MLB Stadium Saga: Oakland/Tampa Bay/Southside

[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_ThenNowForever]

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?

[GDAWG]

2 minutes ago, Ridleylash said:

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 it, anyways; baseball isn't anywhere near the juggernaut it used to be to make someone want a team in that league over an NBA or even NHL team.

 

Where they expand will determine whether or not the A's stay in Oakland or goes to Las Vegas.  Otherwise it will probably be Nashville and a team in the Carolinas (Charlotte or Raleigh) as expansion teams.  

[McCall]

24 minutes ago, GDAWG said:

 

Where they expand will determine whether or not the A's stay in Oakland or goes to Las Vegas.  Otherwise it will probably be Nashville and a team in the Carolinas (Charlotte or Raleigh) as expansion teams.  

They won't expand until the A's and Rays situations are resolved. It wouldn't make sense to either take away prospective markets from two existing teams in "bad" situations, nor would it make much sense to add two new teams while STILL dealing with those other two situations. If they were to end up relocating to Vegas and Nashville, and MLB didn't feel there were two solid markets to expand to, then they would delay expansion until such time as they have two additional markets that they'd be satisfied with adding.

[GDAWG]

15 minutes ago, McCall said:

They won't expand until the A's and Rays situations are resolved. It wouldn't make sense to either take away prospective markets from two existing teams in "bad" situations, nor would it make much sense to add two new teams while STILL dealing with those other two situations. If they were to end up relocating to Vegas and Nashville, and MLB didn't feel there were two solid markets to expand to, then they would delay expansion until such time as they have two additional markets that they'd be satisfied with adding.

 

Lost opportunity for a minority led MLB team with the Nashville Stars if the Rays move there since the group is led by former MLBer Dave Stewart (with significant financial backing of course).

[McCall]

7 minutes ago, GDAWG said:

 

Lost opportunity for a minority led MLB team with the Nashville Stars if the Rays move there since the group is led by former MLBer Dave Stewart (with significant financial backing of course).

I don't know if he's part of any actually ownership group or just part of the organization trying to lure a team to Nashville. They're not just targeting expansion, but rather relocation, as well. So I don't think he'd be heartbroken, as long as Nashville ended up with a team.

[FiddySicks]

5 hours ago, Digby said:

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. 

Yeah there’s two big things I think people are overlooking on this. I don’t think people realize just how much of a foothold the A’s have lost over the last decade due to the conglomeration of all of their issues. Like, they’ve been absolutely hemorrhaging support with all of this, and even the die hards have had enough. But that’s the other thing, as you pointed out. The A’s have NEVER really knocked your socks off when it comes to attendance and a following, even during their heyday. There was even a thought back before AT&T Park was built that maybe the Bay Area as a whole just wasn’t that great of a market for pro baseball. But then the Giants got their own park built in a perfect location on basically their own dime (which is the first fully privately funded MLB park since Dodger Stadium in the 60s) and totally flipped the script. The real big issue all of these owners are having is they’re all trying to preach the same nonsense about the importance of public funding, but then the Giants just went ahead and knocked down that nonsensical curtain and have made money hand over fist because of it. I think they paid off the loan on the park in like half of the time they had to do so it’s been so successful. The A’s chances at public funding basically died right then and there, and the only ones who haven’t caught on to that yet are the A’s themselves. People are tired of their act, and most of Northern California is ready for them to leave, if legit ANYONE else will take them. 
 

I mean, :censored:, even the Sacramento Kings, who are still the most dysfunctional pro team in California and are most certainly not in the Bay Area (therefore having none of the prestige when it comes to location) realized they would have to fund at least half of their own building. The the A’s have been asking for isn’t just absurd, it’s insulting. They’re asking for the thing to be nearly fully publicly funded, and they want to keep basically all of the revenue. Like, good luck, guys. That may have flown in the 1990s (but even for the A’s it didn’t), but it sure as isn’t going to work now. People would rather light the coliseum on fire and watch it burn than fund another billionaire’s money making toy.
 

the A’s. All of their problems are self created due to their own stupidity, lack of any foresight whatsoever (like, how the :censored: do you not forsee the South Bay growing enough to warrant the land back when you had thirty years to JUST TAKE IT BACK! That’s all they had to do. File a form. And they never did. Good :censored: this team is dumb), and just shameless greed. The minute they’re gone, the better off everyone will be. 

[The_Admiral]

19 hours ago, WestCoastBias said:

But the Coliseum might as well be Mongolia, I mean have you ever been there? It's a complete hole, why do you think the Raiders are in Vegas and the Warriors are in San Francisco now?

I think yurt too hard on them.

 

19 hours ago, WestCoastBias said:

I get the feeling that if this was a midwest city this forum would defend the team to the end

Oakland is spiritually midwestern and thus why I've always had a soft spot for them.

[Walk-Off]

On 3/5/2023 at 2:30 AM, who do you think said:

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.

 

From 1960 through 1999 -- before the Giants began to play at a ballpark that they have been apparently able to "sell out" for "eternity" -- Candlestick Park was the Giants' home field.  A blend of often mediocre play by the home team and frequent and chilly wind gusts at and around "the Stick" throughout a typical baseball season (especially during night games) caused the Giants to rack up many seasons of below-average attendance figures ... even when the A's (whose first season in Oakland overlapped with the Giants' ninth season at Candlestick) were also attracting disappointingly few spectators to their home games.

 

In fact, the Giants struggled so much to draw fans to Candlestick that they not only came close to being bought by some rich Floridians who would have relocated that team to St. Petersburg and its now-infamous domed ballpark for the 1993 season (i.e. one more way that the Rays' existence could have been prevented), but were also almost sold by Horace Stoneham (yes, the man who brought the Giants to San Francisco in the first place) to a group of wealthy Canadians who would have moved the team to Toronto for the 1976 season.  (A few months later, the American League gave those same Canadian businessmen the Toronto expansion franchise that debuted in 1977 as the Blue Jays.)

 

So -- to use @who do you think's logic -- do the Giants' suboptimal attendance statistics throughout their four whole decades at Candlestick mean that "nobody" was "caring" about the Giants for all of that time?

 

Furthermore, as best as I can tell, taking that same poster's stubbornly and fanatically pro-contraction worldview to its seemingly ultimate logical conclusion means that neither the MLB commissioner's office nor the National League should have ever let the Giants be moved out of the Bay Area or even sold to anyone willing and able to pay in full for a new ballpark for the Giants within the Bay Area ... but, instead, either the commissioner's office or the NL should have confiscated the Giants franchise from Horace Stoneham and dissolved the team outright during the 1975-76 offseason, when Stoneham was trying to sell the Giants to those Torontonians.

 

If the Giants deserved to survive long enough to replace the dismal, discomforting environs of Candlestick Park with a much more appealing venue in an area much closer to the heart of San Francisco, then both the A's and the Rays deserve any and every reasonable opportunity possible to secure new places to play, whether in their present respective home markets or elsewhere.  To think otherwise would be unfair, unjust, and hypocritical.

 

On 3/5/2023 at 2:30 AM, who do you think said:

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. 

 

I think that, had the additions of National League teams in the Denver and Miami areas for 1993 been the absolute last time so far that MLB had expanded, the A's would have been much more likely to become the Tampa Bay Athletics than transform into the Phoenix or Arizona Athletics.

 

On one hand, the City of St. Petersburg completed construction of what was originally the Florida Suncoast Dome in 1990 ... with neither a commitment from any existing MLB team to move to that ballpark nor any pledge from MLB to award an expansion franchise that would play at that venue from the start.

 

OTOH, Maricopa County, Arizona's government did not pass the sales tax increase that was to help pay for Downtown Phoenix's "airplane hangar" of an MLB-specification ballpark until the spring of 1994 -- which happened to be around the time that MLB formed a committee to evaluate expansion from 28 clubs to at least 30.  This set of circumstances leads me to believe that Maricopa County would not have dared to raise that tax for that particular publicly stated purpose unless most of the politicians there thought that their county and the Phoenix metro area in general were very likely to get an MLB expansion team in the then-near future.  Furthermore, even if (a) Maricopa County had gone ahead and raised that tax with much less confidence regarding the Phoenix area's ability to earn an MLB franchise and (b) further MLB expansion in the 1990s or beyond had proven to be unlikely, politicos in that county could have easily either reversed the tax increase or re-designated the extra tax revenue toward a different matter well before any existing MLB team could have tried to move to the Phoenix area and get its hands on all of that money.

 

On 3/5/2023 at 9:27 AM, BBTV said:

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.

 

I am of the opinion that, without the Florida Suncoast Dome / Tropicana Field having been completed in 1990 with a baseball-focused layout and an MLB-level seating capacity right from the beginning, the Tampa-St. Petersburg area would have been in no better a position as a negotiating tactic for teams trying to get better ballparks than were pre-1993 Denver and Miami, pre-1998 Phoenix, pre-2005 Washington, D.C., etc.  For all of the flaws that St. Petersburg has as a host city for an MLB club and the Trop has as a big-league ballpark, I think that no one can deny how daring it was for St. Pete to go ahead and build a major-league-caliber baseball venue on speculation.

 

To give an example of the extent to which that stadium seemed to give the Tampa Bay area an edge as a bargaining chip in MLB circles, I can remember the Chicago White Sox threatening to move to St. Pete while the Florida Suncoast Dome was under construction in the late 1980s.  The powers that be inside the Illinois State Capitol were intimidated enough by the Pale Hose's relocation threat to stop the clock (literally) to pass a law that alloted a nine-figure sum of taxpayer dollars to enable the Chisox to replace the original Comiskey Park with a new baseball palace right across the street.

 

On 3/7/2023 at 3:49 PM, FiddySicks said:

the A’s. All of their problems are self created due to their own stupidity, lack of any foresight whatsoever (like, how the do you not forsee the South Bay growing enough to warrant the land back when you had thirty years to JUST TAKE IT BACK! That’s all they had to do. File a form. And they never did. Good this team is dumb), and just shameless greed.

 

When it comes to territorial rights situations, I have no sympathy whatsoever for either MLB team in the Bay Area.  I think that the A's were (if not still are) naïve fools for letting the Giants have exclusive territorial rights to the South Bay region without requiring the Giants to locate their permanent home ballpark in one of those South Bay counties in order to keep such rights and without demanding a compensatory swap of territorial rights (e.g. to San Francisco and San Mateo counties) if and when the Giants were to move permanently to a South Bay locale.  However, I think also that the Giants have been a bunch of selfish, greedy jerks for having been unwilling even to share those South Bay territorial rights with the A's ever since the Giants chose to waste those rights by putting their current ballpark on the opposite side of Candlestick Point.

Edited March 9, 2023 by Walk-Off

[B-Rich]

6 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

 

From 1960 through 1999 -- before the Giants began to play at a ballpark that they have been apparently able to "sell out" for "eternity" -- Candlestick Park was the Giants' home field... 

 

 

Frickin' well-written, comprehensive,  on-point, factually backed-up,  and historically accurate post, my man.