MLB Stadium Saga: Oakland/Tampa Bay/Southside

[tBBP]

44 minutes ago, MJWalker45 said:

 

Maybe they can just travel with the Savanna Bananas since they're trying to hit every MLB ballpark next year.

 

 

Not for nothing, but fun fact: the Bananas were actually in Vegas the weekend I was there this past May.  (Of course I went and saw the Knights play instead.)

[TrueYankee26]

2 hours ago, GDAWG said:

 

Also, Las Vegas isn't likely out of the running for an MLS team when MLS decides to expand to 32.  

Very possible if MLS goes this route

[GDAWG]

9 minutes ago, TrueYankee26 said:

Very possible if MLS goes this route

 

They will because its MLS.  While they should go fill 31 and 32 with two of Louisville, Indianapolis or Phoenix, they won't.  They will fill one of them with Las Vegas.  And then out of those three, they will go to Phoenix.  And seeing as this is also MLS, they will not be going after the USL Championship teams in any of those cities and create their own Louisville FC (or FC Louisville) or Indianapolis FC or Phoenix FC or Las Vegas FC.

[FiddySicks]

3 hours ago, GDAWG said:

 

The A's playing in Summerlin.....will the MLBPA sign off on it?  There's no doubt that they will sign off on the A's playing in Oracle Park for a few years, but I have doubts that they will sign off on playing in a minor league park.  Going to a minor league park for the A's would have to require a visit from upper management of the MLBPA before they sign off on it.  

I’m just hoping that whatever is left of the A’s Bay Area fanbase makes it so inhospitable for the team that they’re forced to leave the Bay Area before they’re ready to. Of all the kicks to the groin this team has delivered to their fanbase over the years, sticking around the Bay Area once the move is official for two or three years would be the absolute biggest one. 

[GDAWG]

3 minutes ago, FiddySicks said:

I’m just hoping that whatever is left of the A’s Bay Area fanbase makes it so inhospitable for the team that they’re forced to leave the Bay Area before they’re ready to. Of all the kicks to the groin this team has delivered to their fanbase over the years, sticking around the Bay Area once the move is official for two or three years would be the absolute biggest one. 

 

Which is why the A's will do exactly that if they announce half of their home schedule at Oracle Park.  

[Lights Out]

The A's will be a huge flop in Vegas just like the Chargers have been in LA. It was never the city that was the problem. It was the douchebag cheapskate owner, and he's moving with the team.

[TrueYankee26]

21 hours ago, GDAWG said:

 

They will because its MLS.  While they should go fill 31 and 32 with two of Louisville, Indianapolis or Phoenix, they won't.  They will fill one of them with Las Vegas.  And then out of those three, they will go to Phoenix.  And seeing as this is also MLS, they will not be going after the USL Championship teams in any of those cities and create their own Louisville FC (or FC Louisville) or Indianapolis FC or Phoenix FC or Las Vegas FC.

MLS would have teams in all of the major markets in the West coast and Southwest (except San Antonio but they will probably figure Austin FC will cover San Antonio anyway) and the giant Mexican population in the Southwest would be a factor in MLS going to both Vegas and Phoenix

[FiddySicks]

It’s been a real wild experience seeing A’s fans get so mad at the Giants like this whole mess was their fault. I’ve gone over it about a thousand times (a hundred or so just in this thread), but the territory the A’s “gifted” the Giants could’ve been claimed back at any point for two decades, and the A’s just never filed the paperwork. They never saw the value in San Jose, while the Giants did. That’s the whole reason they gave it away in the first place! Lol yeah sure, Giants. You can go play in cow town San Jose, and we’ll corner your old SF market since it’s closer! Then SJ blew up, and the A’s figured out what the Giants already knew about SJ, but it was too late in the process to claim it back. Giants current ownership group had already paid specifically for SJ (which the league assumed the A’s didn’t want because they never claimed it back). 
 

 

I honestly cannot believe that A’s fans are STILL falling for this bull:censored: coming out of this ownership group’s side. They’re trying to blame anyone else for this mess other than themselves, and the few dopey ass A’s fans left are eating it up.
 

 

The most annoying thing about this is that’s gonna ultimately be the A’s story about the Bay Area, and I’m going to have to spend years dispelling this myth these bitter dummies have concocted in their heads. 

[SFGiants58]

On 6/16/2023 at 6:48 AM, SFGiants58 said:

So yeah, while the granting of rights was intended to be conditional, at no point did the A’s insist that agreement’s conditional nature be put into the MLB Constitution or anything beyond the 1990 minutes. You can’t do much legally over that if it’s not in an overtly-official document.
 

 

Also, if we bring the later revisions of the constitution into account (before the Santa Clara exploration the A’s made), the A’s could have disputed the conditions of the territory’s ownership and chose not to make any such claim. You can blame the Giants all you want, but the A’s share in the responsibility for not doing their due diligence with the constitutional revisions and with disputing the claim in between 1990 and ~2005, when they had ample opportunity to do so (and without their franchise’s venue at stake)

Quoted for its relevancy to the above post. The A’s had ample opportunity to dispute the conditional nature of the territory claims before they looked to San José, including the 1992 sale of the Giants, but they just never bothered to do their due diligence and it bit them in the ass. 
 

Seriously, how hard would it have been Haas to object to the San José part of the sale in 1992? 

[The_Admiral]

The Bay Area territory issue never made sense to me. The Dodgers and Angels have the same territory. So do the Cubs and White Sox. The White Sox almost moved to the near western suburbs and would have been, though farther from Wrigley itself, closer to the Cubs' suburban base than to the Sox' own base. The A's shouldn't have been in the position to sell San Jose to the Giants because it should have been both of theirs all along. What a stupid situation.

[SFGiants58]

28 minutes ago, the admiral said:

The Bay Area territory issue never made sense to me. The Dodgers and Angels have the same territory. So do the Cubs and White Sox. The White Sox almost moved to the near western suburbs and would have been, though farther from Wrigley itself, closer to the Cubs' suburban base than to the Sox' own base. The A's shouldn't have been in the position to sell San Jose to the Giants because it should have been both of theirs all along. What a stupid situation.

Blame Horace Stoneham for only claiming San Francisco and San Mateo counties, when he should’ve claimed the whole Bay Area region (North to Napa, the East Bay, and Santa Clara County). The A’s could’ve done what the Angels did and pay a fee to share all the counties of the region. That’s how it should have gone down, but it didn’t happen that way and it was stupid.

[FiddySicks]

Yeah that was a product of the time as well as Bay Area politics. One thing to keep in mind about San Jose is even though it’s been the largest city in the Bay Area for decades, it wasn’t much more than a bedroom community for the larger cities to the north for most of that time. There wasn’t much of a need to really push for that population, because you were already getting them anyway. The tech industry has of course changed all that. Now being the biggest city in the Bay Area actually has some heft behind it. Kind of amazing that three separate A’s ownership groups couldn’t see that. 

[Walk-Off]

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

The Bay Area territory issue never made sense to me. The Dodgers and Angels have the same territory. So do the Cubs and White Sox. The White Sox almost moved to the near western suburbs and would have been, though farther from Wrigley itself, closer to the Cubs' suburban base than to the Sox' own base. The A's shouldn't have been in the position to sell San Jose to the Giants because it should have been both of theirs all along. What a stupid situation.

 

On one hand, I have been able to understand MLB's Bay Area territorial rights policy and situation in that the Giants and the A's had always played in separate municipalities and separate counties in that region -- whereas the Cubs and the White Sox have long coexisted within both the City of Chicago and Cook County, the MLB Angels started off playing alongside the Dodgers within both the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, and the Yankees and the Mets have coexisted (and, before 1958, the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers coexisted) within New York City, whose five boroughs each double as counties.  On the other hand, San Francisco and Oakland have long shared a federally defined Metropolitan Statistical Area, and those two cities and San José are all inside both a common federally defined Combined Statistical Area and a common Nielsen-defined television Designated Market Area.  So, in that sense, having the Giants and the A's enjoy territorial rights to all of the same locales across the Bay Area would have been the fairer and more just policy all along.

[Walk-Off]

On 11/18/2023 at 8:52 PM, SFGiants58 said:

Blame Horace Stoneham for only claiming San Francisco and San Mateo counties, when he should’ve claimed the whole Bay Area region (North to Napa, the East Bay, and Santa Clara County). The A’s could’ve done what the Angels did and pay a fee to share all the counties of the region.

 

Had Horace Stoneham been both willing and able to claim the whole Bay Area for the Giants, I suspect that Charlie Finley, one of the ... shall we say ... thriftiest MLB team owners of his day, would not have dared to make the extra payment that would have been needed in that case to move the A's from Kansas City to Oakland, and thus would either have had the A's stay in KC or have kept looking for somewhere else to put the A's.  For that matter, I cannot think of anyone who had the means to own an MLB team back then and would have been willing to shell out a special indemnity to the Giants just to move an existing MLB club to Oakland or secure an MLB expansion franchise for Oakland.

 

On 11/18/2023 at 7:13 PM, FiddySicks said:

It’s been a real wild experience seeing A’s fans get so mad at the Giants like this whole mess was their fault.

 

My impression is that while A's fans who either just wanted their team to play practically anywhere in the Bay Area or outright favored a relocation to somewhere in the South Bay are understandably angry at the Giants over the territorial rights issue, many -- if not most -- of the #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam types have seemed to be Oakland-first-and-only provincialists who would oppose a relocation to the South Bay every bit as much as they scorn the current effort to shift the franchise to the Las Vegas area.  As far as I can tell, the people in that latter group either do not care about the territorial rights situation at all or actually approve of the Giants' claim to the South Bay so as to minimize alternatives to Oakland for the A's.

[Fowler2]

Moving into a brand new stadium right away in Oakland instead of waiting for a stadium to be built in KC was part of Finley's motivations. 

[BBTV]

I don’t think it’s even remotely possible but it’d be cool for the A’s to play a gap season in Phila, though they’d have to share CBP  

[Dilbert]

18 hours ago, BBTV said:

I don’t think it’s even remotely possible but it’d be cool for the A’s to play a gap season in Phila, though they’d have to share CBP  

In that case lets split the home schedule. 20 games in Philly, 20 in KC, 20 in OAK, 21 in LV.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

On 11/21/2023 at 11:44 PM, BBTV said:

I don’t think it’s even remotely possible but it’d be cool for the A’s to play a gap season in Phila

 

The Connie Mack statue is still there.

 

 

 

[ManillaToad]

Born in 1862, last managed the A's in 1950

[gosioux76]

On 11/21/2023 at 10:44 PM, BBTV said:

I don’t think it’s even remotely possible but it’d be cool for the A’s to play a gap season in Phila, though they’d have to share CBP  

 

That would be fun. But if it's successful, we'd start hearing Philly fans make claims that they should be a two-team market.