Diamonds For Women

[dodgerblue6]

It really is the end of an era! And probably the retirement of this thread, too.
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"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[forloveofthegame]

There sure are a lot of pissed off fans I have talked to since I last posted here. I had forgotten that back in 1993 when the Water Hoarders were looking to move away from San Francisco, it was Oakland who helped them stay in the Bay Area and so now, they wonder why they are not being returned the favor.
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"Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem." - Saul Steinberg

[dodgerblue6]

In this article from BaseballAmerica.com, Athletics ownership is compared to the Chargers' in the NFL during their final years in San Diego.

But certainly Oakland didn't offer compensation for unsold tickets.

Also, from Bill Shaikin in the L.A. Times:

"Column: MLB and As Should Do the Right Thing and Keep Team in Oakland"


BY BILL SHAIKIN

APRIL 21, 2023 5 AM PT

If baseball mythology really came to life, if teams really were civic assets and owners really were stewards of those public trusts, Rob Manfred would have issued a starkly different statement when the Oakland Athletics decided they wanted to move to Las Vegas.

Instead of extending his support to the "A"s, the commissioner should have said the following: “I appreciate the effort the "A"s have put into pursuing a new ballpark in Oakland. But, in baseball, we do not abandon our fans unless we have exhausted all of our options. The only team to move in the past 50 years— the Montreal Expos— did so because the league already had stepped in to buy the team.

“I respect that John Fisher, the "A"s owner, sees Las Vegas as his most viable option. Before I ask owners to consider approving a move, I am asking any investors interested in buying the "A"s to contact my office. Any buyer would be required to keep the team in Oakland and pay for a new ballpark next to the Coliseum, where the "A"s currently play.

“If a qualified bidder emerges, my office will negotiate a sale in which Mr. Fisher would receive full and fair market value. If no qualified bidder emerges, I will recommend owners approve a move to Las Vegas.”

That is pretty much what happened in 1992, when the San Francisco Giants had agreed to move to St. Petersburg, Fla. But the league wanted the Giants to stay in San Francisco, and the team was sold to local investors.

I asked Manfred last year if he would take the same approach if the Athletics wanted to move from Oakland.

“I think John Fisher — really at my urging — has done everything humanly possible to find a viable stadium plan in Oakland,” Manfred said then. “He’s spent millions and millions of dollars. He’s focused solely on Oakland for years.

“Secondly, unlike the San Francisco situation, Oakland was granted permission to explore the Las Vegas alternative, for the simple reason that the progress in Oakland at the time was not far enough or fast enough.”

Fisher pursued a complex deal for a waterfront ballpark in Oakland, a project that real estate developer and former "A"s managing partner Lew Wolff previously had called “close to impossible.” Fisher declined to consider a new ballpark on the Coliseum site, which sits on development-ready property with a freeway on one side and subway and train stops on the other.

The Oakland Athletics' average attendance of 10,129 is lowest in the majors.

“When you’re going to privately finance a ballpark, to the tune of a billion dollars,” Manfred said, “I think you’re entitled to a certain amount of respect, with respect to where you want to make that investment.”

That is unfortunate. Joe Lacob, whose Golden State Warriors won four NBA championships within eight years, has said he would buy the "A"s and build at the Coliseum. Lacob built a privately financed arena for the Warriors in San Francisco, and he shrugs off NBA luxury taxes in the pursuit of trophies. For an Athletics fan, this would be about as fan-friendly as it gets.

Baseball cherishes its antitrust exemption, which allows the league to control where its teams play, without fear that an owner unilaterally would decide to move his team.

The league touts this relocation control as fan-friendly, and not without reason: In the last half-century, the Raiders have moved from Oakland to Los Angeles to Oakland to Las Vegas; the Rams from Los Angeles to Anaheim to St. Louis to Los Angeles.

But the "A"s would have been playing in San Jose by now if the San Francisco Giants had not invoked their territorial rights to block the move. San Jose sued and lost, with courts reluctantly citing the antitrust exemption. The league declined to push back. The commissioner works for the owners, after all, and no owner wants to lose any of his rights.

And now? The commissioner works for the owners, and Fisher does not want to sell. If Manfred leaned on Fisher to sell, every other owner might wonder when the commissioner might try to push him out too.

Fisher fields a noncompetitive team, which is not a sin among his fellow owners.

Frank McCourt was forced out of Dodgers ownership because the spectacle that was his divorce trial revealed that he and his ex-wife diverted massive amounts of team revenue— $189 million, the league alleged— for personal use. The potential for fans in other markets to wonder if the owner of their team did something like that— well, that was a sin among his fellow owners.

On his way out, Fisher ought to do one decent thing for Oakland. In 2019, the "A"s agreed to pay $85 million for half-ownership of the Coliseum site. If the "A"s secured their waterfront ballpark, they could have been partners with the city of Oakland in determining how to reuse the 150-acre site.


Since the "A"s are rushing to call themselves Las Vegas, they should have no say in what happens to that Oakland property, let alone profit in any development from it.

The Athletics don’t need the money. They are saving hundreds of millions in potential moving costs, since Manfred has said the league will not assess the team a relocation fee.

The right thing to do is for Fisher to make clear the "A"s will donate their interest in that land to the city of Oakland. Manfred should not have to lean upon him to do that.
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"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[dodgerblue6]

A few comments from The Athletic:

[dodgerblue6]

A few comments from The Athletic:

[dodgerblue6]

Big rally coming up this Friday in Oakland.
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"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[sunnyblue]

Now the latest on this story is they have a new land deal for a different site!

[dodgerblue6]

From the L.A. Times:

Column: "Sitting on the Top of the Bay? Giants Have a Lot of Work To Do"

BY BILL SHAIKIN

MAY 11, 2023 5 AM PT

SAN FRANCISCO — The crowds were sparse and muted, the atmosphere less than festive, the players household names in very few households in the San Francisco Bay Area. The home team was down 5-0 in the first inning on Monday, 8-0 in the third inning on Wednesday.

Oakland? Nope.

With the Oakland Athletics declaring their intent to move to Las Vegas, this could be a moment for the entire Bay Area to embrace the San Francisco Giants. The timing is not good. The "A"s are willfully and shamefully dreadful, but the Giants so far are uninspiring and mediocre.

The “we never rebuild” Giants were pummeled twice within three days by the rebuilding Washington Nationals. Six weeks into the season, the Giants are six games behind the first-place Dodgers in the National League West, one game ahead of the last-place Colorado Rockies.

The Giants are not moving, at least. The "A"s say they are, and there is no shortage of opinions around here as to why. Lew Wolff, the "A"s former managing partner, pointed the finger at the Giants’ longtime president.

“If we move out of California, it’s because of Larry Baer,” Wolff told The Times.

Baer declined to respond. Wolff had wanted to move the "A"s to San Jose, and San Jose had wanted the "A"s.

Baer represented a Giants ownership group that refused to yield its territorial rights to that city, citing revenues from fans and businesses there that it used to help cover the privately financed ballpark in San Francisco. Bud Selig, then the league commissioner, did not lobby the Giants to yield.

The "A"s have had a decade since the San Jose option vanished, with no ballpark to show for it in either Oakland or Las Vegas.

The Athletics grandly announced three weeks ago they planned to buy one site in Las Vegas. This week, they pivoted to another site. Both would depend on public funding, with "A"s owner John Fisher coming off as less of a deal maker and more of a guy walking around Las Vegas wearing a sandwich board reading: “My major league team can be yours for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.”

With no deal in place, "A"s fans have taken up collections for folks sitting in camera range at a game and wearing a T-shirt that says “SELL” or “FISHER OUT.” When the "A"s return to Oakland on Friday, fans plan to set up cardboard cutouts of Fisher in the stadium parking lot, then invite fellow disgruntled fans to hurl tomatoes at the cutouts.

The pitch: “Throwing rotten produce is one of the world’s oldest forms of expression.”

The tomatoes remain atop the hamburgers at Oracle Park, still beautiful 23 years after the Dodgers’ Kevin Elster baptized the place by hitting three home runs in the first game here.

The Giants won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014, then won a franchise-record 107 games in 2021. That season appears more of an outlier with each passing day; the Giants otherwise have not posted a winning record since 2016.

In 2018, the Giants hired Farhan Zaidi away from the Dodgers, to develop a new generation of champions while managing the transition from the likes of Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt.

“It was never going to be a shock-and-awe rebuild,” Zaidi said.

The Giants’ ownership never wanted to rebuild, and Zaidi said he was on board.

“Philosophically, I don’t really believe in the full teardown, because baseball is unpredictable and you can get surprising performances from everywhere,” he said. “That’s obviously what we got in ‘21. I think every team has a chance to have a season like that every year.

“When you pull the plug, you’re kind of eliminating a little bit of that. It can create a more comfortable narrative — ‘Hey, we’re rebuilding and we’re going to be under .500 for a few years!’ — but it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re not going to try to compete, it’s pretty easy to do.”

The Giants wooed Aaron Judge and Carlos Correa last winter. They settled for a collection of veterans: outfielders Michael Conforto and Mitch Haniger, and pitchers Sean Manaea, Taylor Rogers and Ross Stripling. All five thus far have performed below league average.

“It’s our expectation to make a run at the playoffs every year,” Zaidi said. “You want to get to a point where that is the sustained equilibrium and not even have the question of ‘Should we tear it down?’ ”

This is what every team wants to do, and it is much easier said than done. What the Dodgers have done over the last decade is remarkable.

Zaidi cited three prospects whom he hopes will impact the Giants this season: infielder Casey Schmitt, who homered in his debut Tuesday, catcher Patrick Bailey and pitcher Kyle Harrison.

In the meantime, the Giants are short on winning and star power. The Giants once sold out 537 consecutive games, a streak that extended into 2017. They never have announced a crowd below 20,000 here.

In their last seven midweek games, they have sold as few as 20,203 tickets, and no more than 23,397. Tickets for this week’s games were available on resale sites for as little as $1.

“We’ve never seen the disparity between weekends and weeknights that we’re seeing now,” Baer said.

Baer attributed the disparity to a city hard hit by vacancies in offices, the rise of remote work, and the collapse of the latest tech bubble.

“Downtown has been so slow to recover,” Baer said. “We’re a downtown ballpark.”

The fans seated behind home plate Wednesday wore an assortment of Giants jerseys, with the names a tribute to the distinguished history of the franchise: Barry Bonds and Posey; Will Clark and Willie Mays; Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum.

There were plenty of Crawford jerseys, in honor of the shortstop who is the last player remaining from the World Series championship teams. However, Crawford is on the injured list, and I saw no one wearing a jersey with the name of a player on the active roster. The next bobblehead the Giants give out will feature the team mascot, a seal.

Crawford stands out in Bay Area baseball lore for more than his play. When he was 5, he was photographed looking forlorn, his cap backwards and arms crossed, at what he thought would be the last game he would see in San Francisco. The Giants had announced a move to Florida, before local investors rescued the team, signed Bonds and built Oracle Park.

Crawford does not believe the "A"s moving to Las Vegas would be a positive for the Bay Area, even though the Giants would have the region all to themselves.

“The Bay Area likes being able to have two teams to root for,” Crawford said. “As a kid, I liked the A’s too. I was Giants No. 1, but especially after moving out to the East Bay, I was able to get to a lot of "A"s games also. It was actually a little bit easier. BART went right to the stadium.

“I enjoyed watching the "A"s growing up. I feel like there’s more of a rivalry now with fans, where they don’t like both. As a kid, I did.

“Would it potentially mean more fans for us? I guess. But I always enjoyed the Battle of the Bay.”

That’s fun. Battles for taxpayer dollars and a .500 record, not so much.
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[sunnyblue]

The most current update is, it's going to be the Tropicana site on the Strip. This is starting to look more real every day. Here's the link.