Walk-Off

Recently in this thread, at least one person has asked why so much of the current speculation regarding the NBA's next expansion favors Seattle and Las Vegas instead of, for instance, a pairing of Seattle and a much more easterly market.  Also in this thread recently, at least one person has expressed doubt about the Timberwolves' long-term viability in Minnesota.  How likely is it, then, that the NBA would rather add two teams out west so that the league can then prop up the T-Wolves through an easy realignment of that franchise into the Eastern Conference?  A look at the great-circle distances between Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport and the predominant domestic and/or transborder commercial airports in every other current NBA market reveals (or at least suggests) that the next six closest NBA markets to the Twin Cities are all in the Eastern Conference -- Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, and Toronto, to be exact.

Last Friday (May 26), Brodie Brazil put out four YouTube videos with content and commentary related to the Athletics' Southern Nevada ballpark quest.  In the last of those vids and in a subsequent tweet, he speculated that those renderings might be several months old or even a few years old and, in any case, are extremely likely to have been made well before the A's organization's present understanding with Bally's Corporation and Gaming and Leisure Properties, Inc.  At least in the vid, Brazil notes that the renderings not only have the ballpark occupying easily more than its proposed footprint of nine acres, but also lack any of the development that Bally's now wants to build on the remaining 26 acres and that would flank the ballpark to the north (along Tropicana Avenue), northwest (where Tropicana Avenue and the Strip intersect), and west (along the Strip).

Thanks to the Nuggets' triumph tonight, if all goes according to plan, come June 1, after 47 seasons, every one of the four NBA teams that started off in the American Basketball Association will have at least one NBA Finals appearance to its name.

6 hours ago, VampyrRabbit said:

How about Meruelo buys Phoenix Rising instead and finds the money to build a stadium and enter MLS, finally letting the NHL take the Coyotes behind the toolshed? Is there any chance of that happening?

One can hope.

In the meantime, the respective current members of each of the houses of the Arizona state legislature need to wake up and realize that their state's present restrictions on eligibility for sports betting licenses are giving owners of professional sports franchises across Arizona a disgustingly perverse incentive to try to keep even the financially sickliest of pro sports teams alive and operating in Arizona at all costs (literally as well as figuratively).

12 hours ago, Gary said:

The majority of the voters were 65 plus. It was the blue hairs that turned down the arena.

9 hours ago, Cosmic said:

I don't doubt it was the blue hairs voting, but nobody had to come out- all voters were automatically sent a ballot. It's just that nobody cares about that Coyotes.

Maybe it is just me, but I think that, throughout both the Coyotes' history in Arizona and the history of the Florida Panthers, there has been surprisingly too little discussion about the extent to which the heavy concentrations of retired residents in the Phoenix and Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan areas have hampered the respective attendance figures of the Coyotes and the Panthers and have thus caused the Yotes and, to a possibly lesser extent, the Panthers to have the most chronically fragile economic situations of any two current franchises in the NHL.

To me, at least, the negative impact of large populations of retirees on the bottom lines of the Yotes and the Panthers comes down to four basic factors:

• People (regardless of age) who move from areas with consistently cold winters to regions with milder winters tend to have less interest in activities requiring ice and/or snow than do the friends, neighbors, and relatives that they have left behind.
• Even if a transplant (regardless of age) from a traditional ice hockey market with heavy support for at least one established NHL team stays interested in hockey upon moving to a place that has an NHL club but a much shorter and more threadbare history of hockey fandom, the transplant is likely to remain loyal to whatever NHL team that person was supporting "back home."
• At the risk of my invoking a possibly unfair stereotype, older adults tend to be more rigid in their preferences in general and in their sports team allegiances in particular than are younger adults, adolescents, or children.
• Worst of all for the financial wellbeing of a major-league professional team in any sport, many (if not most) retirees have incomes that are too low and especially too fixed to enable regular purchases of tickets to such a team's games.

11 hours ago, VampyrRabbit said:

Bettman is almost certainly going to do all he can so the Coyotes can have another chance to make things work in the Sun Valley over taking the NHL back to Hartford.

8 hours ago, SCMODS said:

Bettman must be getting nightly visits from Jerry Colangelo's ghost threatening to possess the Damian Thorne wannabe if he doesn't keep the Yotes in Arizona. 

As fun and as fashionable as it has been to criticize Gary Bettman for being the chief culprit behind the cockroach-like persistence of the Coyotes' presence in Arizona, I am of the opinion that, as time goes on, the confluence of current Yotes owner Alex Meruelo and the State of Arizona's sports betting license law will deserve a steadily greater share of the blame for all of the desperate measures being undertaken to have the Yotes stay in Arizona than will Bettman or any future NHL commissioner.

• Currently, Arizona law requires any broad-based sports betting license not held by an Indigenous community in Arizona to belong to a professional sports organization located within Arizona (or the owner of said organization).
• Alex Meruelo holds an Arizona sports betting license that he was allowed to obtain only once he bought the Coyotes.
• If Meruelo lets the Yotes move out of Arizona, he has not become the owner of any other pro sports entity in that state by then, and Arizona's government has not loosened its criteria for sports betting licenses, then he will lose that license.

On 5/14/2023 at 7:57 PM, BBTV said:

Relo fees are usually to either discourage owners from moving on a whim, or to compensate the other owners for losing something - whether perceived or real.  Like with the Rams - the owners were losing the ability to use LA as the bargaining chip to extort money from cities, as well as allowing one of their peers to exponentially increase the value of his franchise and be able to compete harder against them.  The reality is that they had milked the LA opening for as much as it could have been and someone was going to move there, but they wanted to be compensated.

 

In this case, I doubt there's a single owner that wouldn't want this situation figured out ASAP, and I don't think MLB is using LV as a bargaining chip.  It's A's or expansion... that's it.  While expansion would certainly line their pockets more, it's still costing everyone to keep the A's in Oakland.

I see no reason to disagree with any these points.  Even so, I have come across a fair number of comments elsewhere on the Internet that criticize MLB for not intending to impose a relocation fee on a move of the Athletics to the Las Vegas market.  Such disapprovals seem to be fueled mainly by (a) a concern that any future attempt to relocate an MLB franchise will include a demand that no relo fee be charged and/or (b) a belief that MLB team owners in general have a habitually stupid tendency to pass up opportunities to make money in ethical ways.

In particular, I agree with the notion that no one in MLB is likely to use Las Vegas as a bargaining chip.  This is because, personally, I believe that the Las Vegas area might have barely enough people to be able to host an MLB club profitably, but that region is still too small and is still too poor per capita to be an especially effective bargaining chip for an owner eager for a new ballpark deal in a team's existing home area.

On 5/15/2023 at 2:16 PM, WestCoastBias said:

Lacob is on record saying that the A's should remain in Oakland. If he was to buy the team, I see no reason why he wouldn't pull out all the necessary stops to remain in Oakland and build a new ballpark on his dime.

Joe Lacob can say whatever he wants to say about wanting the A's to stay in Oakland and at least being willing to keep the A's in Oakland should he ever buy that team.  However, as far as I can see, Lacob has done absolutely nothing so far that would back up such proclamations.  On the contrary, the Warriors' departure from Oakland under Lacob's ownership suggests to me that Lacob, like John Fisher, is likely to move the A's out of Oakland at the first possible opportunity.

Maybe Lacob chooses not to put the A's in a place that is at least a triple-digit number of miles away from Oakland.  Even so, I would not put it past Lacob to, for instance, mimic Fisher's past pursuit of a ballpark for the A's in San José so that, like the Warriors, the A's could play in a per-capita wealthier section of the Bay Area.  Furthermore, if Lacob is both richer and smarter than Fisher, he might offer the Giants an indemnity of many millions of dollars to let the A's into the South Bay at long last.  Anyone with a simple desire for the A's to stay in the overall Bay Area might be pleased with a San José home for the team, but I suspect that the most Oakland-centric fans of the A's will be quick to equate such a relocation with the Dubs' move to San Francisco, become furious toward Lacob, and allege that Lacob has betrayed Oakland once again.

Certainly, lots of A's fans and plenty of journalists and pundits who have been following the A's ballpark issue have every reason to be fed up with how Fisher and his underlings have run the team, to yearn for anyone or anything to prevent Fisher from taking the A's away from Oakland, and to plead for Fisher and his partners to sell the team as fast as possible.  However, I think that too many of these people are currently exhibiting an apparently blind and disturbingly naïve trust in Lacob's claims of wanting to keep the A's in Oakland.  If nothing else, I think that Sheng Thao and other powerful figures at Oakland's city hall might still be so bitter over their city's loss of the Warriors that they are far more skeptical of Lacob's words and, therefore, would demand that both Lacob and MLB agree to the most rigid commitments possible to have a Lacob-owned A's team stay within the Oakland city limits for multiple decades and to build any future home venue for the A's within Oakland's boundaries.

https://newballpark.org/2023/05/14/two-peas-in-a-decrepit-pod/

This article, the latest from a blog that has been covering the Athletics' ballpark quest since March 2005, contains some insightful observations of the current situations of both the A's and the Rays.  The "P.S." section of the article is particularly enlightening.

10 hours ago, BBTV said:

There is no circumstance in which either team would be asked to pay half a billion dollars as a relocation payment.  I've not found any source that any relocation fee (whether waived or not) has even been decided on.

https://apnews.com/article/mlb-sports-baseball-las-vegas-business-dcd9f06b76427130d3aebff610b0325c

https://sports.yahoo.com/oakland-won-t-face-relocation-234958778.html

The above two articles, both from last December, state that Rob Manfred told the media that the A's would not pay a relocation fee should they move to the Las Vegas area.  The latter article, which Yahoo Sports repurposed from the paywalled Sportico website, goes so far as to include a direct quote from Manfred that admits to the A's being allowed to dodge a relocation fee if they choose to make the Las Vegas market their new home.

As for what an MLB team would be normally expected to pay for the right to relocate somewhere, I think that I have heard $500,000,000 tossed around as the figure in at least one Casey Pratt video and/or at least one Brodie Brazil video.  If my memory is faulty on this matter, then I stand corrected.

On 5/13/2023 at 6:31 PM, the admiral said:

I think Warriors ownership's table will be ready before Fisher can start sniffing around Portland or Salt Lake City.

4 hours ago, Ridleylash said:

Lacob's already expressed interest in the A's as far back as 2005, so I think he's perfectly happy with getting the A's.

I do not understand why so many people seem to be looking to Joe Lacob -- the man who moved the Warriors from an arena next to the Oakland Coliseum to their current venue in San Francisco -- as a potential savior of the A's, let alone as someone who would keep the A's in Oakland.  Yes, the Warriors have risen to probably their highest-ever levels of success both on and off the court while Lacob has been that team's principal owner.  However, that raises these two questions:

• If Lacob at least seemed to think that Oakland was not good enough for the Warriors, then why would he deem Oakland to be good enough for the A's?
• Between Lacob and his business partners moving the Dubs across the Bay and the present effort by John Fisher and his group to secure an escape from Oakland for the A's, why should Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and her allies trust Lacob as the main owner of the A's?

To be honest, if I were Sheng Thao, I would treat Joe Lacob and what he claims to want to do with the A's as if I have two daughters, Lacob was an awful boyfriend to my elder daughter, and I have just learned that Lacob wants to date my younger daughter right after she has undergone a painful breakup of her own.

If the English-language Wikipedia's article on NBC's college football television coverage is anywhere close to being correct, this year will be the first since 1965 in which the NBC over-the-air network televises a regular-season CFB game not involving Notre Dame or an HBCU.

I can think of many reasons why what John Fisher and his circle are trying to do with the A's might be different -- and might lead to a different aftermath -- from what the Maloof family attempted to do with the Sacramento Kings.  Here are a few of them:

• The late David Stern's criteria for markets worthy of keeping or gaining NBA franchises might have had some key differences from Rob Manfred's priorities regarding which areas are most deserving of retaining or earning MLB teams.
• By all appearances, MLB intends to add at least two teams if and when -- and only if and when -- both the A's and the Rays resolve their respective ballpark conundrums.  On the other hand, the NBA was in no hurry and in no mood to expand at all when the Maloofs were looking either to relocate the Kings themselves or to sell the Kings to someone who would then try to move the team.
• MLB has been subjecting the A's to a January 15, 2024 deadline for a concrete plan for a new ballpark in order for the team to keep receiving revenue sharing payments.  I do not recall the NBA requiring the Kings to meet any deadline for a plan for a new arena so as to maintain or gain any special financial privilege.
• I definitely do not recall the NBA offering a relocation fee waiver to the Kings, let alone for a move to any specific market.  By contrast, MLB is willing to forgo any relocation fee -- a payment of $500,000,000 under normal circumstances -- should the A's relocate to the Las Vegas area.  As far as I can tell, MLB is not offering this waiver for either a move by the A's to anyplace else or any relocation of the Rays.  If that is true, then I wonder if Rob Manfred and/or most of the current owners of MLB franchises (a) want an MLB club in the Las Vegas market as soon as possible, (b) want the A's to leave Oakland and the overall San Francisco Bay Area as soon as possible, and (c) want the Rays to stay in the Tampa-St. Petersburg market more -- maybe even much more -- than they wish for the A's to keep themselves ... ahem ... rooted in Oakland.
• As to why MLB would tolerate, let alone desire, a long-distance relocation of the A's more than it would accept such a move by the Rays and more than the NBA was willing to let the Kings depart from the Sacramento market, it may well be because certain people in high places within MLB believe that the presence of the A's in Oakland -- even during its fifty-sixth season -- is unusually expendable.  Oakland and the A's share a media market with San Francisco and its Giants, that market is currently the smallest one with two MLB clubs, and the A's are at least widely assumed to be (a) a poorer team than the Giants and (b) playing in a poorer-per-capita part of the region than the Giants' immediate backyard.  On the other hand, a move of the Rays to anywhere outside the Tampa-St. Petersburg market (even to Orlando, which shares a media market with some communities along Florida's Atlantic coast but not with any locale on or near the Gulf of Mexico) would leave that team's present home region without any MLB franchise, just as an exit of the Kings from Sacramento would have turned the NBA's presence in that market into an absence from said area.

I agree that the Athletics' owners and executives have made some outlandish decisions in at least some of their attempts to get a new ballpark (regardless of location) since the start of this millennium.  However, between the aggressive actions being taken lately by the A's to try to get something done in the Las Vegas market and MLB's January 15, 2024 deadline for the A's to have a firm deal on a new ballpark in order to keep receiving shared revenues, I think that, whether or not any of us likes it, (a) John Fisher and his partners are currently well on their way to having the A's leave the Bay Area and (b) a sale of the A's, let alone to anyone who would keep the team in the Bay Area, seems to be both highly unlikely in general and something that Fisher and his consortium would conduct only as a financially motivated last resort in particular.

If the owners of the A's cannot get what they want in the Las Vegas area, then they might look toward Salt Lake City and possibly work with Gail Miller and her Big League Utah group.  If SLC ends up disappointing Fisher and his clique, then they might aim for Portland, Oregon and maybe join forces with the Portland Diamond Project.  Should Fisher and his lieutenants determine that Portland is not a viable option, but they still want to keep the A's west of the Central Time Zone, then Sacramento and/or Vancouver might come into play.

If none of those ideas pan out ... then what?  The Nashville Athletics (my admittedly biased preference should the A's be once again east of the Mountain Time Zone)?  Les Athlétiques de Montréal?  Los Atléticos de la Ciudad de México?  If this quest goes on for much longer, then it could get even wilder and weirder than it is already.

https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/athletics/as-new-las-vegas-ballpark-plan-comes-with-a-strip-view-2775451

I thought that the A's organization's proposal for a ballpark with a major-league-level seating capacity (even if it is 35,000 at the most) and a retractable roof on only nine acres of land was already foolish.  Now comes word that those in charge of the A's want the field at their apparently current dream home at the Tropicana resort site, on the east side of the Las Vegas Strip, to face northwest so that, at least when any retractable roof is open, the Strip could be seen behind the outfield stands.  Unfortunately, another thing that could be seen beyond the outfield stands of a westward-facing baseball field during afternoon games and even the early innings of many night games -- again, at least when a retractable roof would be open -- is the sun ... an often 100-plus-degree-Fahrenheit sun in Southern Nevada ... thus putting way too many batters, catchers, home plate umpires, fans in what would be choice seats at most ballparks, and media personnel in the press box at way too much risk of eye damage.

Is creating the potential for a glitzy backdrop during the seventh-inning stretches of possibly just a handful of night games really worth giving a big-league ballpark such a discomfort-inducing layout?  If John Fisher and his minions have been yearning so much for a ballpark that would allow at least those behind home plate to see the skyline of the Strip, then they should have stuck with (and should have kept enduring the presumably higher costs of) the Wild Wild West site, from which a view of buildings along the Strip would be to the east ... and, therefore, would face away from the sun during afternoons and evenings.

As reported by The Nevada Independent at 1:59 Pacific time this afternoon:

A’s pivot to new site for Vegas baseball stadium, lowering public funding request

Okay, so Will Levis has gained a better fate in this year's NFL Draft than what I predicted.  With that said, I hope that Levis recognizes and understands how his new status as a Titans draftee is causing the Titans organization to suffer its second self-inflicted public relations black eye this week, so soon after swaying the Nashville Metro and Tennessee state governments to commit more than a billion dollars of public money to help the team build an indoor replacement for Nissan Stadium.

As I type this, a clear majority of the Levis-related comments that fellow Titans fans of mine have made public via Twitter are angry, bitter disapprovals of that selection ... and express a belief, which I happen to share, that the Titans would have been far smarter to spend that pick on University of Tennessee quarterback Hendon Hooker.  At least choosing a QB from the most popular college football team in the Titans' current home state would have helped to soften the blow of the stadium deal.  By contrast, the drafting of Levis -- coming from what is both a neighboring state's flagship public university and a longtime rival of the Vols in multiple sports -- seems to have taken a barrel full of 93-octane gasoline from the Exxon station bordering Nissan Stadium's parking lot and poured it onto the fire of widespread public furor over so many tax dollars going to the Titans' new digs.  While the University of Kentucky may not be a traditional powerhouse in football, it is still easy for me, at least, to imagine my (and any other Titans fan's) personal displeasure over the choice of Levis over Hooker being precisely what many fans of the Detroit Lions -- who took Hooker last night in the draft's third round -- would feel and express if and when the Lions choose to draft a skill position player from The Ohio State University instead of a comparably talented and equally available University of Michigan player at the same position.

Another thing that I am noticing in the realm of "Titans Twitter" is a common labeling of Levis as "Jake Locker 2.0" -- a concern that Levis has too many of the same flaws as the University of Washington QB that the Titans selected in the 2011 draft's first round.  If you ask me, an at least equally valid and equally unflattering comparison of Levis to a past Titans draft pick at QB would be to the 2006 draft's third overall pick, Vince Young ... with Hendon Hooker being the equivalent of whom I have always wished that the Titans took with that pick, Matt Leinart.  While Young may have been a great all-around athlete, his subpar passing skills and his poor mental approach toward the QB position per se led him to underachieve constantly as an NFL player.  Meanwhile, Leinart's professional playing career got off on the utterly wrong foot thanks to the stubbornly pathetic customs of the Arizona Cardinals organization, and he ended up spending most of his NFL playing days as a backup.  Worst of all, IMO, is that the Titans were preparing for their second season with Norm Chow, who had overseen Heisman Trophy winner Leinart and his teammates on USC's offense, as their offensive coordinator ... and then proceeded to blow a golden opportunity to reunite Chow with Leinart!

I have always regarded -- and probably will always regard -- the selection of Vince Young to have been a lose-lose situation for the Titans and Matt Leinart.  I think that the Titans would have won more games and enjoyed more and deeper postseason runs had they chosen Leinart in the first round in 2006, and Leinart would have enjoyed a longer and more fruitful career as an NFL player had the Titans been the team that brought him into the league.  Similarly, I fear that going with Will Levis will create a lose-lose scenario for the Titans and Hendon Hooker.  Barring an intensive sharpening of multiple physical and mental skills relevant to the QB position, Levis seems to be at risk of playing less reliably than Hooker would do if all things are equal.  Meanwhile, the Detroit Lions -- who, like the Arizona Cardinals, have a decades-long reputation for chronic organizational incompetency -- may very well waste and ruin Hooker as a player in the same way that the Cardinals seemed to waste and ruin Leinart.

Could "San Antonio Sentries" work?  Not only would the overall name be alliterative and fairly easy to say, but "Sentries" (plural of "Sentry") might be a fitting tribute to the Texian soldiers who tried to guard the Alamo against Mexican forces in 1836.

51 minutes ago, FinsUp1214 said:

With regards to Levis, the Rams at pick 36, Tennessee at 41, Washington at 47, or even Tampa Bay at 50 make some sense. He could develop a year in any of those places (maybe longer if in LA). If he slides past all of them, however, then there must be a massive red flag somewhere. Turf toe, arrogance, too much mayo in coffee, who knows.

One should not forget the "deathly fear" of milk that Levis seems to possess.

Seriously, though, as unfair and as unfortunate as it might be for Levis, the cluster of quirky behaviors and attitudes that he has been revealed to have are putting him at risk of being labeled a "crazy person" (to put it kindly) among decision makers throughout the NFL ... to the point that he might be taken with a shockingly late pick in the draft ... or even not be drafted by any NFL team at all.

On 4/26/2023 at 9:01 PM, BBTV said:

If those minimum-require numbers are true, I have to assume the people behind the stadium aren't idiots, an they'll get there - even if via temporary seating. LFF "only" holds 67k, but can go up to 80k with temporary bleachers in the SRO sections (unless some of their newer permastructures cut down on that.)   My biggest problem with this is the cover, though that's obviously needed in order for them to host these events.  Just wish it could be retractable, always open for football, and a truly open stadium - not just a hole in the roof.

 

But... even if they do get a Super Bowl (which seems to be the norm for a new stadium, even if just a one-time thing), will the NCAA work them into their rotation?  When was the last time a team was added to their championship rotation?  Will the influx of new events really justify a new >1B investment for a structure that will still remain empty most of the time?

• The Titans' new stadium will be already expensive and already complex with a roof that is fixed and not retractable.  Besides, the emergence of mass production of lightweight, translucent ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) roof panels for large buildings is further helping to reduce demand for retractable roofs and revitalize the appeal of fixed roofs at large sports venues, as evidenced by U.S. Bank Stadium, SoFi Stadium, and Allegiant Stadium.
• Sure, a retractable roof that exposes an entire stadium when open and is somehow required to be open at all times during every football game is an easy thing to desire if and when one believes in a nostalgic, romantic notion that every football game must always expose everyone present to the elements.  Unfortunately, such a roof would be even more complex and even more costly than something that exposes only the playing surface and leaves a canopy over the stands when open.  Even worse, such a harsh restriction on the roof's use would (a) subject football games at that stadium to lightning delays that each tend to last at least thirty minutes and that could be avoided completely if the roof were allowed to be closed for a football game; (b) force the stadium's staff to choose between opening the roof shortly before each football game and closing it shortly after each football game (thus putting needless wear and tear on the roof and its related mechanisms just for the sake of maximizing the number of indoor events held between football games) or leaving the roof open all throughout the football preseason, regular season, and postseason (thus requiring the stadium to pass up opportunities for indoor events for almost half of every year and putting the roof at risk of being stuck permanently in either an open state or a closed state due to underuse of the opening-and-closing mechanism(s)); and (c) disqualify the stadium from hosting a Super Bowl and/or a College Football Playoff championship game unless winters are very mild at the stadium's location.
• Between Nashville's basic appeal to tourists and the NCAA's unsettling combination of an apparent desperation for more venue choices for the Division I men's basketball Final Four and an apparent unwillingness to bring that event back to traditional basketball arenas, I have a very easy time seeing an indoor home of the Titans becoming one of the most frequent hosts of the men's (or even women's) NCAA D-I hoops Final Four.  Furthermore, I would not rule out the Southeastern Conference -- which almost always holds either its men's basketball tournament or its women's hoops tourney at downtown Nashville's Bridgestone Arena these days -- utilizing the Titans' new stadium for at least one men's tourney in that sport.

On 4/26/2023 at 11:53 PM, Sec19Row53 said:

It was talked about earlier here, but the concrete structure of Nissan Field was incorrectly built. It lacks appropriate rebar in places. It isn't repairable.

As I see it, the best-case scenario for a claim that Nissan Stadium was built so shoddily as to require an outright replacement would be if the stadium's construction happened to have used materials and/or techniques that have ended up being ill-suited to the humid subtropical climate that Nashville and most other parts of the South have.  If so, then the Titans would be at least the second major-league professional sports team in the South to undergo a venue replacement due to seemingly unforeseen flaws in a previous venue's construction.  A big reason why the Omni Coliseum, the NBA Hawks' first permanent home arena in Atlanta, gave way to what is now State Farm Arena was that the weathering (that is, deliberately pre-oxidated) steel that dominated the exterior of that venue proved to be far less durable and far more prone to continued corrosion in Atlanta's climate than in climates that are decidedly cooler (such as in Pittsburgh, whose U.S. Steel Tower has a weathering steel exterior) and/or drier.

Besides the basic matter of how much money will be spent to build and maintain an indoor stadium for the Titans, my main concern with this project is whether or not the stadium's specifications will be generous enough to enable the hosting of many of the events that many business and political leaders throughout Nashville are hoping that such a venue will attract.  Right now, from all that I have read, this new stadium is being planned to have somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000 permanent seats.  Unfortunately for such a proposal -- and unless the rules have changed recently -- my understanding is that the NFL's criteria for a Super Bowl host venue include an ability to seat at least 70,000 for football.  Likewise, the NCAA's rules for a venue that hosts a Division I men's basketball Final Four seem to call for a minimum of 70,000 seats around a centrally located basketball court.  While a basketball court is definitely smaller than a football field, could a 60,000-seat (let alone 55,000-seat) football stadium be genuinely able to have enough seats be placed atop the outer parts of a football field to reach a capacity of 70,000 for basketball?

1 hour ago, LMU said:

The real winner in this whole scenario may be Fresno.  If Summerlin is taken over then they'll potentially be right back up in AAA after being swatted down to Low-A after the whole minor league reshuffle.

As nice as it might be for Fresno to regain Class AAA professional baseball, another likely scenario is that the A's and the Aviators not only coexist in the Las Vegas market in general over the long term (just like the Atlanta Braves and the Gwinnett Stripers, the Houston Astros and the Sugar Land Space Cowboys, the Minnesota Twins (of Minneapolis) and the St. Paul Saints, or the Seattle Mariners and the Tacoma Rainiers), but also even play at the same ballpark in Summerlin while the big-league club's new venue is under construction.  I lived near Nashville when a now-demolished ballpark in that city hosted both the established Class AAA Sounds and a temporary Class AA team nicknamed the Xpress for two seasons, so I know that the A's and the Aviators would have at least one model for pulling off a similar situation.

1 hour ago, who do you think said:

[S]urely this Vegas development blows up the Utah proposal, right?

I doubt that.  If Big League Utah is anything like the Portland Diamond Project and/or the Music City Baseball consortium in Nashville, chances are that those in charge of the Salt Lake City group would be at least as satisfied with an expansion team as they would be with a relocated franchise.  Besides, every expansion-related public statement that I have seen or heard from any MLB official over the last few years has been that MLB will keep waiting until both the A's and the Rays gain new ballparks before expanding again.  Furthermore, among the comments that I have read outside this message board since the emergence of this tentative agreement has been a bit of speculation that the recent launch of Big League Utah and its MLB bid put a fresh wave of pressure on officials in the Las Vegas area to clinch a deal with the A's.

1 hour ago, BBTV said:

Baseball isn't like football, which can rely on visiting fans making road trips.  Baseball requires the local connection, and to me, keeping the A's brand would be more of a hinderance.

Even if baseball requires more of a local connection than does football, it seems quite clear to me that baseball requires also more of a historical connection than does football or any other team sport with a traditionally large following in North America.  For many decades, baseball has tended to attract lots of North American fans who have cared more deeply about the history and traditions of that sport than the average North American fan of football, basketball, or hockey has cared about that particular sport's history and traditions.

Thus, I think that keeping the championship-filled, Hall of Famer-laden, geographically very portable Athletics / A's brand upon relocating to the Las Vegas area would be much safer and much wiser than conjuring a new, patently Las Vegas-centric identity.  As I see it, that latter alternative would make decidedly more sense for a team that has a geographically far more specific nickname and/or plays a sport with a clearly less history-conscious fandom.

Shortly after the news broke in Las Vegas, both Casey Pratt and Brodie Brazil uploaded YouTube videos in which they gave their respective initial reactions.

I will let everyone reading this post watch either or both of those videos and make up their own minds as to what to think about Pratt's and/or Brazil's takes.  However, I do find it amusing that Brazil's video has already attracted at least one commenter advocating for MLB to put an expansion team in Oakland if and when the A's leave and even at least one other commenter expressing a hope that the Tampa Bay Rays would move to Oakland if and when the A's depart from that city.

Should the A's consummate a move to the Las Vegas area or any other place well away from the overall Oakland-San Francisco-San José media market, I, for one, do not see MLB letting any existing team relocate to join the Giants in the Bay Area, nor can I imagine Oakland per se regaining a presence in MLB even via an expansion franchise.  Instead, as far as I can tell, the absolute best hope for a post-A's Bay Area to have two MLB teams again would be through an expansion that adds a club to San José or another South Bay locale.  Yes, the Giants have succeeded mightily at quashing any and all efforts by the A's to get a ballpark in any Bay Area community south of Alameda County.  However, I happen to be cynical enough to think that the Giants would tolerate a South Bay MLB expansion team -- a franchise that would be probably required to pay both a hefty expansion fee to MLB as a whole and a special indemnity to the Giants organization and which would need to start from scratch with its brand, roster, history, etc. -- much more than they have ever been willing to accept a relocation of a history-rich club like the A's to that same region.

On 4/14/2023 at 7:59 PM, the admiral said:

The Mormon Church is a moneymaking enterprise; they'll raise no stink about it if they run the numbers on a SLC baseball team and can find a way that they'd come out ahead. They're against gambling but built Las Vegas. They're against homosexuality but profited from radio stations that played Elton John and Joan Jett. The church owns a mall. They don't have actual principles that the rest of baseball would have to acquiesce to.

While I am not personally aware of anything that the Latter-day Saints Church has done to help "build" Las Vegas as we know that place today, I did live for a while in a region where, at the time, the LDS Church-owned Bonneville International Corporation owned and operated two commercial FM radio stations -- one specializing in classic secular rock music and the other devoted to alternative secular rock.  Thus, my impression is that the LDS Church has been most willing to own and/or run businesses that at least seem to contradict well-known church doctrines if and when the church can keep an extremely low profile about such enterprises.

Yes, the LDS Church's highest-ranking leaders have apparently spent decades tolerating Sunday home games played by the current Salt Lake Bees club, previous professional baseball teams in Salt Lake City, and pro baseball teams elsewhere in Utah (e.g. the Pioneer League's Ogden Raptors) and in heavily Mormon communities outside Utah (e.g. the Pioneer League's Idaho Falls Chukars).  Even so, I would not put it past the LDS organization's grand poobahs to be brazen enough to exploit Major League Baseball's far higher profile and level of wealth by trying to hold an MLB franchise in the church's mother city to an unreasonably much higher standard regarding compliance with LDS doctrines on matters such as the home game schedule.  Should that happen, I hope rather strongly that the team's ownership and/or the MLB commissioner's office will use the LDS Church's history of "sinful" business ventures to push back hard against any such demand.

On 4/12/2023 at 4:27 PM, GDAWG said:

So the rule is not state law, but it's out of respect for the Mormon religion.  Which is why the Jazz and Real Salt Lake play road games on Sundays and why the NFL would never work in Utah (among other reasons).

Games in the NBA and especially in MLS are spread out enough that both the Jazz and Real Salt Lake seem to have a luxury of declining to play home games on Sundays.  (The average NHL team's schedule tends to be more or less as spread out as that of an NBA team, so a Salt Lake City NHL franchise would be likely to enjoy that same privilege.)  By contrast, during a typical MLB regular season, calendar weeks in which a given team has two or more days off are rare, and, every now and then, a team will need to play at least one game on every day within a given calendar week.

As I think about this issue, I would not be surprised at all if an MLB club based in the SLC market were to want as many of its home stands as possible to contain Sunday off days and Monday-through-Saturday game schedules.  However, that would then raise the question of what MLB and the SLC team would do whenever a home stand starts directly after a Sunday road game.  The team could hit the ground running right after a Sunday away tilt with home games from Monday through Saturday and wait until the next Sunday for a break, but the MLB Players Association might then allege that such a schedule would wear out the SLC team's players too much.  Another possibility is that a home off day in the week following a Sunday away game could be salvaged with a Saturday home doubleheader, but the MLBPA might then object to its members (on both the home team and any and every visiting team) spending so many hours at work on so many Saturdays in SLC.

On 4/13/2023 at 1:07 AM, tBBP said:

It's been a while since I last been to SLC, but just based off those three flutes: hypothetical as all that is, are they eyeballing either the golf course next to the refineries and railyard down off 3300 or (last I knew) that empty patch next to the refineries further up the 15 between it, the beltway and Redwood Rd? Those are about the only two open patches of grass I can remember (& of course that was nearly three years ago so ain't no telling what they may have done with those patches of land by now).

According to this SLTrib.com article, the Big League Utah group being led by Gail Miller (longtime Jazz owner Larry's widow) is, for now, seeking to build an MLB park within the Power District -- a redevelopment of a 100-acre property located on Salt Lake City's west side, bound by the Jordan River to the east and both North Temple Street and a light rail line to the north, and owned by Rocky Mountain Power (which is itself helping to redevelop the parcel).

Between Gail Miller's deep pockets and the seemingly well-thought-out initial ballpark plan, I think that Big League Utah is off to a great start and, therefore, the likes of the Portland Diamond Project and the Music City Baseball effort in Nashville would be foolish to underestimate this new initiative from the Beehive State.