A’s have signed a binding agreement to purchase land for a future ballpark in Las Vegas.
- Thread starter soxhop411
- Start date
But they could if they put even a nickle into the product. In the last five years Oakland has lost its NBA and NFL teams, the A's could absolutely own that city if it had an owner who gave even the slightest damn. When the Athletics are good, Oakland always responds in kind. And there are generations of A's fans. In Vegas, they're starting over except that they're five squares behind the Knights, two behind the Raiders and a whole bunch behind the NBA team that's going to move in there by the time they throw the first pitch on the Strip.
What a colossal error by Major League Baseball and Rob Manfred.
Last edited:
This will be the first MLB franchise move in the past 20 years, and only the second in the past 50 years. It sucks for A’s fans, but unless we’re going to say it’s never ok for a franchise to relocate, I’m having a hard time mustering outrage over this one.
Moving the A’s to Vegas rather than Charlotte, Portland, SLC or Nashville is dumb, but that’s neither dark nor shameful.
Rotating home games? Man, if they keep this up, they won't be able to sign any of the best free agents to play for them.
If I were the MLBPA, I'd be keeping a close eye on the living conditions for the A's players. One would assume that Oakland will let that already-crumbling stadium continue to crumble, so the condition of the locker rooms, etc., may be pretty horrendous.
I guess MLB can look back at how the Expos' situation was handled (games in San Juan), but even that wasn't rotating around.
Incidentally, the A's are apparently the only team to not "Thank" the fans on social media once the season is over. While on the surface perhaps a minor thing, but in a larger scope it just shows what a dunce Fisher is.
Incidentally, the A's are apparently the only team to not "Thank" the fans on social media once the season is over. While on the surface perhaps a minor thing, but in a larger scope it just shows what a dunce Fisher is.
They could just as easily have moved to San Jose or somewhere else nearby. It's the fifth largest CSA in the country (not much behind Chicago), it should be able to support two teams.
They tried to move to San Jose for something like 20 years, the Giants with the backing of Manfred vetoed it.
But....but....but....he and his brothers used their inheritance to build a squash court at Phillips Exeter.
https://www.exeter.edu/people/fisher-brothers
https://www.exeter.edu/people/fisher-brothers
I’m convinced Manfred could have made the Giants exclusivity deal go away had he been interested. He clearly wasn’t.
Bud Selig blocked an expansion team in Washington for decades at Peter Angelos's hest, but Selig eventually caved when it became obvious that the Expos move was best for baseball. I'm sure Manfred could have done the same thing.
They made the playoffs 5 times since 2012 not counting the covid year, some of those years with some really really good teams, and never ranked better than 9th in the AL in attendance, so I'm not seeing much evidence for "when the As are good oakland responds". Until the post covid years attendance was pretty similar whether they won in the high 90s or high 60s.
It’s not just that “a team moved”. In my opinion it goes far beyond that. It was the process that was involved to get the team to move. Shady owner doing the bare minimum then blaming the lack of support. This sets a bad precedent moving forward. The A’s are a pretty historic franchise. This isn’t Tampa/Miami/AZ/Col (insert small market team with little success).
I feel for sports fans in the Oakland area that have now lost all 3 professional teams in a 5 year period. And for what??? The almighty dollar. It’s fucked up.
edit: another thing that pisses me off about this is that the vote was 31-0. Unanimous support amongst the owners. I’d have a ton of respect for one or two owners that would vote no and use that as a platform to say “this is wrong and the city of Oakland and it’s fans deserve better (etc)”. But of course I’m giving the good old boys club too much credit I guess. They all have to look out for each other… oops, I mean their money.
Last edited:
To be fair, their history is one of being shitty and moving the franchise. This is pretty on brand for them.
I hope the owners' vote is the first step in giving Fisher enough rope to hang himself. Approving the move doesn't line up financing for the park or make it fit on the land they have selected for it. If the entire thing blows up, he should be forced to sell.
Or showing actual data rather than just making stuff up. They went from one of the worst teams in MLB from 2015-17 to one of the best in 18-19 and barely gained attendance.
Uh-huh. So you think that just attendance is the only data? Fisher had poisoned that well long before the 2012 season.
They essentially had 1.7m people in 2012, 1.8m in 2013 and over 2 m in 2014. When they bottomed out I. 2015, they still had over 1.7m show up to watch a shit team. After two 60+ win seasons, they still averaged between 1.5-1.5m fans before ticking up to 1.6m when the team finished in second place in 2019.
So their attendance mostly ebbs and flows depending on how well the team plays. Which makes sense, the A’s have been through so many yo-yo rebuilds it’s hard to blame them for staying away from a team that the fans know will be broken up the minute any of their good players get to arbitration.
Furthermore in their salad days when owned by the Haas family and were routinely in contention they averaged well into the two million fan range, almost reaching three million in 1990.
In the early part of the 00s, the last time the A’s had a sustained measure of success, they averaged 2 million plus fans from 2001-2005 and saw 1.9m come to the Coliseum in 2006.
Fisher didn’t just ruin baseball in Oakland, he salted the Earth there and drove fans away instead of bringing them to park. He slashed marketing budgets, he raised prices, he forced the team to play in a woefully outdated and disgusting pit of a ball field. All of this while chopping payroll, making eyes at Vegas (after trying to go to Freemont, San Jose and any other place that would take his calls).
The fact that any fans showed up is a minor miracle and a testimony to Oakland’s love for this team and this sport.
But please, your perusal of a baseball-reference page of numbers without putting them in proper context is so much more compelling. Just writing copying and pasting a bunch of numbers and calling that a “story” or “analysis” is neither. Any monkey could do that.
But there I go again, just making up stories.
3 straight years of 97 win seasons (2 and a prorated year) apparently isn't considered a sustained measure of success, who knew? During a time when their payroll went way up too (per Oakland standards anyway). So how exactly did Oakland fans show that "when the as are good Oakland responds" during that time if I'm not allowed to use attendance?
You can--and should use attendance numbers--but there has to be some context; which is something you fail to do, time and time again. Copying and pasting a bunch of numbers from baseball-ref and saying, "Yeah, see! See!" without writing about why those numbers are what they are what they mean is lazy posting and not quite the checkmate that you think that it is.
Like I said earlier, if you're just going by the numbers of the early part of the teens, try to figure out why that they might look a little low for a team that wins 90s games. Hint: it's not apathy.
1. By this point A's fans know the drill: they stink, draft well, promote good players, play well enough to do something in the regular season, flame out in the playoffs, sell off their players and then begin the cycle all over again. They've literally have done this going back to the Philadelphia days and they just did the same thing less than a decade prior which could be why they weren't reaching 2m people. So there might be some PTSD of not wanting to commit to a team that's going to sell off a player that you like for peanuts in a season or two and then having to start the whole boom-bust cycle all over again.
2. The place that they play in is a complete shit hole. If Tampa Bay didn't exist, the Colosseum would be the worst place to play. I'm pretty sure that the A's are the last team to play in one of the 60s/70s multipurpose monstrosities. There are literally a group of feral cats that roam the stadium, there was an opossum living in the walls of one of the radio booths, there was a time where actual sewerage was emptying into the home dugout. Have you ever been to the Colosseum? I have. Once. It wasn't great. The only thing that it has going for it is that there's a BART station that stops at the stadium. From there you walk along a bridge, covered in chainlink fencing, to the stadium. Unlike Fenway and Wrigley and a bunch of other parks there isn't much to do around there before or after a game. I went in 2008 and I know that since they've added a food truck pavilion, and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the area has been spruced up much since then. Plus, what was once one of the parks with the prettiest view has been destroyed by Mt. Davis in centerfield. A's fans hate that monstrosity.
3. There are two teams that play in the Bay Area. What were the Giants doing in 2012? That's right, they were in the midst of an unprecedented (for them in SF anyway) streak of three championships in five years. Think watching a definite World Series contender, that not only pays its players but picks up new ones in free agency in one of the game's most beautiful parks had any effect on attendance in Oakland?
Furthermore out of the four teams that house two MLB teams in the same area, the Bay Area is last in population:
LA: 12.8m
Chicago: 9.4m
NY: 8.4m
Bay Area: 7.7m
The Bay Area has the population to support two teams.
Here are the Giants' attendance during that time:
2010: 3.03m
2011: 3.38m
2012: 3.37m
2013: 3.36m
2014: 3.36m
2015: 3.37m
Here's what the A's did during that time:
2010: 1.41m
2011: 1.47m
2012: 1.67m
2013: 1.80m
2014: 2.00m
2015: 1.76m
And if you add them together:
2010: 4.44m
2011: 4.85m
2012: 5.04m
2013: 5.16m
2014: 5.36m
2015: 5.13m
Both teams are getting a large majority of the Bay Area to come to both franchises. Again, the Giants are higher and will get the more casual Bay Area fan because they're better, play in a better ballpark, have been in the area longer than the A's and the owner isn't a fucking asshole.
What the A's don't have are people who are going to blindly plunk down money for a product that they know is not going to last and for a piece of shit owner which leads to ...
4. This sorta coincides with number one, but it needs to be stated how bad owner John Fisher is. His "calculated neglect" which is a brilliant way of putting what he's done to this team and a list of what he's done can be found here, has been to drive Oakland fans away so that he could have a free stadium somewhere. And he's done that. When the Haas family was in charge of the A's and put money into the club, the team drew really well.
There's a lot more stuff that I'm either forgetting or don't know, but Bay Area SoSHers, like @SoxFanInCali or @Spacemans Bong could fill you in. This is simply not an "attendance problem". Whether you want to believe it or not is your own choice.
Last edited:
This is spot on. Every team has challenges on the business side. Not every team solves every one of them. And some solve many more than others. Fisher, however, has ducked *every* single one of them in favor of making sure his pockets remained Krazy Glued.
Sorry if I missed this in the 9 pages prior... but will they be changing their name for this? Like to the "Aces" or something (which isn't a bad name for a Vegas team and would have some connection to the A's logo)? I really love their uniforms and logo. Classic team. Green and yellow seems a weird color for Las Vegas to me and especially if they become the "Aces" (which I didn't read is happening, just wondering/speculating)
That's TBD. Oakland mayor has said that if MLB wants to use Coliseum past 2024, as it waits for the Vegas stadium to be built, it will have to allow city to keep the name and the branding rights
Aces is the name of the LV WNBA team. Not sure of the legalities involved.
Jim Kelly started his pro career with the Houston Gamblers of the original USFL. That would be appropriate.
I hope that they keep the A's (or Athletics) name. At this point it's been 124 seasons (or so) with it and since it was among the original AL teams (not even the Yankees can say that) from 1901, I think that there's a lot of weight there and is not nostalgia for nostalgia's sake.
As far as the colors and uniforms go, I've been a big fan of the A's set since they debuted their current uniforms way back in 1987. I think that it has a classic look and I think that yellow and green pop. Plus the colors are unique to the A's, no one else in baseball has them. When you see yellow and green, you know that you're getting A's baseball (for better or worse). Plus I think yellow (gold) and green sorta are Vegas colors. They're the color that are associated with money which is what you get from gambling which is what you do in Vegas. So I could see it staying.
However, over their 100+ years the A's have had a ton of color combinations: blue and white, red, white and blue, blue and yellow; so if they change, that's cool. They've done it before. But I think that if they drop the name, that's probably going to be a big mistake. (Bigger even than moving to the desert without a place to play indoors.)
Deuces, flush and runs all hearken back to their sewage-filled days in the Coliseum.
As JMOH said, ownership fully destroyed the fan base. Many long-time season ticket holders said their tickets more than doubled between 2019 and 2022, so many of them gave them up. He basically managed to successfully pull off Rachel Phelps' plan from Major League.
The stadium is really beat up, but on a sunny day when the Red Sox were in town is was still a decent place to watch a game. Reminded me of the way the YWT let Fenway rot in the late 90s to try and get a new park built. Just some minor effort would have kept the fan base engaged, and if they'd agreed to tear down Mt. Davis and restore the old bleachers, he'd have been a hero.
I guess we will always have game 5 in 2003...
The stadium is really beat up, but on a sunny day when the Red Sox were in town is was still a decent place to watch a game. Reminded me of the way the YWT let Fenway rot in the late 90s to try and get a new park built. Just some minor effort would have kept the fan base engaged, and if they'd agreed to tear down Mt. Davis and restore the old bleachers, he'd have been a hero.
I guess we will always have game 5 in 2003...
Yeah, and the Oakland hills you could see above the bleachers before Davis Mountain was built were usually golden in color, as in the Golden State, and were quite attractive. Calming.
Still, other than playoff games, my clearest recollection of the place was Mark McGwire hitting one off the Budweiser sign in left in extras to send us down 17 unhappy.
Which is dumb, since nobody will ever try putting a expansion team there. If there's going to be a second team in the Bay, it has to be near San Jose. Which the Giants would fight for sure.
Yeah and the irony of Giants likely getting some sort of gain from hosting the A's is pretty rich.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/sanfrancisco/news/san-jose-asks-mlb-remove-giants-territorial-rights-bay-area-expansion/
Which is the ultimate irony, since they only had the territorial rights because the A’s gave them away for nothing back when the Giants were going to move to St. Pete.
Oakland is replacing the A's with the B's...
View: https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/1729505286623215702
View: https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/1729505286623215702
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/38997038/oakland-area-fans-start-ballers-independent-baseball-team
And when they relocate too, they can be Formerly Oakland.
It's entirely possible I'm not hip to the current lingo but isn't Ballers (or at least ballin') in an actual sports connotation used almost exclusively with basketball? I've never heard the term used in baseball. It sounds like a new entry in the NBA developmental league.
Mr. Johnson would like a word...
But yeah, not a term one associates with baseball. If their intent was to find a name that easily led them to be able to use "B's" why not just go simple and call them the Oakland Bees? At least there's a historical baseball context for that one.
Billy Beane is still with the A’s in some kind of ownership / management position, right? He’s an advisor to Fisher, I believe. Curious to know what he thinks of what’s become of the A’s. Maybe they can make Moneyball II: Vegas Bound.
I hope that the Bay area really embraces this franchise. I mean it's bad enough that the A's are pulling up stakes and going to Vegas, but they're talking about playing a good number of home games out of town in the interim. I say support the team that wants to be there and hey, the quality of baseball will probably be better.
Perhaps it's not up to your standards but someone's going to these games.
https://www.pioneerleague.com/sports/bsb/2023/attendance/attendance?sort=avg&r=0&pos=att
It is what it is and you seem to want to compare it to things that it's not. I hope it succeeds and provides an affordable alternative to fans who like to go out to the park and take in a game.
I'd assume they'll draw better than most of those markets, which would put their floor at about A-ball attendance and maybe they draw like a good AA team. I think affiliated teams have a fairly large variance based on things like facilities and closeness to the MLB team they feed.