Stadium/Arena Saga Omnibus

[Walk-Off]

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.

[BBTV]

25 minutes ago, Walk-Off said:

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. 

 

It was the $500M-$1B figure I was doubting, not the waiver.  I'd wager that there's math that shows where the break-even point is if the other owners no longer had to pay these teams their revenue-sharing money in exchange for forgoing a relo fee, and it probably makes a lot of sense to make relocation as easy as possible.  But there's no source as to the amount - I think it's something that was made up out of thin air.  It's definitely been printed, but not validated by anyone that would know anything.

 

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'm not sure where TB resides on the revenue-sharing list.

[kolob]

I wonder how many BINDING agreements one can have? Is this a record?

[GhostOfNormMacdonald]

 @kimball     I worked at a few law firms. The answer is, like so many things in life, "how rich are you?"  

 

Also. Can someone please fix typing on mobile I feel lime I'm going insane whenev Er I post

[WestCoastBias]

18 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

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?

 

I don't think the two situations are very comparable. Staying in Oakland was never a real option for the Warriors and I think most people at the time of the original announcement understood why.

 

Lacob's goal from day one was to make the Warriors one of the most valuable franchises in the league and that was never going to happen playing in Oakland (or so we thought). The Warriors represent the entire Bay Area and they wanted to play their games in the iconic city of the Bay Area, making them more marketable to fans and to free agents (which is an understandable premise). The plan was  for the Warriors to be playing in San Francisco in a world class arena (the Bay Area's own version of MSG or Staples Center) right when the team would hopefully start competing for championships (likely dropping the Golden State name for San Francisco too). Of course that's not what ended up happening as the arena got delayed and eventually changed locations while the team became one of the all time great dynasties and most valuable franchises anyway while still playing in Oakland which made the eventual move awkward. 

 

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.

[Walk-Off]

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.

[Walk-Off]

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.

[GDAWG]

 

[OnWis97]

I think the Rays still have a lease through 2027 at the Trop...It's the reason the Twins were nearly contracted instead of them. But maybe it'll be easier to get out of with just a few years  left?

[McCall]

35 minutes ago, OnWis97 said:

I think the Rays still have a lease through 2027 at the Trop...It's the reason the Twins were nearly contracted instead of them. But maybe it'll be easier to get out of with just a few years  left?

At this point, they really don't need to. Any new stadium anywhere probably isn't going to be complete until 2027/2028 at the earliest. They can very well just finish out the lease then move. Whether it's St. Pete, Tampa or elsewhere.

[GDAWG]

So umm...what exactly is a "loose agreement?"

 

 

 

[Burmy]

3 hours ago, GDAWG said:

So umm...what exactly is a "loose agreement?"

 

 

 

In the A's dictionary, it means it's set in stone, unlike the "binding agreements" which seem to change every week.

[GDAWG]

 

[McCall]

1 hour ago, GDAWG said:

 

I mean, Nashville Brewers could make sense...

 

... But, no. I just... I mean... no. Why? The stadium is only 21-years-old. Where are they needing $448M in repairs that could trigger a relocation?

[Ridleylash]

1 hour ago, GDAWG said:

 

Where would the Brewers even go for potential relocation with the league still looking into expansion?

[McCall]

30 minutes ago, Ridleylash said:

Where would the Brewers even go for potential relocation with the league still looking into expansion?

Relocation comes first, THEN expansion.

[Sykotyk]

5 hours ago, Ridleylash said:

Where would the Brewers even go for potential relocation with the league still looking into expansion?

There's no value for expansion fees IF there's a team on the market for relocation.

 

As for where Milwaukee could go: Nashville, Las Vegas (haha), Charlotte/Raleigh, San Antonio, Salt Lake City... not really many other options at this point. Portland will never happen now after they went all in with soccer. Every other major market has a team and probably won't let another squeeze in. Other big markets (Memphis, Birmingham, OKC, Orlando, Jacksonville, Sacramento, Norfolk area, Columbus, Buffalo, Indianapolis, etc)  probably don't have the excess fan dollar to support an MLB team for 81 home games a year. They're saturated with what they do have already. MLB is a huge commitment financially. 20k-30k at today's prices for 81 games? There's a reason MLB is the one league without the 'fringe cities'.

 

NBA has teams like Orlando, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, San Antonio and Memphis. NHL has American markets such as Raleigh, Columbus, Northern NJ (by identity, if not by playing location) and San Jose. NFL has Jacksonville, Buffalo, and you can kind of say Green Bay even though that's Milwaukee in absentia. Meanwhile, MLB's only market to themselves among Big 4 teams is San Diego. And that's only because the NFL left. MLB is so bad, that they have, currently, four markets with two teams (soon to be 3) because they need a ton of people with a ton of money to remain solvent.

 

And of those options I listed, i don't think any of them can really afford to support MLB today. MLB is hanging on to the aging/dying fanbase they have with the pockets to support them. The boomer class is their bread and butter. Younger sports fans were priced out of MLB years ago, and many young sports fans missed World Series games in their youth due to the late starts on the East coast to the point that MLB is an afterthought for fan support. It's why MLB is struggling to try to adjust the game to what they think will attract young fans (i.e., 18-35) range.

 

*(are the Sabres really a professional team?)*

[Digby]

“whispers of relocation could reportedly hit” is Brian Windhorst language. Not worth putting many brain cells toward.

[Dilbert]

Relocate to where? Unless MLB or an owner privately finances the building of a stadium and the infrastructure, they arent going anywhere. Nowadays, its extremely difficult to find a city that is willing to pony up taxpayer money to help fund the building of a stadium for a sports team run by wealthy owners. Plus AmFam is 22 years old and is still very usable. Oakland/Las Vegas needs to be the first priority for Manfred. The sooner they can get out of the possum dump the better. Tropicana, while not ideal is in better shape than Oakland. Id then place Angel Stadium after that. Milwaukee is far down on the list of stadium needs. If the Brewers dont get the funding, they can survive a little while longer without the upgrades. Not a big deal.

[GDAWG]

Angel Stadium could be interesting.  It's either stay there and build around the stadium or go elsewhere in the Greater Los Angeles Area, maybe to Long Beach.