MLB Stadium Saga: Oakland/Tampa Bay/Southside

[Digby]

They have tried to build a SSS in or near Boston proper through the years, though there is some debate as to how serious or competent those efforts have been. But yeah, playing at Gillette rent-free means the urgency is not as severe as it was for say, DCU, and it’s perfectly serviceable as a soccer stadium.
 

At this point I no longer expect the Revs to ever move out, unfortunately.

[goalieboy82]

17 hours ago, the admiral said:

Yeah, no situation is perfect, especially in an early-to-bed town like DC, where everything shuts down at 11 so that people can get up bright and early to go do evil. I still find crowded public transit much less enervating than trying to get out of a bottlenecked parking lot. That's just me.

 

[goalieboy82]

17 hours ago, the admiral said:

Yeah, no situation is perfect, especially in an early-to-bed town like DC, where everything shuts down at 11 so that people can get up bright and early to go do evil. I still find crowded public transit much less enervating than trying to get out of a bottlenecked parking lot. That's just me.

and yes it does close down at 11pm.  

[waltere]

On 6/1/2021 at 11:00 PM, GDAWG said:

 

Oracle Park is a beautiful stadium.  Better than that monstrosity the Rangers are playing.  

 

This is the lowest of possible bars to clear

[FiddySicks]

On 5/31/2021 at 8:20 PM, bosrs1 said:

 

 

Before. Though SF emptying out into the east bay hasn’t been helping matters. The Giants made major inroads in the Bonds/roids era, sealed the deal with the World Series runs, and stuck the knife in the A’s locally when they killed San Jose. I mean more power to them as it was well played and the A’s owners have been clueless off field for 30 years now. 

This is pretty much it. Sucks for the A’s, but they basically made their own bed on this one. They had a full decade to submit the paperwork returning the rights to them, and just never did

[SFGiants58]

Just now, FiddySicks said:

This is pretty much it. Sucks for the A’s, but they basically made their own bed on this one. They had a full decade to submit the paperwork returning the rights to them, and just never did

I’m curious about what that entailed. My reasoning being that I’m hitting a brick wall with trying to a San José A’s write-up for Defunct Saga. I have written 20-25 page history and research papers that were less daunting than summarizing the San José saga (in a way that didn’t perpetuate misinformation) in a clear way.

[bosrs1]

1 minute ago, FiddySicks said:

This is pretty much it. Sucks for the A’s, but they basically made their own bed on this one. They had a full decade to submit the paperwork returning the rights to them, and just never did

 

Worst part, came out very recently that the Giants apparently had no interest in moving to St. Petersburg, or the South Bay for that matter. Which means all of the A's efforts initially to help them stay in the Bay Area by offering to forego the rights on Santa Clara County... were really even more wasted than we already knew.

 

https://newballpark.org/2021/06/02/ghost-of-blue-ribbon-panel-speaks-out-in-favor-of-the-coliseum/

 

I mean again, I'm in awe of how much the Giants then owners played everyone. But again, the A's allowed themselves to be played, and then as you say didn't move to rectify it when it became clear the Giants were full of :censored: about moving to the South Bay. 

 

[SFGiants58]

1 minute ago, bosrs1 said:

 

Worst part, came out very recently that the Giants apparently had no interest in moving to St. Petersburg, or the South Bay for that matter. Which means all of the A's efforts initially to help them stay in the Bay Area by offering to forego the rights on Santa Clara County... were really even more wasted than we already knew.

 

https://newballpark.org/2021/06/02/ghost-of-blue-ribbon-panel-speaks-out-in-favor-of-the-coliseum

 

Given all the TV deal stuff that I’ve detailed earlier and Lurie’s willingness to loan money to the local group, I was pretty sure that letting the Giants actually move (even to Santa Clara County) was never in the cards. Lurie made it clear in statements that public funding measures for stadiums were unpopular with Bay Area voters, with two SF referendums failing along with the Santa Clara County and San José ones. Since SF business folk didn’t take the bleeping hint about Lurie’s goals, he went to the desperate folks in Tampa Bay to really deliver his message
 

Bob Lurie really knew how to play some suckers. He knew how to stir up a storm. Both Santa Clara/San José politicians (e.g., Mayor Susan Hammer) and the desperate St. Pete folks were the perfect marks for his plan to give the Giants good local ownership to solve the Candlescheisse problem. 

 

You could even argue that he played Haas with the San José deal, even though Haas was arguably trying to get one-up on him.

 

1 minute ago, bosrs1 said:

 

I mean again, I'm in awe of how much the Giants then owners played everyone. But again, the A's allowed themselves to be played, and then as you say didn't move to rectify it when it became clear the Giants were full of about moving to the South Bay. 

Indeed. The A’s got complacent and missed the boat to gain even a slight edge in the market. 
 

That post is gonna need a bunch of primary source literature, which will be quite the dive.

[bosrs1]

2 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

 

Given all the TV deal stuff that I’ve detailed earlier and Lurie’s willingness to loan money to the local group, I was pretty sure that letting the Giants actually move (even to Santa Clara County) was never in the cards. Lurie made it clear in statements that public funding measures for stadiums were unpopular with Bay Area voters, with two SF referendums failing along with the Santa Clara County and San José ones. Since SF business folk didn’t take the bleeping hint about Lurie’s goals, he went to the desperate folks in Tampa Bay to really deliver his message
 

Bob Lurie really knew how to play some suckers. He knew how to stir up a storm. Both Santa Clara/San José politicians (e.g., Mayor Susan Hammer) and the desperate St. Pete folks were the perfect marks for his plan to give the Giants good local ownership to solve the Candlescheisse problem. 

 

You could even argue that he played Haas with the San José deal, even though Haas was arguably trying to get one-up on him.

 

Indeed. The A’s got complacent and missed the boat to gain even a slight edge in the market. 
 

That post is gonna need a bunch of primary source literature, which will be quite the dive.

 

Eh I've never bought the argument that the Haas family were trying to play the Giants. Even if the Giants had moved to San Jose I think it's pretty certain they still would have had more drawing potential from SF than the A's would have had. You saw a microcosm of that with the Niners when they moved all but to San Jose and it having no impact positively on the Raiders in Oakland. Sure the dynamics would have been a little different given it's baseball and not football. But fact is East Bay teams other than the Warriors (who were east bay only in location not in practice) have never had much appeal in the city proper. Or anywhere else in the Bay Area for that matter. Other than a few unsustainable years at the close of the 80's, the A's were always second fiddle when on even and even superior footing stadium wise to the Giants. And a San Jose Giants team in a new ballpark would have still had a leg up on the A's all these years financially (maybe even more so not having to pay off a ballpark presuming San Jose would have provided some form of public assistance on an SJ ballpark). And the Giants would still have had the lion share of the draw for most of the last 30 years both in person and on TV due to San Jose being primarily a Giants market even before they had the territorial rights to it (I grew up in the South Bay when the A's were at their absolute peak as a franchise during the Bash Bros. era, and outside my family I didn't need any hands to count how many A's fans I knew). 

[SFGiants58]

That's definitely a good assessment of the situation. I do wonder why the Warriors didn't consider bolting for San José when The Shark Tank finished construction, given that they played there during the Oracle Arena renovation. The Sharks draw well enough for the whole region (part of why the team delayed that much-needed rebuilt), so why not try their luck there instead of demanding an Oracle renovation?

[TBGKon]

15 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

That's definitely a good assessment of the situation. I do wonder why the Warriors didn't consider bolting for San José when The Shark Tank finished construction, given that they played there during the Oracle Arena renovation. The Sharks draw well enough for the whole region (part of why the team delayed that much-needed rebuilt), so why not try their luck there instead of demanding an Oracle renovation?

Being second tenant to the Sharks might've been a downside.  At the Oracle, they were primary tenant so first dibs on dates.

[FiddySicks]

I think you really have to put into context just how different San Jose was back then compared to now. It’s a tech powerhouse now, but when the Sharks came in it was still sort of a bedroom community for those who couldn’t afford to/didn’t want to live that close San Francisco. And even today, access to the South Bay pales in comparison to the rest of the region. Maybe if those BART plans in the early 90s to move the lines further south had come to fruition (there was no realistic chance of this happening, for MANY reasons. Biggest being that South Bay residents simply didn’t want it.) things would’ve been different. But San Jose wasn’t really the draw in the early 90s that it is today.

[SFGiants58]

That makes perfect sense, thanks for clarifying on the economic and tenant side of it.

[bosrs1]

27 minutes ago, TBGKon said:

Being second tenant to the Sharks might've been a downside.  At the Oracle, they were primary tenant so first dibs on dates.

 

Bingo. Plus if you're able to swindle your current land lord for a new arena (which frankly was what they got as nothing but the outer shell of the old Coliseum Arena survived the rebuild into the New Arena in Oakland), why would you give that up to go be second tenant in a now older and somewhat simpler arena that was built primarily for hockey in San Jose? Not to say it was the right choice, obviously the "new" arena in Oakland was only good enough to keep the Warriors for a little more than 20 years before they bolted anyway.  

[Walk-Off]

Dave Kaval, for all of his recent uptalking of a potential move of the A's to the Las Vegas area, seems to have admitted that a Howard Terminal ballpark is, at least for now, much closer to becoming a reality than an MLB-ready venue anywhere in Southern Nevada:

 

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/06/07/as-have-called-the-stadium-pursuit-in-las-vegas-and-oakland-parallel-paths-but-what-does-that-mean/ 

[Red Comet]

So the A’s owner was just rattling his relocation saber to get a better deal locally? I remember when Mario Lemieux did the same thing to Kansas City so the Pens could get a new arena in Pittsburgh.

[rams80]

In fairness to the Penguins, the old Igloo was really in bad shape by that point.

[bosrs1]

23 minutes ago, rams80 said:

In fairness to the Penguins, the old Igloo was really in bad shape by that point.

 

I mean the Coliseum is literally falling apart. So it's not like the A's aren't justified in playing hardball with Oakland. Particularly since they're not asking the city to build the stadium or pay for it outright.  Especially given this is year 26 of their stadium search. 

[TBGKon]

2 hours ago, Red Comet said:

So the A’s owner was just rattling his relocation saber to get a better deal locally? I remember when Mario Lemieux did the same thing to Kansas City so the Pens could get a new arena in Pittsburgh.

I mean isnt that what usually happens for relocations?  The Tampa Bay area was a relocation threat for Seattle, SF Giants, White Sox, etc.

[WSU151]

2 hours ago, Red Comet said:

So the A’s owner was just rattling his relocation saber to get a better deal locally? I remember when Mario Lemieux did the same thing to Kansas City so the Pens could get a new arena in Pittsburgh.

 

I think it was to create urgency for the city to approve rather than getting a better deal financially.  If the city didn't approve it this summer, it could be another year before it was approved.