance allowing them to move as in the movie (I think, I've never seen it). Wouldn't it be easier to some extent to get tax dollars in any city for a stadium for a good team than for a terrible team?

 

Lastly, why would he want to move the team at all? There's no market that doesn't have a team that would be even close to as attractive a market as Charlotte. And his hometown (Pittsburgh) will never ever get a second team.

 

I definitely could see him moving the team, don't get me wrong. But that would be because he doesn't get the stadium deal he wants, not because he wants the team in a different market. So how could he have known in advance he wouldn't get a stadium deal? It just doesn't make sense.

Maybe I am missing something, but part of my impression of David Tepper is that from the moment that he secured ownership of the Carolina Panthers, he has been agitating for, at the minimum, an extensive renovation and rebuild of the Panthers' current stadium or, at the maximum, the building of a whole new stadium for the Panthers.  Thus, it stands to reason that if no government in the Charlotte area is offering a stadium deal that pleases Tepper enough, he will at least be tempted to consider moving the Panthers to a place like St. Louis (with an indoor stadium that might be easy to renovate), San Antonio (also with an indoor venue that might be easy to refurbish), or San Diego (with usually more comfortable weather for outdoor football than Charlotte and a new-ish college stadium designed for easy expansion to an NFL-level seating capacity).

As for why Tepper would sabotage the Panthers on the field in order to help justify a relocation, one must consider that the NFL's leadership and the owners and executives of teams across the league might be simply much more comfortable from a public relations standpoint if a team that loses a lot of games and thus has below-average attendance is trying to move than if a frequently winning team with above-average attendance is seeking to relocate.

On 11/9/2023 at 10:56 AM, Burmy said:

I still think that if the Triangle gets an MLB team, they should be called the Durham Bulls.

Recognizable name, full of history, protagonists of the most realistic baseball movie ever...the team doesn't even have to play in the city of Durham for it to work.

On 11/9/2023 at 3:17 PM, throwuascenario said:

The brand really is that strong. I doubt they would do it though. Especially because any team would likely play in Raleigh and the Bulls would most likely continue to play in AAA. So there would be an MLB Durham Bulls in Raleigh and then a likely-unaffiliated AAA Durham Bulls in Durham. Would be all kinds of confusing.

If a Major League Baseball team were to play home games in the City of Durham and/or Durham County or in a part of the Raleigh-Durham-Cary Combined Statistical Area that is in neither the City of Durham nor Durham County, but is clearly closer to Durham than to Raleigh, then ... and only then ... could I support such a team being called the Durham Bulls.  On the other hand, should an MLB team be based in the City of Raleigh and/or Wake County or in a section of the Raleigh-Durham-Cary CSA that is outside both the City of Raleigh and Wake County, but is decidedly closer to Raleigh than to Durham (e.g. Zebulon, the Carolina Mudcats' current hometown), then I think that a made-from-scratch, Raleigh-oriented identity would be a far smarter choice.

Please think about this for a moment.  How likely is it that a Durham Bulls brand for an MLB team with a home field in either Raleigh proper or a suburb in Raleigh's cultural and economic sphere of influence would be regarded as tone-deaf and dismissively disrespectful by many people in the Durham-focused and Raleigh-centric halves of the region?  If you live in Durham, would you not at least suspect that the regional MLB franchise's ownership thinks that your city is good enough to be represented in the team's name, but not good enough to contain the team's actual home ballpark?  Meanwhile, if Raleigh is your home, would you not feel at least indignant over the MLB team in your proverbial backyard, as opposed to a Durham resident's proverbial backyard, opting to glom onto the history and Hollywood-induced fame of a minor-league baseball brand rooted deeply in "the other big city" in your region?

Besides, the major advocacy group for a Raleigh MLB franchise seems to have too much of a Raleigh-first-and-only provincialism to want anything to do with Durham, let alone with the Durham Bulls organization and brand.  For starters, those in charge of the Raleigh MLB group seem to think that their desired team and a still-minor-league Durham Bulls club could coexist with each other easily.  Furthermore, all of the ballpark sites proposed so far by the Raleigh MLB group look to be firmly within the Raleigh city limits.

Then again, neither the A's nor the Rays seem to have any interest in moving to Raleigh or any nearby part of North Carolina anytime soon.  Thus, I will try to steer this thread back on topic with a link to a Morgan Wick blog post -- The Blunt Reality Facing Oakland Sports Fans -- that was made in late June, but which I find to be very relevant right now, with MLB owners presumably planning to vote on the 14th, 15th, or 16th of this month as to whether or not to let the A's relocate to the Las Vegas market.

Las Vegas Sun: Oakland passes resolution to keep A's as MLB vote on move to Las Vegas looms

Weekend link dump:

Ballpark Digest: Rays unveil St. Petersburg ballpark plan, ask for swift consideration from the city

Athletics Nation: Elephant Rumblings: Oakland Invites A's Fans to Tuesday Press Conference Urging Team to "STAY"

6 hours ago, Digby said:

Heartwarming! This pitcher finally has more rings than domestic violence suspensions!

5 hours ago, Cujo said:

Add: Milwaukee Brewers.

Please excuse me while I set up a doctor's appointment for my foot-in-mouth disease.

1 hour ago, Cujo said:

We can now remove the Rangers from this infamous list:

 

Arizona Cardinals (76 years)

Cleveland Guardians (75 years)

Sacramento Kings (72 years)

Detroit Lions (65 years)

Atlanta Hawks (65 years)

Texas Rangers (62 years)

Minnesota Vikings (62 years)

Speaking of infamous lists, the Rangers' triumph means that the San Diego Padres (first season: 1969), the Seattle Mariners (first season: 1977), the Colorado Rockies (first season: 1993), and the Tampa Bay Rays (first season: 1998) are MLB's four remaining current teams without a World Series championship, with the Mariners having the added indignity of being MLB's only extant team that has not yet even played in a World Series.

A special congratulations should go out to Rangers relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman, who pitched briefly in tonight's game.  Now, he is part of two especially history-making World Series title runs; he was one of the relievers on the Chicago Cubs squad that won the 2016 Fall Classic.

17 hours ago, McCall said:

In case this was never covered, this past summer, The Athletic did a player's poll on potential expansion cities they'd like to play in. Nashville was the overwhelming winner. Las Vegas was left off as this was done after the A's announced their intentions to relocate, but Oakland was on it and garnered no votes, less than Salt Lake City, Vancouver and San Juan, PR.

Oakland's inability to garner even one vote in that poll adds fuel to the fire of my mixed feelings regarding the current attempt to move the Athletics to the Las Vegas market.  As badly as I feel for the many working-class people who at least seem to abound within the present-day fanbase of the A's, and as miserly and as generally unsympathetic as John Fisher and the overall current A's ownership group have proven to be, I also wonder if too few people in the #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam movement have thought enough about what can and should be done to make Oakland a more attractive destination for not only owners of major-league professional sports teams, but also the people who get paid to play for such teams.

As an aside, while no one in that poll volunteered to express a preference for San José, I am curious as to how that particular Bay Area city would have fared had the pollster(s) made it an active option.

6 hours ago, Fowler said:

If Charlotte had a strong ownership group with a rock solid ballpark plan, they would be a shoo-in. 

6 hours ago, kimball said:

Raleigh seems like a better option. But, outside of that, I'd still rank Nashville ahead of Charlotte if they're only taking one east coast team.

The last time that I can recall any semblance of an active campaign for a Charlotte MLB team was at least two decades ago.  Since then, I have had an impression that the Charlotte area's business elite, media, and general public have all been resting on their proverbial laurels and assuming rather strongly and stubbornly that their metropolis has had a lock on getting an MLB team either through a relocation or from the next batch of expansion franchises.  To use a metaphor inspired by Aesop, I think that in terms of having a future as the home of an MLB club, Charlotte has been a hare while the likes of Nashville, Portland, Salt Lake City, and -- to use an example from within North Carolina -- Raleigh have all been tortoises.

1 hour ago, Dilbert said:

At a St Petersburg council meeting, the Rays gave a presentation on the new stadium development project. Apparently part of the agreement is the Rays play one game, wearing "St Petersburg Rays" jerseys (pending MLB approval).  To me this just screams the whole "Anaheim" schtick, that city forced the Angels to do, where the city didnt want to be little brother to Los Angeles so the team compromised with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim bs. St Pete doesnt want to play little brother to Tampa.

I seem to recall that Tropicana Field (originally the Florida Suncoast Dome) was itself a product of an unwillingness within St. Petersburg's business and political establishments to let their city accept a stature below that of Tampa; Bob Andelman's book Stadium for Rent: Tampa Bay's Quest for Major League Baseball seems to make that point clear in an early chapter.

Now, if, indeed, the Rays are obliged to wear a St. Petersburg-themed jersey as a condition of replacing the Trop with another ballpark in that city, then that only furthers my belief that Stuart Sternberg made a lazy and cowardly decision by choosing to keep the team in St. Pete and not seeming to work harder to secure a new home field in Tampa or elsewhere in Hillsborough County.  Oh, well ... at least a St. Pete tribute jersey worn by a St. Pete-based MLB team would do a lot to put the "City" in "City Connect".

• If the Rays' upcoming ballpark and related development existed in a complete vacuum, both geographically and historically, the overall proposal would be a wonderful idea.  Also, I am glad that Stuart Sternberg has revealed that he and the Rays organization will pay for the majority of the costs of the whole project.  Unfortunately for Sternberg and the Rays, putting the entire development in its proper geographic and historical contexts causes me to be dismayed with the whole plan and to regard the plan as being specifically rife with not only greed (as Sternberg and the Rays will still extract hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers across St. Petersburg and Pinellas County and will get a cut of the revenue from the redevelopment of so many acres of land throughout the neighborhood where the Trop stands now and where the Rays' new ballpark is to be located), but also laziness and cowardice (as Sternberg seemed to be unwilling to put much of an effort into making this kind of deal happen in Tampa and/or Hillsborough County, let alone commit enough of his own and/or the Rays organization's money to make the project feasible on Tampa's side of the bay).
• The only realistic way that I could see the MLBPA accepting contraction is if, in return, every remaining MLB team starts eighteen (18) players in every game, with every batter being a designated hitter and every pinch runner being a designated runner.  The pitcher would only pitch and field, each of the other fielders would only field, each batter would only bat and run the bases, and all that a pinch runner would be allowed to do after he finishes his initial baserunning stint is take his predecessor's place as a DH.
• Even if the MLBPA can be swayed to accept contraction in MLB and its affiliated minor leagues, various politicians are likely to oppose contraction enough to introduce bills that would punish MLB for putting whole franchises out of business.  Such measures, should they become law, could do as little as abolish baseball's antitrust exemption or do as much as break up MLB teams' farm systems and subject every professional baseball league operating in a given country to a European-soccer-style pyramid of leagues with mandatory promotion and relegation of teams across leagues at different levels.
• Any debate over which MLB teams to cull via contraction is likely to run into discrepancies between teams with strong ticket sales but locations that are unattractive to free agent players and teams in the opposite situation.  For instance, while the Twins and the Pirates might have easier jobs of finding buyers for tickets than do the Rays or the Marlins, the typical free agent might be far more eager to experience the kind of lifestyle that is possible in Florida than to deal with a presumably less glamorous life in the Rust Belt.

8 hours ago, Dilbert said:

They've already been around for 2 seasons.

On one hand, I feel very embarrassed that I had assumed that the Topeka Tropics were a completely new team and not just another entry on the long list of professional indoor football teams that have jumped or are jumping from one league to another.

On the other hand, the Tropics' current situation helps to illustrate my longstanding doubts about the basic economic viability of professional indoor tackle football in general.

• A professional indoor tackle football team's opportunities for revenue are limited by (a) tackle football's violent nature and the resulting need to play no more than one game per week (and, therefore, play less frequently than an ice hockey team or especially a basketball team); (b) the fact that an indoor venue built mainly for basketball and/or ice hockey tends to have a noticeably smaller footprint, and thus noticeably fewer potential spaces for ticket buyers, than a stadium (whether outdoor or indoor) that is built around a full-size gridiron football field; and (c) an arena-size gridiron football field's tendency to take up slightly more space than an NHL-specification hockey rink, which, in turn, requires any given arena to have slightly fewer seats for indoor football than for hockey (and definitely fewer seats for indoor football than for basketball).
• To make matters worse for a professional indoor tackle football team, the cost of running such an enterprise is heightened by (a) the need for a larger roster of players and a larger coaching staff than what an ice hockey team or especially a basketball team requires and (b) the rather obvious need for each player on a tackle football team to wear a uniform that is essentially as elaborate and as complex as an ice hockey player's uniform ... and certainly more elaborate and more complex than a basketball player's uniform.

All of these factors make me wonder if professional indoor gridiron football would be, in general, a more lucrative sport -- and would have wealthier and longer-lasting teams and at least one wealthier, longer-lasting, and definitely more stable league -- if all of those leagues and teams switched to flag football.  Maybe then, the sport would have a low enough physical impact on its players to let each team play multiple games -- and thus enjoy multiple chances to make money -- in each week of a given season.  At the very least, a shift to flag football would enable players on indoor pro teams to wear simpler and, therefore, more affordable uniforms.

As soon as I saw that post announcing the launch of the Topeka Tropics, I ran a search on the website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office for "Flint Tropics" trademark registrations.  What I saw was that (a) every US federal registration to date of the full logo, and the only US federal registration to date of the wordmark, for the Flint Tropics as used in the movie Semi-Pro has expired, and (b) only one US federal registration of the phrase "Flint Tropics" (without an associated wordmark or logo) is currently active, and it belongs to someone with an address in the People's Republic of China.

To make a long story short, I think that this upcoming Topeka Tropics team is a prime example of how "Just because you can do something does not mean that you should do it."

Tampa Bay Times: Rays ‘highly optimistic’ about getting St. Petersburg stadium deal done

My own takeaways from this article are:

• Just as John Fisher has said in at least one of his recent interviews that he wants to keep owning the A's for as long as possible, Stuart Sternberg states in this article that he wants to hang onto the Rays for as long as possible ... and also, more specifically, as long as the Rays are playing somewhere in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area.  (I will have more on that in a bit.)  Unlike Fisher, however, Sternberg admits to being receptive to offers to buy his team for a high enough price.  I, for one, think that Sternberg is walking a refreshingly fine line between honesty and humility on this kind of matter.
• Sternberg claims that much more progress is being made on a proposal for a new ballpark anchoring an 86-acre mixed-use development in St. Petersburg's Historic Gas Plant District (the neighborhood where Tropicana Field happens to be located) than on any alternative on the Tampa / Hillsborough County side of the bay.  If he is telling the truth, then I, personally, feel disappointed by such news, given the Rays' longstanding and well-documented struggles to draw fans to the Trop.  However, if the Rays need to stay in St. Pete and especially in their present neighborhood in order to have any future as a Tampa Bay team, then a ballpark within a mixed-use development full of high-density and high-value residential units would at least create a potential for a large "captive audience" of people who could afford tickets to lots of Rays home games and take short walks to each of those games.
• Another noteworthy thing mentioned by Sternberg is that if the Rays clinch an agreement for a new ballpark in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, he will insist that any would-be buyer of the Rays accept said deal and keep the franchise in its current market.  However, should the only acceptable deal(s) for a new venue for the Rays be outside the Tampa Bay region, then he would sell the Rays rather than move the team himself.  If Sternberg is being truthful on this issue, then his stance, ironically, reminds me of the Giants' near-relocation to the Tampa Bay area just over three decades ago; Bob Lurie was unwilling to move the Giants out of the San Francisco Bay Area on his own, but was willing to sell the Giants to a group that wanted to relocate the team away from that region.  As for the past (and, IMO, horribly awkward) idea of the Rays splitting seasons between the Tampa-St. Petersburg and Montréal areas, Sternberg argues that it would have been a way for the Rays to maintain a base in the Tampa Bay region -- enough of a base, I presume, for him to keep feeling comfortable with owning that team.

Steering this thread back on topic ... especially with regard to an MLB franchise whose ownership, unlike that of the White Sox, is actually making an active and public pursuit of a relocation right now ... Raj Mathai of the Bay Area's NBC-owned-and-operated television station scored one of the least likely and most surprising feats that any journalist can garner these days: an interview with John Fisher.

Here is the transcript.

NewBallpark.org: Apples and Oranges

IMO, this commentary does a great job of articulating a few of the aspects of the #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam movement that I have found to be embarrassingly and frustratingly naïve, even if that movement happens to have a seemingly well-meaning set of goals on the surface.

In particular, I think that the author summarizes his main point rather well with the article's second paragraph:

"Recently, East Bay politicians and fans settled on a talking point: If Fisher only needed 9 acres and wanted to build only a ballpark, he could’ve done that much more cheaply and quickly at Howard Terminal. If you don’t think about it, it sort of makes sense. But there are obvious problems with the argument."

Las Vegas Review-Journal: A’s begin relocation application process with MLB

• I think that Depressed Ginger has an unduly strong obsession with the exteriors of NBA arenas (if not of sports venues in general).  It is easy for me to imagine Adam Silver and other executives at the NBA's headquarters having concerns about the interior of an arena, the level and kinds of amenities available to spectators within an arena, and the level and kinds of facilities and equipment available to players, coaches, and league officials within an arena.  However, I cannot see why the NBA's leadership would care so much about how any given NBA team's home venue looks on the outside.
• One impression that I get from both that article from WWLTV.com and that video from Depressed Ginger is that Adam Silver and others at NBA HQ seem to have stronger concerns about the condition and features of the Smoothie King Center than do the Pelicans' own ownership and management.  In particular, I notice that even the WWLTV.com report does not have even any anonymous Pelicans official go on record as calling for that arena to be either aggressively renovated or replaced in order for the Pels to stay in the New Orleans area; the only people quoted directly in that whole article are an executive at the company hired to manage the arena for the Louisiana state government and the host of a podcast that covers the Pels, with a brief mention toward the end of that report of something that Silver said to another New Orleans-based news website.  If the NBA's commissioner and his lieutenants are indeed less content with the respective states of current arenas across the NBA than are the team owners themselves, then the commish is running a high risk of pushback from the people who are the most direct writers of his paychecks.
• If (a) the Smoothie King Center is outdated enough that the NBA and/or whoever owns the Pelicans would want that franchise to be relocated and (b) the NBA's bigwigs keep insisting upon saving at least Seattle for an expansion team, then which currently NBA-free places in North America have arenas that would be acceptable to the league's leadership and are deemed to be fair game to receive a relocated NBA team?  Does Kansas City, Missouri's T-Mobile Center still satisfy all of the NBA's present criteria?  Does any NHL team in a currently NBA-free market other than Seattle (e.g. Buffalo, Nashville, Pittsburgh, St. Louis) have ownership that can afford to own and run teams in both the NHL and the NBA?  Now that the Golden State Warriors have a state-of-the-art arena in San Francisco, would the NBA be finally willing to let the NHL Sharks' ownership buy the Pels and move them to San José as long as said ownership is both willing and able to pay a large enough indemnity to the Warriors organization?

2 hours ago, Cosmic said:

I'm convinced the only reason the Coyotes have this current (bad) owner at all is because of the gambling license. It's the sports equivalent of hiding Grandma's body so you can keep cashing her Social Security checks.

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

It's ironic that this rare gambling license has been entrusted to a man who cannot pay his debts.

I have said it before and I will say it again: I think that the biggest (if not only) reasons why the Coyotes are still playing anywhere in Arizona and why that team's executives (with the blessing of (if not outright help from) the NHL) keep fighting to the death to play at even a barely suitable venue within Arizona's borders are the current owner's "precious" Arizona sports betting license and Arizona state law's foolish requirement that a sports betting license that is not held by an Arizona-based Indigenous community be co-owned with a professional sports entity located within that state.  If betting on sports needs and/or deserves to stay legal in Arizona, then lawmakers in that state should repeal that criterion for sports betting license holders as soon as possible so that taxpayers across Arizona would no longer be under so much pressure to subsidize the financially unsustainable enterprise that the Coyotes and their organization have proven to be.

The Nevada Independent: Lombardo signs A’s baseball stadium funding bill; relocation hurdles remain

As this year's "Southern Nevada Tourism Innovation Act" awaits the current Nevada governor's signature, I want to express my very mixed opinions and very mixed emotions on this issue.

On one hand, I find it shameful that John Fisher, his partners, and their allies are looking to inflict such raw deals upon people in both California and Nevada.  Fisher seems all too willing to become the next Walter O'Malley -- that is, someone who takes a Major League Baseball team away from a gritty, largely working-class, ethnically diverse, religiously diverse community full of people who have loved and cared for the team deeply for many decades, and then puts the team in a place with a far warmer and sunnier climate and a much glitzier and more glamorous image.  At least the Dodgers as owned and run by O'Malley had a steady stream of success on and off the field during both their last few years in Brooklyn and their first few years in Los Angeles, and at least O'Malley's hunger for government aid, as far as I know, was confined to wanting a municipal government to condemn a large swath of land so that he could buy said land inexpensively and then build his own new home field for the Dodgers with only his own money.  By contrast, Fisher and his underlings are seeking to force the residents and businesses that occupy any and every square inch of Nevada -- even the residents that live and the businesses that operate in parts of Nevada that are closer to Boise, Idaho than to Las Vegas or even Reno -- to spend years sacrificing hundreds of millions of their tax dollars for a venue that will be exempt from practically any substantive means of taxation, all to host a franchise that, under its current ownership, has been quick to jettison any player or coach the moment that he is thought to become too costly to keep.  In the meantime, the sports fans that the A's would be leaving behind in Northern California will still have to endure the, to put it kindly, thrifty practices of the Fisher clique's "stewardship" of Major League Soccer's San José Earthquakes.

On the other hand, I cannot help but feel what would be best described as frustration toward what I believe to be some naïve and unrealistic expectations and preferences within the whole #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam movement.  My impression is that too many current fans of the A's have been expecting one of only three possible courses of action -- Fisher et al. (a) go full speed ahead toward moving the A's to Las Vegas, (b) have a change of heart and reconcile with Oakland for a deal on a new ballpark, or (c) sell the A's to someone who keeps the team in Oakland -- with the latter two scenarios seeming to be treated by these fans as the only two possible consequences of a failure to secure a relocation to Las Vegas.  To me, such thinking overlooks the possibility that Fisher and his associates would try to move the A's to Portland, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, etc. if the Las Vegas option falls apart or that the A's would be sold to a person or group that is even more determined to move the team to a different Bay Area locale (e.g. San José) at best or a market hundreds of miles away at worst.  (In other words, in that last scenario, John Fisher avoids becoming his generation's equivalent of Walter O'Malley, but is instead MLB's answer to Howard Schultz, the man who sold the Seattle SuperSonics to Clay Bennett.)

Further hurting the #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam crowd's argument in my eyes is that movement's apparently widespread fanboyism toward Joe Lacob.  He had the Warriors ditch Oakland for San Francisco, and yet we are supposed to take him at his word if and when he says that he would keep the A's in Oakland should he ever get his hands on that team?  Yeah, right!

Yet another frequent example of naïveté that I have seen from #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam activists is an insistence that anyone wanting an MLB team in the Las Vegas area should hold out for an expansion franchise.  When one looks at how Fisher and his minions have commanded the A's and what Fisher and his lackeys have been demanding from both Nevada's political leadership and the general public throughout the Silver State, such advice seems to be very sensible.  Unfortunately, such advice also seems to ignore (a) the Las Vegas area's current lack of any MLB expansion team advocacy campaign that is genuinely comparable to the Portland Diamond Project and/or the Big League Utah group and (b) the fact that the Sacramento market, the Portland market, and even the Salt Lake City market are more populous, per-capita wealthier, and definitely less tourism-dependent alternatives to the Las Vegas market for an MLB expansion team in the Western United States.

Finally, with regard to something that could have given the A's a brighter and more sustainable future in the Bay Area (though maybe not in Oakland per se), I have to agree with @NYCdog and disagree with @Ferdinand Cesarano on the territorial rights issue.  Yes, the A's made a sportsmanlike gift of South Bay territorial rights to the Giants more than thirty years ago.  Yes, I can understand why anyone with fond memories of the most triumphant era(s) in the history of the A's in Oakland would want the team to keep playing specifically in Oakland.  However, neither of those factors changes the fact that the Giants (a) built what is now Oracle Park within that team's original Bay Area territorial footprint, at a site that is the farthest away from the South Bay of any regular home venue so far in the Giants' Bay Area history; (b) have retained the freedom to locate their permanent home field in many more parts of the Bay Area than do the A's, ever since receiving that South Bay gift; and (c) have a lock on putting their home ballpark in practically any and all of the wealthiest communities in the Bay Area, whereas the selection of ballpark sites available to the A's has been financially poorer per capita in addition to being geographically narrower.  To make matters worse on the territorial rights front, if and when the A's are gone from the Bay Area for good, I expect that the Giants will then make every effort imaginable to have their territorial rights expanded to encompass the few counties that the A's have been allowed to claim.  Should that happen, then any attempt to put a new MLB team in Oakland or even in the East Bay in general would face all of the same hurdles that stand against any effort to bring an MLB franchise to San José or anyplace else in the South Bay.

Congratulations to the Denver Nuggets -- at the end of their 47th NBA season and their 56th season overall -- on becoming the second former American Basketball Association team to win an NBA championship!

2 hours ago, Marcos Flamengo said:

Which would mean that Gray Television would launch their own in-house sports division, just like Scripps did it?

Gray Television has an "in-house sports division" already -- Raycom Sports, which launched in 1979 as a producer and syndicator of college basketball game telecasts and which Gray gained when it bought the broader Raycom Media company in 2019.  If Gray's portfolio of sports properties grows enough that the company's executives feel a need to utilize an operation similar to Scripps Sports for production and distribution of television broadcasts of sports events, then Gray should be more than able to tap into the personnel and technology on hand at Raycom Sports.

9 hours ago, GDAWG said:

Rays vs. A's starting today in the "Battle of MLB Teams with Crap Stadium Situations" 

The second game of that series, which is scheduled for tomorrow night (June 13), is being targeted for a "Reverse Boycott" by many A's fans who are eager to show still-widespread, still-strong support for the A's in Oakland and nearby communities and to pressure John Fisher, Dave Kaval, et al. to sell the A's to a person or group who will be much more willing both to keep the A's in Oakland and to spend generous sums of money on the team.

Lest we forget, tomorrow night (June 13) is the night of the "Reverse Boycott" game, which has been targeted by a group of A's fans as a time to (a) form one of the largest crowds for any A's home game in the team's history in Oakland, (b) demonstrate that the A's still have a large and passionate fanbase in and around Oakland, and (c) pressure John Fisher and his partners to sell the A's to a person or group who will keep the team in Oakland, get a deal done with Oakland's political establishment for a new ballpark, and spend much more money on the team than what Fisher, Dave Kaval, and their associates have been willing and/or able to spend.

Tomorrow is also the first day of a three-day series of meetings among MLB team owners in New York City.  Obviously, the organizers of this "Reverse Boycott" are hoping that the A's home game on that night will have a crowd that is both big enough and loud enough to persuade as many MLB teams' ownerships as possible to (a) call for Fisher and his group to sell the A's as soon as possible and (b) insist that whoever owns the A's keep that franchise in Oakland for as long as possible.

21 hours ago, JerseyJimmy said:

I honestly think it's more likely that the Spurs move up to Austin down the line than an expansion team getting put there.

In all fairness, part of my thinking when I typed that post was that (a) the population of not only Austin and its metro area, but also the whole state of Texas, has been growing to the point that Texas could soon be -- if it is not already -- able to support four NBA franchises (just as California does), and (b) having the Rockets, the Spurs, and the Mavericks all stay put and then adding an Austin team would be a more sensible path to four NBA clubs in Texas than, say, a second Greater Houston franchise or even a team on the Fort Worth side of the North Texas Metroplex (regardless of what becomes of the Spurs).