Stadium/Arena Saga Omnibus

[who do you think]

Disrupt the balance of what? The Giants sell out the park for eternity while the A's have been buried and forgotten for over two decades, so clearly Northern California is not a strong two-team region. The Dodgers, Angels, and Padres are apparently all relevant and competitive enough in their environment to buy up all of free agency between them every year. The A's in Vegas won't be siphoning any of those fans off. I see no problem.

 

If only that dumbass 98 expansion never happened. The A's could have just bounced to Arizona by now and be doing their piddling hospitality house operation in the airplane hangar, and the Rays wouldn't exist in the first place. 

[VampyrRabbit]

5 hours ago, who do you think said:

Disrupt the balance of what? The Giants sell out the park for eternity while the A's have been buried and forgotten for over two decades, so clearly Northern California is not a strong two-team region. The Dodgers, Angels, and Padres are apparently all relevant and competitive enough in their environment to buy up all of free agency between them every year. The A's in Vegas won't be siphoning any of those fans off. I see no problem.

 

If only that dumbass 98 expansion never happened. The A's could have just bounced to Arizona by now and be doing their piddling hospitality house operation in the airplane hangar, and the Rays wouldn't exist in the first place. 

The Rays would probably still exist without that expansion. The lawsuit brought up by Vince Naimoli after the MLB owners blocked him from taking control of and moving the Giants to the tomb in St. Pete would have just resulted in a team being moved to the Trop, most likely either the Expos after Jeff Loria sold the team to MLB, or the Marlins after the fire sale after winning the World Series in 1997.

[BBTV]

1 hour ago, VampyrRabbit said:

The Rays would probably still exist without that expansion. The lawsuit brought up by Vince Naimoli after the MLB owners blocked him from taking control of and moving the Giants to the tomb in St. Pete would have just resulted in a team being moved to the Trop, most likely either the Expos after Jeff Loria sold the team to MLB, or the Marlins after the fire sale after winning the World Series in 1997.

 

Maybe, but much like LA in the NFL, TB's lack of team served as a negotiating tactic for teams that could threaten to move there.  Ironically, it probably made MLB more money without a team than it has with one.

[GDAWG]

 

[WestCoastBias]

On 3/4/2023 at 11:30 PM, who do you think said:

Disrupt the balance of what? The Giants sell out the park for eternity while the A's have been buried and forgotten for over two decades, so clearly Northern California is not a strong two-team region. The Dodgers, Angels, and Padres are apparently all relevant and competitive enough in their environment to buy up all of free agency between them every year. The A's in Vegas won't be siphoning any of those fans off. I see no problem.

 

If only that dumbass 98 expansion never happened. The A's could have just bounced to Arizona by now and be doing their piddling hospitality house operation in the airplane hangar, and the Rays wouldn't exist in the first place. 

 

The A's aren't that irrelevant. They had back to back 97 win seasons not that long ago in 2018 & 2019. They won the AL West back to back in 2013 & 2014. Six postseason appearances since 2010. Certainly better than what the Angels or Padres (or anyone out west besides the Giants and Dodgers) have done in the same time frame. I've never felt that the A's were viewed here as the same as the Clippers for instance, or the Chargers once they moved to LA. Or the Sac Kings.

 

If the A's got a stadium in the late 90's/early 00's like much of baseball, they'd be just fine. Certainly would be a better situation than Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, KC, Miami are right now. 

 

 

[who do you think]

11 hours ago, WestCoastBias said:

The A's aren't that irrelevant. They had back to back 97 win seasons not that long ago in 2018 & 2019. They won the AL West back to back in 2013 & 2014. Six postseason appearances since 2010. Certainly better than what the Angels or Padres (or anyone out west besides the Giants and Dodgers) have done in the same time frame. I've never felt that the A's were viewed here as the same as the Clippers for instance, or the Chargers once they moved to LA. Or the Sac Kings.

 

If the A's got a stadium in the late 90's/early 00's like much of baseball, they'd be just fine. Certainly would be a better situation than Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, KC, Miami are right now.

 

And we are once again back to the sad fact that nobody cares. This team doesn't play their home games in Mongolia. If anybody cared (and they have reason to, since like the Rays, Oakland consistently comes up with good players despite being broke and never goes very long between playoff appearances), they wouldn't be drawing Marlins-tier crowds at the ballpark.

 

What is it with this forum and conflating a team's on-field success with the notion that they must be popular and relevant in their market?

[WestCoastBias]

2 hours ago, who do you think said:

 

And we are once again back to the sad fact that nobody cares. This team doesn't play their home games in Mongolia. If anybody cared (and they have reason to, since like the Rays, Oakland consistently comes up with good players despite being broke and never goes very long between playoff appearances), they wouldn't be drawing Marlins-tier crowds at the ballpark.

 

What is it with this forum and conflating a team's on-field success with the notion that they must be popular and relevant in their market?

I think you missed the point of my post. The on field success makes them relevant and they do matter. They have a market, it's the East Bay along with the rest of Northern California. But the Coliseum might as well be Mongolia, I mean have you ever been there? It's a complete :censored: hole, why do you think the Raiders are in Vegas and the Warriors are in San Francisco now? They aren't the Clippers or even the Rays for a baseball example. This team has a history and people here know that, they just need a new stadium and the ownership to act like it gives a :censored:. I mean the Rockies average a Top 10 attendance every year with a worse team, why? Because they have a stadium people want to go to even if the team sucks. Stadiums matter. 

 

I get the feeling that if this was a midwest city this forum would defend the team to the end (was anyone wanting the Bills to move to Austin before the state pitched in a cool billion dollars?), but when it comes to the west coast or expansion teams like the Rays everyone just want to see them fail. 

[McCall]

7 hours ago, who do you think said:

 

And we are once again back to the sad fact that nobody cares. This team doesn't play their home games in Mongolia. If anybody cared (and they have reason to, since like the Rays, Oakland consistently comes up with good players despite being broke and never goes very long between playoff appearances), they wouldn't be drawing Marlins-tier crowds at the ballpark.

 

What is it with this forum and conflating a team's on-field success with the notion that they must be popular and relevant in their market?

If you have a good on-field team in a bad market, you relocate them to a good market, not just drop them. If you relocate them, that new market gets to start off with a good team, which would help it be more successful from the beginning.

 

I know logic is a foreign concept to you, but give it a shot.

[BBTV]

Good teams can become bad teams overnight (and vice versa.)  I wouldn't even factor in the on-field success of a team (unless it's one with the sustained track record of maybe the Yankees, Cardinals, etc) in a relocation or contraction discussion.

 

If you contract them, then the people who made the on-field product good would be able to get jobs elsewhere and make someone else's product good.  It kinda nets out.

[McCall]

23 minutes ago, BBTV said:

Good teams can become bad teams overnight (and vice versa.)  I wouldn't even factor in the on-field success of a team (unless it's one with the sustained track record of maybe the Yankees, Cardinals, etc) in a relocation or contraction discussion.

 

If you contract them, then the people who made the on-field product good would be able to get jobs elsewhere and make someone else's product good.  It kinda nets out.

Two words: Major League Baseball Players Association.

[gosioux76]

13 hours ago, who do you think said:

 

And we are once again back to the sad fact that nobody cares. This team doesn't play their home games in Mongolia. If anybody cared (and they have reason to, since like the Rays, Oakland consistently comes up with good players despite being broke and never goes very long between playoff appearances), they wouldn't be drawing Marlins-tier crowds at the ballpark.

 

You seem to be discounting the value of having a good fan experience.

 

Sports fandom is nothing more than tribalism, and we tend to assume that if you're part of the tribe then you must support it through any and all circumstances. But if the venue stinks and the experience is terrible, then I can't blame even the most die-hard of fans for not wanting to attend. That doesn't make them any less of fans, but it does suggest that the problem isn't necessarily the team's performance or any lack of interest. 

[Sport]

Going to a sporting event is a non-essential expense for an entertainment product, which means you have to win people to your park with the experience. If your experience is a dump of a venue that isn't fun to visit and/or difficult get to (Tampa Bay) then you're not going to attract as many fans as you would in a nice, more easily accessible park. That's just math. 

 

Additionally, the A's on-field product has been often good through sheer Billy Beane shrewdness, but that churn and burn style of roster management asks a lot of a fanbase. You're constantly meeting and then quickly saying goodbye to favorite players. *Cries in Reds* It's not great for sustaining reliable fan support. That and every time they do manage to cobble together a playoff team they seem to lose in 5 in the ALDS - After a while people check out because you can only go on the merry-go-round so many times before you lose interest and don't want to do another spin on the rebuild ride. Now, combine all of that with last season being the low point of a tank and, oh yeah, they still play in the worst stadium in all of North American sports, a title it's held since I was a kid in the 19 hundred and 90's, and you have a recipe for constantly sparse crowds. I don't know why some people want to deny these very valid factors and instead pretend an entire region of Americans are allergic to baseball.

 

A ton of people live in the East Bay region. Either they all hate baseball or there's big obvious, human reasons for the A's poor attendance. If John Fisher moves the A's to Las Vegas, they might do okay for a little while, but he's still John Fisher. 

[DG_YouKnowWhatThatMeans]

I took the BART to the Coliseum once and it felt like I had to walk through Thunderdome to get from the station to the stadiums. Once was enough for me.

 

A shame too, because there will forever be a part of me who remembers the 1989 Oakland A's as one of the coolest sports teams of all time. Dave Stewart, Dennis Eckersley, Rickey Henderson, Mark McGwire and Jose :censored:ing Canseco all on the same team? Incredible.

[OnWis97]

I went to an A's game on July 3, 2007. I thought the BART trip in from SF was OK and the walk, while partly a bridge that appeared to be made entirely of rust, didn't seem that bad. I went by myself because my wife was hanging out with friends. I told her I'd be back at about 10:30 (which turned out to be true). The game went something like 2:09.  But there were fireworks, so we were not allowed to walk the rusty bridge and had to take shuttle buses back to the station and it took that would-be-saved hour back. That left a terrible taste in my mouth (and I assume people that drove had no extra delay; don't get me started on preferences toward the car).  That said, I assume it's normally OK.

 

As for the ballpark, I loved every second of being there; sure I wish I'd seen it without Mount Davis but it was really kinda fun to be in a big ol' hunk of concrete with no amenities except for flag-waving fans. So, to be clear, I know it's an outdated dump that can't sustain an MLB team beyond next week, but it was a fun nostalgia trip and a college football like atmosphere (just days earlier I'd been to Pac Bell or whatever it's called and that was such a different experience. Beautiful ballpark but also just a cool place for people to be. Fan rabidity was only fraction in SF of that in Oakland. After all, who is going to go to an A's game just for something cool to do?).

Does this mean I like the Coliseum better than Pac Bell? No. Would I want it as my home ballpark? Hell no. But I kinda hope I get to go once more.

[Digby]

Also worth noting Oakland has never been a big attendance draw since even before the slow destruction of the Coliseum. They had good numbers during the late 80s, and middle-of-the-pack numbers during peak Moneyball. Otherwise pretty consistently near the bottom. They’d probably never top the list but it’s still a rough history, especially compared to the same time that the Warriors and Raiders were famously well-supported in the same location. 

[GDAWG]

4 hours ago, McCall said:

Two words: Major League Baseball Players Association.

 

They might (and that's the key word) be amenable to it if there is roster expansion for all of the other teams.  

[McCall]

59 minutes ago, GDAWG said:

 

They might (and that's the key word) be amenable to it if there is roster expansion for all of the other teams.  

They won't. First off, they've been adamantly against it. Second, even with roster expansion, you're not increasing the number of starting positions  to make up for those lost from the two contracted teams. They'd view those as higher paying jobs and therefore, even with roster expansion, they'd come out behind.

[GDAWG]

5 minutes ago, McCall said:

They won't. First off, they've been adamantly against it. Second, even with roster expansion, you're not increasing the number of starting positions  to make up for those lost from the two contracted teams. They'd view those as higher paying jobs and therefore, even with roster expansion, they'd come out behind.

 

Likely why contraction won't ever happen.  It's going to have to be relocation.  

[Ridleylash]

Any talk of contraction is a non-starter when we know the MLB is really looking to expand. Does anybody really think prospective owners will want to pay the MLB's desired expansion fees fresh off the heels of multiple franchises completely folding?

 

Especially when multiple other leagues are talking about expanding, anyways; baseball isn't anywhere near the juggernaut it used to be to make someone want a team in a league that looks less solid over an NBA or even NHL team.

[VampyrRabbit]

3 hours ago, Sport said:

A ton of people live in the East Bay region. Either they all hate baseball or there's big obvious, human reasons for the A's poor attendance. If John Fisher moves the A's to Las Vegas, they might do okay for a little while, but he's still John Fisher. 

If I'm a baseball fan in Nevada, why in the blue hells should I be excited for the relocation of the A's to Vegas? Fisher is treating the city of Oakland like s*** and putting on a sandbagging the likes have never been seen before.

How is that supposed to drum up fan interest in a potential new city?