Oakland A's headed to Las Vegas

I also would like to see commissioners act more like this, but a look at what happened to Fay Vincent probably explains better than anything else why they don't. When your bosses are 32 heartless greedy plutocrats you tend to end up doing what they want or you lose your job.

 

The Orioles are turning that empty upper deck in left field at OPACY into some sort of party deck, I think. When they moved the fences back, you can't see half of left field if you sit up there, so they stopped selling tickets there.

 

The fact that the Orioles used to regularly bang that place out at 48,000 seats or whatever... and now there are times neither the Nats or O's sell 48,000 combined in one day if they're both at home. Two fanbases that have been bent over, repeatedly, for 30 years: the Pirates and Orioles.

 

Sorry, I'm with Manfred on this one. Might be the first time.

I thought he struck exactly the right chord with his comment about this artificially created "achievement."

Funny how 29 other franchises don't have to start a one-night campaign to creep over the 10K mark.

 

Twenty-nine other franchises aren't run into the ground by the ownership.
Look, we learned in 1957 that these teams don't belong to the communities where they reside, despite all of the marketing pushed towards us telling us how we should buy blah blah because "you're a true fan who loves YOUR team." Merchandise, tickets, MLB TV to watch "your team."
Not my team. Never was. It's theirs. And that's fine.
Conversely, these teams are local businesses, no different than a restaurant or bar or amusement park. And if the product sucks at any of those places -- and stadium experience is part of that -- people have the right to take their money elsewhere. If you got the runs every time you went to a restaurant, you'd stop going. Well, in Oakland, the sewage backup gave the entire damned stadium the runs, and who needs that shit?
So yeah, I feel bad that the diehard A's fans are going to lose their team, same way I'm still mad at what the NBA did to Seattle, but the bottom line is people need to stop falling for this shit. They don't love you back.

 

I don't know how much fan justification for staying away moves the needle. If your product isn't in demand, I find it natural that you try to take it somewhere that might be more receptive.

 

Sports franchises are different than regular businesses because if regular businesses deliberately offer a substandard product, a new location in the next block, town, state, etc, doesn't offer them hundreds of millions in subsidies to go there. My personal solution, have the cops pick up the miscreant owner for drunk driving and have him mysteriously shot to death resisting arrest, is extreme, but it would put an end to this shit.

 

Except he's flat out lying. He's lying to support a guy who is trying to throw Oakland under the bus. The best explanation I heard today is the Howard Terminal location—which despite what Manfred said was a very real thing that could have gone forward—became untenable because it was tied to development that was supposed to be the real money maker. With the economy, that development was not going to as financially viable as they thought.

But there was more public money attached. They had real plans. And Fisher is driving the club into the ground to create the illusion there isn't community support.

 

That only happens to black people in this country. How dare you suggest the same rules apply to rich white guys.

 

I hadn’t seen Larry Beil’s face in 20 years.